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[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening for the meaning crisis so last time we were taking a look at a proposal that we could under now understand the the sacred that that which causes the experience of sacredness in terms of a
John Vervaeke's Part 2 of 'Reverse Engineering Enlightenment' explores the perennial problems of self-deception and how sacredness, relevance realization, and psycho-technologies can help address the
Key Takeaways
- The perennial problems of meaning arise from the same machinery that makes humans adaptive, so solutions must address that machinery directly.
- Sacredness can be understood naturalistically through relevance realization without losing its experiential significance.
- Effective responses to perennial problems require an integrated ecology of complementary practices rather than isolated techniques.
- Modern people often lack traditions and communities that cultivate these practices, forcing risky autodidactic approaches.
- Success is measured by whether the project actually helps people ameliorate perennial problems, not just by theoretical coherence.
What the video covers
- Recaps the proposal that sacredness arises from the dynamic stability between relevance realization and an ever-changing, combinatorially explosive reality.
- Cautions against equating indispensability with metaphysical necessity or an absolute essence of the sacred.
- Distinguishes two components of the meaning crisis: historical factors and perennial problems.
- Argues that the same adaptive machinery of religio makes humans perpetually vulnerable to self-deceptive, self-destructive patterns.
- Notes that cultures traditionally paired religion with ecologies of psycho-technologies, a support that modernity has undermined.
- Frames 'awakening from the meaning crisis' as needing both a new worldview legitimizing meaning-making and practices that address perennial problems.
- Reviews functional and structural features of religio: self-organization, opponent processing, self-identification, and self-reflection.
- Describes cognition as inherently developmental, functioning by developing and developing by functioning, with qualitative gains in self-transcendence.
- Identifies parasitic processing and modal confusion (having vs. being modes) as core perennial problems, linked to Fromm, the Stoics, and Buddhism.
- Stresses that practices must be internalized and indwelt, since one-shot interventions fail against self-reconfiguring dynamical systems.
Chapters
- 00:00Recap: The Sacred and Relevance Realization
- 04:00Two Components of the Meaning Crisis
- 09:00Perennial Problems and the Machinery of Religio
- 14:15Core Functional and Structural Features of Religio
- 22:00Cognition as Developmental: Parasitic Processing and Modal Confusion
- 30:00Alienation, Communitas, and Naturalistic Explanation
- 35:00Integrating Complementary Practices and Indwelling
- 45:00Wrap-Up and Looking Ahead
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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transgenic saw stability a kind of deep and agog a between the no thickness of your ever evolving relevance realization and it's mysterious depths and the no thickness of a reality that is ultimately combinatorial explosive and dynamically changing itself and that we
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can acknowledge the important role of the symbolic the way it helps us to engage and activate the primordial aspects of religio and go through processes of re excitation housing new emergent abilities so that we're opening as we're opening up the world we are
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also opening up ourselves in response to that but I cautioned against confusing indispensability your own or our collective at times indispensability with any kind of claims of metaphysical necessity or an absolute essence and that was part of the larger critique
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that relevance can't have an absolute essence but and therefore we shouldn't think of the sacred ultimately as a supernaturally endowed absolutely at essential form of relevance so I then proposed to you that part of what we saw the at least the experience of
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sacredness doing was helping to facilitate the higher order relevance realization the meta realization between homing us against Dom aside the meta assimilation but also causing us to confront the numinous than that accommodation and those so the sacred is doing that but I also propose
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that we needed to look at this more deeply we needed to look at how the sacred helps us address perennial problems so that took us into opening up and becoming a little bit more analytic about the meaning crisis there's two
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components to the meaning crisis there are the historical factors which we traced in detail at the beginning of the first half of the series and now an issue that is now one we need to focus on the perennial problems because in
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some sense the experience of sacredness the attempt to activate accentuate accelerate articulate and appreciate religio should address our perennial problems the perennial problems are of course perennial because the very machinery of religio that makes us adaptive also makes us perpetually
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vulnerable to self deceptive self-destructive behavior most cultures cultivate an ecology of cyclic technologies typically in the form of a religion for addressing the perennial problems but that set of psycho technologies has to be fitted into a legitimizing and sustaining worldview in
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some sense the psycho technologies have to be integrated with sacredness what's of course happening for us is and we'll come back to this in more detail here the historical factors have undermined that possibility for us undermined the experience of sacredness the all of the
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ways in which we can cultivate an ecology of psycho technologies for enhancing religion because we do not have a worldview in which within which that project of meaning making its self transcendence the cultivation of wizz the affordance of higher states of
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consciousness the realization of gnosis we do not have a world view that legitimates or encourages that and so people are forced as I said to cobble together in a dangerously autodidactic fashion their own personal responses to perennial problems without traditions
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guidance communities well worked out sets like I say a practices well vetted well developed and so that means they're often bereft when they face the perennial problems so responding to the mean crisis has two components to it and
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that's why I call it awakening from the meaning crisis because it has not only the response of trying to rearticulate a new world view in which the projects of enhancing religio again gets validation is properly situated encouraged facilitated legitimated etc but we also
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need to understand what the set of practices the ecology of psycho technology would look like that would allow us to address the perennial problems and I'm proposing that the scientific account of relevance realization and religio and I've already
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tried to give you some illusions to that we're going to come back to it full-force will give us a way of articulating a worldview in which we can resituated meaning-making and of course the the linchpin of that argument is the idea
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that at the core of the meaning-making is relevance realization and relevance realization B can be given a naturalistic explanation one that hopefully still does full justice to the experience or sacredness but I want to concentrate as we began
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last time on the perennial problems because ultimately that's the final thing if I come up with a historical response and it does not actually afford the addressing of the perennial problems helps people to ameliorate and perhaps alleviate the perennial problems then
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this project has failed so we need to start discussing the perennial problems and developing this thesis more extensively that the very machinery that makes us adaptive makes us susceptible to self-deceptive self-destructive patterns of behavior so we talked about looking at some of the
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core features of religio right so we've got functional features all right and here we have of course self-organization and I tried to develop that very explicitly it's not just vague self-organization its opponent processing opponent processing that's making use of self-organizing
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criticality relationship between compression particular ization and others such trade-off relationships etc we've got all right self identification that process by which you're creating an identity and you've got self reflection your ability to step back and reflect on your own cognition which of course was
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made so powerfully present in the actual revolution with the advent of second-order thinking we took a look at the structural this has to do with the components of the agent arena relationship the ways in which self is connected to the world self is connected
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to self and self is connected to others right and then we looked at the developmental and I sort of laid left out as a placeholder because I just wanted to give a quick overview last time but I wanted to go in and draw this
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together because what we've been talking about throughout the last few lectures is the idea that your cognition is inherently developmental it functions by developing it develops by functioning it's a right so because it's inherently self-organizing it develops right by
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functioning it functions by developing and this is qualitative development right what I mean is you get the capacity for self transcendence there's not only an increase in what you know but an increase in the kinds of things you can know the kinds of things
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you can do right and this is ultimately some kind of process of optimization so there's a developmental trajectory and then what you can see right is some of the problems we've already talked about the parasitic processing in the notes
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for this lecture I will put references to the previous lectures in which I have talked about these in detail so if you in order to avoid useless repetition you can go back and look at the presentation all right but this is if you remember
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you there's a bad event and it spirals off and it gets as very complex self-organizing system that takes on a life of its own becomes very compelling very adaptively resistant to our attempts at intervention etc okay so this is modal confusion this is the
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right Fromm but very much you can also see it being addressed by the Stoics you can see it being addressed by Buddhism as Batchelor argues this is to get into confusion between the having and the being modes the kind of AI that you are
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the are you in an ayat' i thou etc self-reflection last time we talked about this this is the reflectiveness gap this comes from the fact that what we can do is we can step back and look at our own processing and this affords
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us this gap affords us regaining our agency from the chaos of being the impulsive wantin but when we open up the reflectiveness gap too much we got also a loss of a agency we get the tragedy of Hamlet and of course some
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middling position is not the answer there because at times you have to be highly reflective at times you have to be highly immersed how do we answer that the problem here right with the self world relationship is absurdity as I
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said this is the agent arena relationship and we talked about absurdity here and made clear that all of the arguments for absurdity like what happens a million years from now it doesn't matter I'm is so small I will
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die none of these things actually are arguments that can legitimately lead to a conclusion of absurdity because there are in many ways and this was Nagle's point there they're just bad arguments they're fallacious arguments now dismissing the arguments is not to
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dismiss the person who makes the argument I'd hope I made that clear last time if not I'm trying to do that now because people are trying to articulate with these pseudo arguments something real that is happening to them something
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that is very important so the arguments are after the fact expressions rather than the generators and the the main thing here and this of course goes into right you can see how all of this is our prospective all participatory ways of
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being ways of knowing okay but what's here is a clash of perspectives all right it's a class of perspectives when we did the example of Tom who's calling Susan and how in humor that clash of perspectives can be resolved usually by
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playing like equivocating between terms or meanings or getting some people to make a connection they hadn't made before but an absurdity and I think there's like I think there's a overlap like this right where you have humor as
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a resolvable clash of prospective perspectives and then you have absurdity here right and then there's an overlap zone and like I said there's a lot of humor my prototypical example tells my age when I was growing up is the humor of
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Monty Python in which right you get a lot of absurdity but then it you get what becomes irresolvable it's undermining religio in some way undermining your your agency in some way and that's sort of pure absurdity myself with self this goes back to what we
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talked about with Tillich right and anxiety inner conflict and what we need here right is to again think about the ways in which this is connected to write a self-deception because the inner conflict remember Plato often skews your
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salience landscape and makes you susceptible to pull bullshitting I'll talk about bullshitting in connection to this over all right of course this is alienation this is our inability to connect to other people something that is often exacerbated through social
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media by the way these other perennial problems and self deceptive behavior can be magnified in social media so we can be modally confused and think by having a lot of connections we're overcoming our alienation and loneliness but of
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course that's not the case we can exacerbate the social media by falling into a sort of pretend pretended narrative and things like that okay here we talked about like existential inertia this is when you need to move between
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worldviews make make a worldview viable that you're not currently in we're going to talk a lot more about the work of agnes Callard and with aspiration but the point here and going back again to the seminal work of la paul but this is basically a need
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for an agog a how do i and agog a my way out of this worldview into another worldview and then of course there's existential ignorance a point made salient by la paul and also picked up by agnes coloured in her book on aspiration
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that right we can't sort of reason our way through this we can't infer our way from a weaker logic to a stronger logic we can't infer we can't propositional e come up with the prospective all knowledge that were lacking with them
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with the participatory knowing that we do not currently possess and the identity that we are not currently cultivating so right all of that of course can come together and this was mythologize and I mean that in a complementary sense right remember how
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I'm using mythos but this is myth mythologized by the Gnostics of existential entrapment feeling trapped now a couple of things before we move towards starting to address this this is analytic this is for Theoretical purposes that these things are being distinguished and laid
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out right it is often the case as I've already tried to indicate that these things are interacting and exacerbating each other right that right you can be experiencing absurdity and it can be really contributing to your existential inertia right you could be overthinking
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things and getting sort of stuck and that a right might be also contributing to your existential ignorance or it might be contributing to your modal confusion because you can't remember the being mode because you're caught up in having a lot of thoughts and trying to
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have a lot of beliefs I'm not going to try and map this out because the the permutations of the ways in which these interact and afford and write exacerbate each other is very complex which of course is why the perennial problems are
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so pressing on people now what I want to try and do is to show you what I I'm I want to try and show you how we can salvage from the legacy so many psycho technologies for addressing the meeting crisis the reason
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why I'm hesitating is because again I'm this this is genuine I am there's a hubristic element here and and I'm not just trying to say oh you know taking it from you and leaving that behind but again I'm trying to get a balance
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between respecting where we really are and what our situation really is and respecting all of the tremendous heritage and legacy that has been given to us and trying to get that balance is always in my mind it's very difficult
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but okay I'm gonna go through these each one first I'm just gonna sort of name so you can get an overall schematic and then I'll erase the board and I'll talk about each one in greater detail okay so
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be patient please I'm asking for your patience I'm just going to give some indications about how we address each one of these schematically so you can see on the board and then I'll step back and go through each one in more detail
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and then how they're integrated together and what's also missing from this in an important sense so what I'm going to propose here is the way you deal with parasitic processing is and this is why this is number one in some sense
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schematically it's overarching you've heard me talk about it before with the idea of an ecology of practices and ecology of psycho technology right what you want to do is you want to cultivate a counter active dynamical system see
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parasitic processing is a very complex dynamical system and if you try and do one-shot interventions it just reconfigures itself what you need is to cultivate a camp that you've internalized can't just be something you think about it can't just be some right
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ideological structure it has to actually be an active dynamical system in you and so what you're gonna do and again I'll come back to this in more detail you're gonna try and cultivate a counteractive dynamical system because that is how you
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will be able to respond to the dynamical systems of parasitic processing and propose to you that a prototypical by no means exclusive so that's how I'm using it but a prototypical example of this is the cultivation of the Eightfold Path
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and Buddhism which is very very perspicacious Li represented by an eighth spoked wheel the integration it revolves it involves etc so what we're looking for here is a counter active dynamical system ok modal confusion we we've already talked about this and this
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is sati practices that are designed to invoke a deep remembrance of the being mode ok the reflectiveness gap you need the combination the integration the dynamic integration not just a settled median point you need a dynamic integration of immersion and creative
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flexibility we know a state that does that we're going to come back to this but that's the flow statement you need to be cultivating the flow state in in important ways ok the clash of perspectives this is going to take again
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so this what I put on the board right now initially it's gonna seem like what so again give me some time I'm just gonna put it on here this is what Spinoza in the West called C&C Intuit Eva or what in Buddhism in the East
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refers to is Praja this is a state right in which you get the deep interpenetration of the perspectives right so I'm just gonna put it up here and you like wow what does that mean how you do that scans here and to ateva
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proj nut but if you remember just to foreshadow it right we talked about I can scale down I can scale up and then I can get the state of non-duality that is simultaneously scaling up and scaling down and that actually alleviates the
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clash of perspectives so we'll come back to this ok so anxiety is inner dialogue so this is to pick up right the idea of internalizing the sage right as the child is to the adult the idle distance stage I want to like the way
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it's so an exemplary example of this is that you know the Christians it's not I who live but Christ who lives in me or the Buddhists you have to realize your Buddha nature or the Stoics I have to
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internalize Socrates and again if you turn these into ideas to believed rather than you know practices that are have actually been internalized and our art are integrated into your the development of your identity then you're not hearing what I'm saying
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okay so alienation I haven't talked as much about this but I'm going to come back to this more this is to cultivate what Turner and other people call communitas this is the sense of connectedness to other and part of that
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is to try and recover what we had in platonic dialogue and what's happening right now is a whole movement called authentic discourse I'm going to talk a lot more about that the authentic discourse movement right authentic discourse movement but we just need
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authentic discourse here something like what we had in platonic dialogue something like therapy sort of both beyond I'll come back to that because this is a primary way of doing this I gave you an extended argument for how
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you respond to existential entrapment and of course this is gnosis and that this gnosis is going to have a connection to higher states of consciousness there's something that's missing right and what's missing is we need of course a an overall framing of
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these things that they the way we're pursuing all of these and the way we're trying to integrate them together right I'll put I'll put it here because I ran out of board on that side all of this has to be within a wisdom framing
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we're gonna talk more explicitly we're gonna devote quite a bit of time to try and get at what can we now think about wisdom given all the current work within psychology and cognitive science and even neuroscience on wisdom right
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because if throughout all of this we have to have a we have to have a cognitive style in which the amelioration of self-deception and the affordance of self optimization are paramount okay so I want to go through each one of these in more detail this is
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the overarching structure and then trying to bring it together what is it I'm proposing to you and seeing then here's where my concern about hubris is here although I think there's a little bit of point I'm making I'm trying to
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argue for a way in which we can reverse-engineer enlightenment instead of keeping enlightenment as an obscure state surrounded by mystique and nostalgia we need an account that recognizes what that mystique pointed to but exaggerated which is the difficulty
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of enlightenment but ultimately if we have a kind of being a ecology of psycho technology that reliably and systematically individually and collectively allows us to address the perennial problems I'm gonna propose to you that that's what we should call
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enlightenment if enlightenment is something above and beyond that then I don't know what what its value is and if enlightenment is not directed towards this I would say it is not something of value so I'm going to propose to you that insofar as we can
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give using the theoretical tools we've cultivated together relevance realization etc insofar as we can need the work we've done on mindfulness the work we've done on flow right all of it in so far as we can give an account of
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this in terms that are all ultimately naturalistic they can be subject to scientific investigation we will have and and this is is this the final sort of challenge to the division given to us on the Enlightenment we will have a
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scientific theory of enlightenment and what it can mean for us all right so let's talk about some of these I'll talk about it more at length because they're more novel others I'll talk about more briefly because there's an
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extended discussion of them so again let's start with this notion of dealing with parasitic processing which is an overarching thing and the idea here is as I said to cultivate a set of practices and that's what you have with
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something like the Eightfold Path where you're trying to remember all of these you know right aspiration right mindfulness right concentration etc remember that the right is not moral righteousness the right is right handedness it's dexterity and now to use
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language that we've developed it's right fitness it's an optimal fitness it's enhanced relevance realization within each one of these and what you have right is a set of practices that are interdependent with each other mutually supporting and self rolling becoming a
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self rolling wheel and if I have a set of practices that can take on a life of its own and you have the metaphors right in Buddhism of you like where you enter the stream it takes on a life of its own and
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initially what I'm doing right is I'm cultivating this practice and this practice in this practice and I've got sort of set but then they start to write it implicitly interact reinforce the develop and it starts to become a
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counter active dynamical system in me the the Buddha told a famous parable about how to understand this he talks about the goldsmith and the gold is something inherently valuable and you should think of your mind as something inherently valuable right and he says
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okay so take a look at the goldsmith the goldsmith just looks at the gold no change is wrought so if you're just sort of doing meditation and reflecting nothing happens right the goldsmith has to heat up the gold right there's to be
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this right effort the energy put in maybe something like flow right but if the goldsmith just heats up the gold the gold just melts and goes away a right and then also there has to be they're shaping right there there has to
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be the reconfiguration there has to be the cultivation of new skills new abilities new virtues if you just hammer the gold deal you'll smash it and wreck it if you just heat it it will melt if you just look at it you won't notice its
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imperfections sorry you-you-you will do nothing but notice its imperfections but nothing will change so I need to look in order to notice but I need to balance that integrate that dynamically with heating and with with with hammering and and
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notice what I'm doing I'm creating this higher-order skill of being a Smith by getting a set of practices that have a complementary relationship to them each one has strengths and weaknesses and the strengths and weaknesses are fitted together so you get something overall
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that can produce something that the individual skills can't do so by getting this fluid ecology of looking of heating and of shaping then the gold becomes well shaped and it becomes as he says we ugly you can wield it very well you can
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it fits your hand and extends your capacity so well so what you're getting there right is a strong recommendation for looking at this as you know cultivating an ecology of practices getting sets of practices sets of psycho technologies
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that have complimentary relationships to each other organizing them together right and we do this all the time we we we we Const we Kate constellations of lower order skills and techniques to build higher order skills and techniques but we build it as a dynamical system a
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counteractive dynamical system that can operate in many ways on many levels of our cognition and our consciousness and our being so the way to deal with parasitic processing is to cultivate a counter active dynamical system and this is why this is an overarching
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thing so modal confusion we've already talked about this we've already talked about the way in which mindfulness practices and other practices like they can be drawn from stoicism like the view from the Bob or objective seeing can help us to remember sati the being mode
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again not as an idea not as a belief but as an existential mode that we can reliably reactivate and re-enter into in a viable and enriching manner okay the reflectiveness gap and flow so if I were to just speak this lecture
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impulsively wantonly just gah it'll become chaotic right it'll tend to right probably fall into self-contradiction they will be confused and therefore confusing but if I'm constantly stepping back and reflecting on what I'm saying and engaging in self-criticism and then
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thinking I also I'll choke right so what do I do well I try to get into the flow state because the flow state is a state in which I am both and velman by the way argues for something very similar he
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proposes Taoism and Taoism as a solution to the reflectiveness gap and of course as I've argued Taoism is basically the religion of flow in many ways the yin and yang the out in the end right there making frame and breaking frame etc so
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what you're trying to do is set up the practices that will afford flow set up the conditions that will afford flow and remember we talked about the right kinds of conditions and also and this is where we're going to have to go back to wisdom
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wisely cultivate your flow where and where and in what domains are you learning to flow so I'm trying to get into the flow state here that will keep me sort of immersed and engaged with the material but also make me hopefully very sort of
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flexible and capable when needed I don't mean to be self congratulatory but you know where it's needed hopefully insightful that there is that this is not just mechanical that there's an element of sort of well a flow to it
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almost like jazz jazz with concepts and jazz with argumentation okay so let's come back to absurdity and come back to Praja talk about this again we did talk about this before but I want to remind you of it and that you are very capable
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of this because your cognition is capable because of the way attention works because attention we put it up multiple times right the cat and everything your attention is simultaneously bottom up from the features and top down from the gestalt
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all right and your attention write it right the way you are related to the world is one in which the world and you can be co-creating this is actually something that Spinoza talks quite a bit about in the ethics the how your
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experience is co-created by the by by the body and by the world so if you remember Spinoza talks about this idea right when you're reading an argument and his whole book the ethics is an attempt to bring back blessedness and a
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sense of I would argue sacredness within a cartesian scientific worldview that's what's called the ethics it means ethics in the older sense of becoming the best person leading the best kind of life not just doing the morally correct thing
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but Spinoza talks about this kind of knowing and and but I realized when I was reading the ethic while studying the ethic so you have to almost do lectio Divina with the ethics you have to read it you have to really let it soak in do
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you have to try and get that worldview a tuner here just what's it like to see the world as Spinoza did so you have to sort of study and practice the ethics viously it's an extended period and then
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he talks about this and then I realized that the ethics was actually designed to do this you have this tremendously tight logical structure but the logical structure is trying to afford what he called ciencia into ateva this sort of deeply intuitive knowing
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and what he means by that is that you've got this tremendous argument that reaches up to the sort of the largest scale of reality right but there's individual premises along the way and the idea here is here's the analogy so
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the premise is like the letter the premises are like the letters right and the oh the whole the argument of arguments all the arguments constellated together so I'm gonna call this the Metta argument the arguments of learning right so these go up into arguments
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right and then the arguments right go up into Metta the Metta argument and this of course is like you know the through words into sentences kind of thing I remember we talked about how your attention is multiplied layered in this
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way and what can happen is if you practice the ethics you get to a place where you see the whole of the argument in each the Metta argument in each premise and you see how each premise and each argument fit into and contribute to
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the whole just like you're seeing the words in terms of the sentence and the letters in terms of the words right and it simultaneously bottom-up and top-down in a completely interpenetrating fashion and what you get is you get a cosmic
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perspective that is right interpenetrating with the perspective of your individual moment of thought that's Kantian to ateva there's a right there there is a complete interleaving of the prospective all-knowing the Buddhists talk about something similar to this Praja a kind of self liberating
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state of wisdom and it's a state in which you know as DT Suzuki says you're sort of simultaneously looking as deeply in as you can and simultaneously looking out as deeply as you can and he quotes Eckhart a Christian neoplatonist as a
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way of explaining this you know the this the I by which I see God is the same ayah by which God sees me so the the the perspective that reaches out and upwards - what's ultimate is the same as the
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perspective that is coming deeply into into me and what you get right is you practice you practice sort of scaling down as deeply as you possibly can towards something like the pure consciousness event and scaling down and you practice scaling up to this sense of
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sort of profound resonant at one mint with everything and then what happens is you get I mean when in practice you're off you if you're you you are alternating between them but then as I mentioned what eventually happens is you
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get non-duality you're simultaneously as deeply in and is deeply down sorry for these metaphors as you can be but as I said they're often indispensable you're simultaneously is deeply down and is deeply in and it's simultaneously as out
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and as up as you can be the you're sort of that maximal breaking frame maximal to make sort of maximal breaking frame and maximal making frame and they are optimally dynamically integrated like in the like they are in them in right sort
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of the most optimal profound insight you can have so that state is a place that addresses absurdity and you say but it doesn't answer any of the arguments for absurdity but that's the point there is no argumentative response to
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absurdity because the arguments that are supposed to be generating absurdity don't generate absurdity there after the fact expressions of absurdity what drives absurdity is prospective clash and if you can reliably realize a state in which you overcome the perspective of
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clash and remember you can overcome lower-order perspective a clash in humor and humor it's has at the core of it a kind of insight and a kind of joy in that insight you can have something like that if there's a continuum you can have
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the overcoming of the prospective of clash with this prajak state of non-duality that carries with it a kind of joy a kind of insight a kind of ski an SIA into atiba a deep intuitive knowing and so that is very doable for
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us so anxiety so what anxiety is about right is there's a nebulous sense that right something is wrong and it's connected to inner conflict you know we see both we see this in Christianity the inner conflict Paul we see it in Plato in the
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inner conflict there's different centers working according to different goals and they're at war with each other and and we suffer and it's a it's a it's a dramatic sense of threat but it has no specific target of course as fear does
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because of course anxiety the threat is endemic to you so no matter where you go that you're sensing the threat but there's nothing that the threat can particularly attached to because the threat has to do with your inner the
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state of being at war within yourself so we see a cross or traditions the idea of internalizing the sage to create an inner dialogue that helps to coordinate the various centers gets them to talk to each other and I think this is something
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where cognitive science can actually do give us tremendous help there is we've had a lot of increase in our knowledge of the various different areas of cognition even different kinds of centers processing in the brain and how they work and how they're all operating
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and what we need is right an internalized representation a model a role model and a role as a way of taking on a new identity right we need a role model for how we can engage in dialogue and the proposal here which
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is of course the Platonic proposal we already saw that if I can internalize my capacity and and and and develop by the store it's my capacity to interact with the sage eventually I get that ability that I have only with the sage I can
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have it with myself within myself and it means therefore that it becomes part of my metacognitive machinery the way I dialogue with myself and get the various aspects of myself to various centers to dialogue with each other and you can see
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various versions of this you can see Jung's use of active imagination as a way of trying to create an inner dialogue between different centers of the psyche right you can see practices like lectio Divina where I am reading
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the text and I am trying to get the text to speak to me is also allowing aspects of the different aspects of the psyche to talk to each other through the text so there is a lot we can do so as I
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mentioned to you the process of identification where you're identifying with something like the the sage right obviously it makes use of our capacity for internalizing the perspective of others but it also requires our what Pelini called the capacity for
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indwelling right so remember indwelling is when I'm I'm proceeding through the pen I'm indwelling it so you not only have to internalize the sage but you have to indwell is that you have to practice right and that's fits within
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with others to practice trying to in what does it look like right what is it like to see things the way the sage does you have to seriously play this age without pretense or arrogance or inflation that's why wisdom is going
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to matter to all of this right so I practice indwelling the sage right and you yet you know and people think what would Socrates do what would Aristotle do what would Jesus do right and you have to regularly practice so
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you practice indwelling and then you practice internalizing and you practice indwelling and then you practice internalizing right and that is how you basically start to afford the internalization of the sage and the creation of your ability as antis and he
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said what he learned from Socrates so long ago to converse with yourself to get to enter into something like platonic dialogue with yourself all right what about alienation so alienation takes us towards something talked about by Emile Durkheim and
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Viktor Turner and others communitas communitas is what you feel when you're watching with other people what has happened recently the Raptors and everybody was gathered together and we have shared attention and we are getting in sync together and we have that sense
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of community and communicating with each other and there is a shared spirit amongst us all that's communitas that's communitas communitas right is basically a way of getting collective flow going but it's also something else it's a collective flow in which we feel like there is real
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communication between people and something deeper there's real communion there's a sense of participating in a shared identity of some kind so this has to be with looked this has to do with sorry taking a careful look at our careful look at the way in which
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our practices of communication and communing have been so undermined by bullshitting and modal confusion and an adversarial political culture etc and so what's been happening and as I said part of the gift of the video series is I've
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gotten to meet more and more people who are trying to do this there they're trying to they're putting real time and talent into cultivating individual and communal responses to the meeting crisis so I've got to interact with for example
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Peter Lindbergh who's been introducing me to authentic discourse authentic relating practices I will talk a little bit about this in a minute and then for example I've got to meet and have some interesting dialogue the in one interview not one interview sort of one
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dialogue with him is out and there's another one coming because what Jordan Hall is trying to do is he's trying to do two things in an integrated fashion I see him trying to do he's trying to free communication from the the cultural
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grammar that has got us where we are and that since he's trying to respond deeply to the history not in theory but in the actual practice and and that is bound up with as my argument has tried to show it
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that is bound up with the project of trying to re-access in a powerful and perspicacious manner these other kinds of knowing and that making our communication on communion not just a matter of propositional exchange or conflict but trying to tap into right the underlying
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procedural knowing and how that procedural knowing is dependent on the underlying perspectival situational awareness the perspective of knowing and how that is ultimately dependent on the participatory process of our ongoing evolving attunement from which the agent and the arena co emerge and so I see him
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trying to do that I see him trying to create a way in which we can get what he calls coherence a kind of community I would say that is directed towards engaging the collective intelligence of distributed cognition and remember that
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most of our real-world problem-solving contrary to the we tell ourselves about how we're self-made individuals most of our problem-solving is done in concert serious play concert music is done in concert with other people and so what he is trying to do is
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create us stands towards right a state called coherence in which we are creating a kind of community cast that is marshalling distributed cognition and it's collective intelligence for simultaneously freeing us from the ways in which we are boxed in like the nine
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dog problem by our historical cultural cognitive grammar access the other kinds of knowing and bring that to bear on the problems that we are facing so I want to talk a little bit I'll just introduce the idea there's a book I'm Co hearing
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the integral we space enabling collective emergence wisdom and healing in groups I've gone to a circling practice already I'm not an expert in it I'm I want to become one I want I want to take it's here I take it seriously
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so I'm only gesturing towards it but it is a communal practice in which this is my best way of trying to explain it to you're engaging in something like share you're engaging in a mindfulness practice something like platonic
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dialogue and you're creating something like a collective flow state so that what emerges right is a dynamical system and as I basically have been proposing throughout this the last few lectures that the word spirit is basically pointing towards dynamical systems that
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right are evolving we create a dynamical system that gives people the resources to address their capacity for being in touch with themselves in each other it's not therapy although it overlaps with some of the the gnosis in therapy as
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well you know this you know that you eat when things are right and you get in sync with another person or another group of people there's a and we talked about this with platonic dialogue something emerges there's a collective
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right that emerges there that takes your cognition and everybody else's in places that you can't go individually you participate in that but you don't make it you're not just a passive recipient of it you know just a patient of it
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right you're participating in it and so I want to know I want to learn more about this but dairy is a growing and this is this the the circling practice overlaps with other practices that Peter and I are learning about where you're
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Peter talks about you know a process he calls the anti debate where we turn adversarial debating we have techniques for turning it into authentic relating where we're trying to get insight rather than victory in our our debating processes there's there's lots of books
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coming out on this like you know verbal Aikido and verbal judo so there is the beginning of a whole set of practices for bringing about authentic discourse that can really address the issues of alienation okay now of course as I said the response to
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existential entrapment is gnosis and we had an extended discussion about that and it's interconnection with higher states of consciousness so I'm not gonna talk about that that a great length please go back and look at that that gnosis but what I would say is that
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gnosis seems to need and you see this with cheap form you see this in therapy it needs that open-ended mythos that the Gnostics talked about I'm not talking I'm not advocating their particular mythos I'm not saying their metaphysics
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is correct but that did that transgressive the open-ended ongoing right symbol the ongoing mythos these seem to be needed for the cultivation of gnosis and so I would recommend that to you so what I want to do next time is
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come back and put this all together what it looks like and then start talking about the overall framing of this the way we frame how we cultivate the individual psycho technologies the individual practices and how we also collect how we constellated G of those
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in a state of enlightenment within a wisdom framing thank you very much for your time and attention you [Music] you you
Topics:meaning crisisrelevance realizationsacrednessreligioparasitic processingperennial problemsJohn Vervaekepsycho-technologiesself-deceptionawakening
