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[Music] welcome back to awakening from the meeting crisis so last time I tried to develop with you the right side of the plausibility argument I'm making and tried to give an account of central features of human spirituality and to
John Vervaeke's lecture on sacredness: Otto's numinous as fascinating and horrifying, horror vs. fear, Mary Douglas on inter-categorical monsters, and the sacred's role in transformation.
Key Takeaways
- Sacredness includes a numinous, pre-moral dimension that is both fascinating and horrifying.
- True horror challenges our sense of reality and sanity, unlike shallow startle-based horror.
- Inter-categorical entities provoke a sense of horror because they break our conceptual patterns.
- Sacred experience can drive profound existential transformation.
- Music and metaphor reflect how the sacred persists in human cognition and culture.
What the video covers
- Vervaeke continues his plausibility argument by developing the psycho-existential machinery of sacredness, distinguishing it from metaphysical claims about its ground.
- Sacredness is framed as a meta-meaning system that provides worldview attunement and homes us against horror.
- Rudolf Otto's 'idea of the holy' is reframed as the experience of the numinous, a pre-moral sense of overwhelming glory, illustrated by the Book of Job.
- The numinous has two poles: it is deeply fascinating and salient, and simultaneously terrifying, which Vervaeke terms horror rather than terror.
- Vervaeke distinguishes true horror, a challenge to one's grip on reality and sanity, from mere startle-fear found in many horror films that exploit predation fears.
- Mary Douglas's work on inter-categorical things (unclean animals in Leviticus) explains why monsters and boundary-breaking entities unsettle us.
- Zombies are discussed as inter-categorical monsters reflecting contemporary anxieties, drawing on work by Phillip Mishik and Jonathan Pajo.
- The lecture uses examples such as traffic accidents and depression to illustrate how we are drawn to horrifying, salient experiences.
- Sacred experiences can produce deep transformation and existential reorganization, pushing relevance realization down through levels of the self.
- Music is presented as a surviving link to the sacred, especially during transformative periods, and the lecture concludes by discussing metaphor and cognitive circuitry reuse.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Recap of Plausibility Argument
- 03:32Sacredness as Meta-Meaning System and Gnostic Transgression
- 03:52Otto and the Experience of the Numinous
- 07:07Horror Versus Fear in Film and Culture
- 10:24Mary Douglas and Inter-Categorical Monsters
- 18:24Salience, Fascination, and Horrifying Experience
- 27:24Sacred Transformation and Relevance Realization
- 35:19Music, Metaphor, and Cognitive Circuitry
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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try not use that term therefore in a vague indefinite way and and I made an argument for how relevance realization can explain many of the facets that are found within the normal attribution of human spirituality and I proposed a term
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religio to cover all of those aspects of spirituality that can be explained by the machinery of relevance realization there was of course an important lacunae there was something that was still missing from that account and this was the account of the sacred and then I
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propose to you in order to avoid confusion especially post Schirrmacher that we should make a distinction between the metaphysical proposal of the ground or the cause of the experience of sacredness we're clear markers emphasizing the experience and then for
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reasons of the way my argument has unfolded since I'm talking about the psycho existential machinery of sacredness as opposed to the metaphysical proposal at least initially that is where I should begin so I'm talking now we began to speak about a
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way of using the theoretical machinery we have developed here in order to talk about sacredness and we began by going to the work that we'd already talked about about Dom aside back to the work of Gerrits and we talked about the
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sacredness one of the ways it functions one of the ways we can experience it is that it functions is a meta meaning system that affords a worldview attunement and thereby homes us against horror but then I noted that of course in the
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Hellenistic domicile there was not only the machinery that attempted to rehome us like the syncretic religions and one could probably argue also stoicism as I've already argued but there was also there was an alternative response which was the transgressive response of the
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Gnostics ultimately and I then said that gives us an opening into another aspect of sacredness and this is the work of Otto and his book that as I mentioned was typically entitled the idea of the holy and I said a better translation
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would perhaps be the experience of the numinous and what Ottawa's proposing is that before we had a moral interpretation of holiness there was a pre moral view of what I'm calling sacredness and this or at least an aspect of the sacred of sacredness I
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should say and what Otto was pointing to was the experience of the numinous which is closely related to the adjective that is most applied to God for example in the Old Testament which is glorious God is shining and overwhelming and powerful
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but glory does not carry with it any moral sense in fact one way of interpreting what's going on in the book of Job is a contrast between some of job's moral arguments about his suffering and God's response is to
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present his glory and how numinous he is and so you're seeing it sort of a conflict between these different aspects of holiness in job of course that's not all that's happening in the book of Job and perhaps when I speak of Jung we'll
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get back to that but right now what I want to pick up on is this insight by Auto that a part of sacredness seems to the experience of the numinous and the numinous seems to be transgressive an important way it seems to be in fact it
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seems to be taking us into the heart of the very thing that the gear see and model of sacredness was supposed to home us against which is experiences that border on horror now Otto describes this experience of the numinous as having
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three central aspects to it it is a mystery very much in the way I argued last time the rather sense that we got from Marcel of something that right brings about sensibility transcendence that sort of trajectory of trance framing and then it
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has two opposing poles in it which make a lot of sense so I think given what we've what we've built together one is is that it is deeply fascinating it compels so a good way of I think a very
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plausible way of understanding is this is super salient to you it is really grabbing your attention involving you you can't pull away so it's super salient and then the other is he said right it's it's like it's terrifying
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it's horrifying it there's an aspect of horror to this now I got to stop for a minute and he'll I don't want to use the word terror I to his original term but the promo terror is of course it has
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become deeply enmeshed with us with notions of terrorism and I want to put that aside that I'm going to use the word horror because it doesn't have that that kind of Association but I had to know distance how I want to use this
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word from how it's become typically used by us so I much mentioned to you that most mystery novels and mystery movies aren't mysterious at all that they don't have you confront mystery they give you just a difficult problem
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to solve and in that sense they're instances of a kind of important modal confusion that is pervasive in our culture the same thing with many horror movies you know many horror movies do not actually expose you to horror many
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horror movies actually expose you to being deeply startled with fear okay so deeply startled with fear so so much much of what passes for horror movies are movies that prey on our sort of ancestral fear of predation so that
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where there's some monster that although the monster points towards something and I'll come back to that and this is work of course made by good work done by Jonathan pazzo on how we should think about Washington monsters we'll come
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back to that and the monster is basically hidden in some way or unknown and it's preying upon people and most of the what's called horror is how that the surprising way in which the monster will suddenly appear and prey upon its its
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victims and then they get ripped apart so you were startled oh no oh right and and then and that and most of that is not horror I mean I imagine it has I find those movies boring actually the inder stand why some people it that
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this is just a statement of taste I don't find them very interesting the sort of startled and puncture movies don't don't appeal to me they're often in mashed also with sort of crypto messages about sexuality and things like
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that that need to be challenged putting all of that aside alright so when I say horror you have to there's a few movies that capture it because horror has to do with what we talked about with respect to gears horror is when your sense of
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contact with reality is being challenged undermined where you feel you have a grasp on things and then it's slipping so horror therefore is often prototypically not associated with fear or directly with fear its associated with insanity or madness and of course
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there is the primordial fear of becoming insane right now the monster points to something very very interesting and this goes back to the work of Mary Douglas right that we often find creatures that are inter categorical for us monstrous
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because that's on a continuum with another important feature of things being into categorical so what is meant by inter categorical inter categorical are things that don't fall into our ready-made categories and therefore we typically regard them as weird she talks
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about how they're unclean she does an interesting discussion about and in in the Bible the Book of Leviticus all the animals that are unclean they're very weird it's a very weird collection have you tried to find some sort of essence
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like well Wyles are unclean and crocodiles are unclean and whatever and certain birds are unclean and certain it doesn't make any sense and then she goes in and argues well no what happens is is there's various ways which categorizing
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the there's ways in which people have categorized things and those categories right have a certain pattern and when that when that pattern is being broken then these things these things challenge our grip on the world they challenge our
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grip on the world so let's for example like there's there's an idea Douglas argues that you should have an interconnection between a creatures sort of shape its morphology its means of locomotion and its location like where it lives so if it lives in the sea
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should swim and therefore it should have a fish shape so you have things that are in the sea that don't seem to be swimming like the Crawleys shellfish and therefore they're kind of weird and they turn out to be unclean and right and
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then you also have this same she argues this same schema is applied now we we think all those archaic ancient people know but remember don't don't do that because we talked about how we also have purity codes we find things unclean that
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wort our system of categorization so right remember if I take this and spit into it repeatedly and then swirl it around and drink it back you're grossed out that's unclean to you because I have this whole structural functional
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organization of a way of categorizing myself and my selfs relationship to my body and how that's other than the environment and then there's important boundaries that shouldn't be shouldn't be crossed and when the spit comes out of me it becomes inter categorical it's
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it's me but it's not me because it's not inside me but it's outside it be but somehow it was produced and on its intricate Agoura call it's yucky and get rid of it right so this is not a feature
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of ancient thought this is a way in which we respond to things that violate our core categorical ways of making sense of the world now some of those things we just regard as yucky or gross or unclean but if the the inter
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categorical thing is inter categorical between really really central categories and it is represented as threatening to us then it can it is what it originally invoked horror for us so if you take a look at many horror creatures there
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prototypically into categorical right the Wolfman is inter categorical between the beastial and the personal right the ghost is inter categorical between the living and the dead the vampire is also in two categorical between the living in the and also between right being a being
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alive in the sense of consuming and being alive in the sense of being able to be generative because of course the vampires consume and do not produce and so and of course and there's the work that Christopher master Pietro and
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Phillip miss if ik and I did and Jonathan Padua ultimately I sorry not ultimately independently not ultimately maybe ultimately but independently did work on the zombie and how the zombie is an inter categorical monster to represent our current situation the
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meaning crisis and you're going to see a video of Chris Chris mr. Pietro and I talking about all of that so I'm gonna get that into detail so the fact that the monster is inter categorical points right and that and that and that inter
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categorical and this can be on a spectrum from just ooh yucky - ah losing a grip on reality and intelligibility because of the deep connectedness between realness and intelligibility this points right again to the connection to madness and all of
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this points to losing a grip losing that contact that comprehensive grip losing that optimal grip on reality so you you can create pretty significant horror without having to do the startle and puncture moment I want to relate one to
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you where I've had the most for me the most prototypical and salient example of an experience of horror that had nothing to do with sort of the prototypical being something jumping out of the shadow with sharp pointy bits so I was
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watching Kubrick's The Shining many of you have probably seen it if you haven't seen it of course there's been ten thousand memes about it it's pervasive throughout popular media and my own I guess my own intellectual arrogance contributed to the aesthetics
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of the horror I was watching this movie and I and some spoilers here but this movies been around for a long time so I I think it's fair game I was watching this movies I was watching this movie
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and I'm you know I'm watching this character and he seems to be going mad the Jack Nicholson character and that that inner of itself is very interesting and of course evocative of all of this and then I'm getting all right Stephen
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King right all right has some sort of deep criticisms of alcoholism and so this is a very extended metaphor for the descent through alcoholism into madness and and and then I sort of I was patting myself on my back I get this movie this
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movies all it's just a symbolic way of talking about alcoholism and everything and he's hearing voices in his head or that's clear sense of madness and I had it all well structured well in hand as we say and then there's a scene where he
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gets his wife actually traps Jack Nicholson inside some sort of pantry and locks it from the outside and then I remember sort of coming to sort of a full stop and what's gonna happen now she's trapped him he's locked in that's
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it and the voices are talking to him in his head and I'm sort of dismissing that because yeah yeah he's mad he's gonna talk to the voices but so what and the voices are sort of in his head are sort
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of chiding him and you know what do you do how did you let it get to this and I'm glad and you're gonna spiral into insanity great great and everything and then the voices say okay it's time to go
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and then the voices say now we're gonna let you out and then they opened the door from the outside the voices in his head and a chill go went down my spine because I realized oh I'm in a much
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different world than I thought I was in I thought I had this completely down and no no these voices have an independent reality and there's something else going on here now nothing nothing startling was happening all they were doing was
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opening the door so he could get out but it was an absolute shell of horror going through me because and that's the most profound experience of horror I've ever had in a movie precisely because what had happened there was I went from being out here
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looking at all of this - I don't know what's going on and I was suddenly participating in his madness because I didn't know what was going on and I was losing a grip on this situation and there was forces at work here that I
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didn't understand that's horror okay that's horror and I met I mean I think there's situations that bring people into genuine horror but I think it's much rarer than we realize all right so given that and like I said we will
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return to talk about this later given the sense of horror as being you know the polar extreme of this continuum of the the weirdness the eeriness the yuckiness of the inter categorical that the spaces in our grip on reality
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through which things can slip right we can return to this so the numinous is super salient if there's almost something like a flow state in that we're being drawn into it but it also has with it aspects of horror it shakes
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at the structure of our worldview now you say whoa like what's an example of this okay so here's an example of or I think where people brush up against the numinous and it's fairly widespread so many of you will have encountered it
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it's one that I find I guess annoying because I find it dangerous so this happens you're driving home and there's been an accident on the highway and people are slowing down it's very dangerous to slow down everybody knows
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you shouldn't slow down like that because it's dangerous to slow down because the chances are you going to cause another accidents what does in fact frequently happen but nevertheless people feel compelled to slow down they are fascinated by this because they hope
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to see something horrifying I'm not just disgusting they're hoping that they will see death that they'll though somehow get a confrontation with this and that's of course is horrifying because death has the capacity to the confrontation with the threat of death
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the presence of death has the possibility to completely sever your grip on reality literally in fact right but they can't look away but if they see something they they have the potential of being very unpleasantly horrified but of course there's something also missing
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this because they can't actually see death right they can see the fact of death in the sense of the result of some thing or someone dying but that won't actually put them into something we've already discussed that won't actually
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get them give them what they want a grip on the mystery of death the phenomenological mystery of death and that tells you something right Wonder and awe have us open up to mystery but if the mystery becomes overwhelming if
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it causes us to lose any potential sense sorry or yes any sense of our potential ability to get right an insight or an understanding that typically comes with wonder right ah sort of liminal but with horror it's like I'm ooh it's um it's
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expanding so fast and oh I'm getting overwhelmed so fast I'm being forced to accommodate so fastest it's like the all absolute worst culture shock and I'm experiencing horror so we can think of horror is when notice what you've got here you've got all the
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indications of flow right or something like flow at least the beginning of it right were you you're getting drawn in in this accelerating loop something like it at least right it's super salient to you but it's it's super salient and this
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is why I'm hesitating to just call it straight-out flow it's super salient but not in the fact that you're deeply coupled it's super salient in the way that you're seeking to be deeply coupled and you're you know the machinery is
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going faster and faster but it's not actually getting a purchase because what's happening is you're getting horrified by a mystery now it's like wow that's that's an experience of the numinous and if you read parts of the Bible or
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you could meet other literature - but the Bible of course is prototypical for a lot of these people these researchers like Otto like there's passages in the Old Testament in which God is like this right just weird and strange and
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horrifying aspects of God fascinating super salient and you're drawn in and it's like like I said I want to call it auntie Flo because auntie Flo is depression but it's like that it's like the shadow of Flo you're you're trying
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to and you're getting drawn in and that all the machinery of coupling is speeding up to try and get what it can't get which is a stable relationship and so wonder that you don't get wonder you might not even get aw if it's too much
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it can pass into horror so it's plausible that this is one of the ways of interpreting certain even commands in the Bible like that you know you're supposed to it's often translated as you're supposed to fear God this
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doesn't make any any any sense for a lot of reasons because God is prototypically not the object that you can run away from or fight or like what your field would be absurd it doesn't make any sense but I think a better account of
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this is right you're supposed to have aw for God and notice how this is the basis of this word awesome but it's also the basis of this word awful right because it borders our borders on horror so there's a sense of the experience of
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sacredness that is supposed to take us to the very horizon of our intelligibility the very very precipice of our ability to make sense and make meaning of the world it's supposed to take us I would say right it's supposed
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to draw us in and the hope is not to just throw us into horror but to take us towards horror until we experience right that sort of boundary between AA and horror where we are forced into a situation of confrontation with a demand
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to change the demand to change who and what we are and in that sense this will overlap with the higher states of consciousness in that this carries with it a sense of being terrifically real and I mean that terrifically real and
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that right it is putting a demand on us to accommodate to expand our capacity to framing for framing that it is pushing us to our very very very limits and the aspect of horror is the sense stronger words needed here the realization that
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we are need finally ultimately limited that no matter how much we grow we can't grow enough to encompass the mysteries that we are confronting so the point of the horror I think is to get us not only to grow but to remember that
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our growth will always be the growth of a mortal limited being a being there is always caught up in relevance realization so notice how I've been pushing how much this is taking you to sort of that deepest powerful
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accommodation the deepest opening up right forcing tremendous change on you varying who you are this is also an aspect of the sacred now think about how you can relate this on the continuum that we've been talking about this is the ultimate
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frame breaking but this isn't just breaking any frame this is you know this is trans frame breaking this is breaking your capacity for framing or at least taking it to the very as I said the very limits where you are forced into a
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trajectory of trans framing that is also acknowledging that you are ultimately insufficient it's supposed to in this and I'm using this in a technical sense it is supposed to humiliate you the problem for us humiliate is that we can
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only hear this negatively but of course humility a deep deep appreciation of one's inescapable limitations is part of I've argued the function of horror it is to bring you to that state of accommodation while maximal accommodation while also deeply
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reminding you sati that you can never become right anything beyond a finite being it's to prevent inflation it is to vent you ever assuming that you are more than you can ultimately be so it's a deep kind of reminding that's put at the
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heart of this power look if I if I could just sort of accommodate and wondering ah there's a temptation that I would have inflate and think I am right now this puts you the numinous and right therefore puts you into contact
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confrontation with something that is much greater than yourself and also that has an existence by definition independent of you precisely because of the way you can threaten you so notice what we've got here we've got over here we've got right worldview we've got the
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sacred doing these two things sacredness sorry I keep slipping on that it's just the way language drives you eh I fear we're not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar okay so sacredness over here we have
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worldview attunement and it's very clear right why that would be regarded as sacred this homes us against horror but we've of this other notion of sacredness which is the numinous which is designed to do the opposite it's designed to
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expose us fascinate us horror with horror so over here we had right basically what I'm gonna argue is meta assimilation we have that meta mean a that is designed to get everything to fit together to belong together the
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agent in the arena fit together but then you have the opponent process the opponent process and this is as I've already argued this is meta accommodation sacredness is doing a very powerful at not at the level of your
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even of your individual projects or problems this is doing it at the level of your existential being in the world it is doing higher order relevance realization it is pushing the machinery of relevance realization again down through all of the levels of your
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knowing into your existential modes into the depths the primordial depths of the agent arena relationship and then it's blowing it apart setting it in motion with opponent processing that's doing powerful powerful higher order relevance realization sacredness I think is a deep
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way in which we are seriously playing with and now the seriousness is at the level of awe and horror and also home which is also deeply serious to you we are seriously playing with the machinery of relevance realization and pushing it
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towards greater and greater put a greater and greater development of optimizing it improving it enhancing it so if that's right if sacredness is right the experience of this machinery as opposed to either one of its poles that tells us again about
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its deep functionality that what we're doing in sacredness is we're playing with the machinery of relevance realization in order to try and create states of mind states of body states of interaction with the world that optimize and a
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comprehensive and profound manner the machinery of relevance realization our connectedness to the world to ourselves and to each other this I award for example explain why music is so deeply associated with sacredness I mean music isn't about anything not in a conceptual
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referential sense nevertheless as Nietzsche said life would be a mistake without music because in music we are playing just with the machinery of salience landscaping just with all of this a machinery in a powerful way for no other reason than for its own sake we
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try to get into a flow state in which we are just just for its own sake seriously playing with this machinery and that's why music is such a pivotal way in which we try to convey and represent the
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sacred and why music strikes us so prospectively in such a participatory way we we we don't just we don't we don't just think about music or write we write it it is it insinuates its way into our perspective or salience
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landscape and we embody it the red and what's happening in the music becomes sowing into our processes of Co identification the way the world as an arena is disclosed to we and the way my agency has been structured are being
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deeply transformed by music one of the great difficulties with our culture of course and I suppose we need to do work on this how it contributes to the meeting crisis is the degree to which we have trivialized music and the degree to
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which we have severed it from at least explicitly unconsciously from its connection to the sacred I think why many people still are so deeply dependent on music especially when they're going through any transformative period in their life is precisely
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because of the way it puts them back in touch and helps them remember at least intuitively some of this machinery of seriously playing with the higher order relevance realization machinery of sacredness now that opens up something that we need to talk about because I'm
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now invoking how we can use something that's and we got up we're going to do work on this something that's symbolic like music in order to like play in order to activate accentuate and play with this machinery and a powerfully
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transformative manner and of course right religions which are right and which have these aspects to them also are rich with the symbolic machinery that it's designed to activate and seriously play with this so what I want to talk about the relationship or the
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role that symbols have in in our experience of sacredness so the important thing is how we're going to use this word and symbol then meet originally means to put two things together and I want to I want to
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distinguish this the the talk that I did with Chris that you'll see one of the talks also distinguishes between a symbol and a sign so I'm not going into great detail here this is sort of central in stomach semiotic because we
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use this term in multiple ways like we talk about abstract symbolic thought but when we talk about you know the the cross as a as an important religious symbol and we can get very quickly confused and so a sign refers right so
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it it by looking at it we can look through it to look at something else so I can use this as a as a sign for love because when you see this it helps you to think of love but this doesn't
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actually exemplify symbols refer right but more importantly they exemplify in a particular way they exemplify by getting you to participate in that to which they refer they're going to invoke of course participatory knowing because they have to do ultimately with getting down to
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the machinery of the agent arena participatory relationship so compare this as a sign for love and this is something as I said that Chris and I did to kissing someone because kissing someone doesn't just make you think of
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love it actually you gets you to participate it activates and gets the map machinery kissing is and I mean this carefully is a serious play with the machinery of the agent arena relationship so that we can participate in a reciprocal relationship with
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another human being where we are right where there's reciprocal realization occurring between us we can together remember the being mode etc so there's a difference there now I want to try and and and and and unpack this a little bit more
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symbols do this do this sort of double job and they do this by having at their core a metaphor and we got it slow down here because this is also something that needs to be understood understood a little bit more carefully and we've
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talked about this before about the word metaphors itself a metaphor it means to carry over or carry across what I'm doing in a metaphor is I have two different domains and I want to see this domain differently so I basically look
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through this was at least the theory of block I look through this thing to look at this so I'm saying that Sam is a pig here's Sam here's a pig I put on sort of pig glasses sorry for that and then I
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look at Sam differently and there's the the salience typography of Sam is altered or Toni talks about this in salience imbalance and that reconfiguration of what I find salient in Sam allows me to see Sam differently I get an insight into Sam and of course
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I'm not actually claiming that Sam is a pig and I'm not just comparing and saying Sam is like a pig I'm doing this act of looking through and seeing this and thereby getting an insight into it in an important way that's fine okay now
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we have to understand first of all how pervasive and profound metaphor is because we have a tendency to think of it again as largely ornamental our culture is so beset comprehensively by patterns of trivialization again and again again you hear me say we have
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trivialize this we have trivialized that okay we've talked about this but I want to bring it back and develop it a little bit how much of our thinking and this goes to the work of Lake often Johnson but I'll criticize it in a minute and
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also somebody who I'm going to talk about later Barfield all right that we don't realize how much of our cognition our ways of thinking and interacting with the world are being structured by metaphor so right to use an example on halfway through this
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lecture as if I was moving through a space but I hope you get my point or at least see what I'm saying but you might not be able to because what some of the stuff I'm saying is really hard
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it's really hard it's really hard to get my point but I hope you understand me it used to be understand by the way stand within but we changed it to understand stand under it's interesting right even right even words that you don't realize
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are metaphorical have a metaphorical origin like interest remember this inter si to be within something so they're there we're often see we're much more naturally poetic than we realize we are we are constantly trying to do this use one thing look through one
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thing at another now I have some criticisms of Lake often Johnson because they argue that what it is is I have some embodied practice and then that just gets projected up into abstract thought and so one of their prototypical
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examples is I'll say things like he attacked my argument right and that's supposed to be from the hallmark of you know abstract thought that's from argumentation where we're at our most rational but we're actually using this word attacked right which goes back to
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you know physical assault and the idea is we take what we have here and we project it onto here well I think this notion of projection is too simplistic okay but this is the basic idea all right I know what this is because it's
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embodied physical interaction it's participatory right I know what it is to attack somebody and then I use that right I sort of just project that on to the abstract conceptual domain and that's how I get he attacked my argument
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this this reminds me of a point in Barfield Barfield says you know you read you read in the old text and they'll use words like newman ah NUMA sorry right which stands either for wind or spirit and we can only hear it one way
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or the other and that's why we break it into two words I sort of get what Barfield saying here but the point is we have that we use this word right and we and we move between these without
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realizing it like we attacked the castle he attacked my argument and those aren't the same but we may actually not notice that we're using them differently now why do I say that well this has work that I published a couple of articles
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with John Kennedy where we said this simple model of just projecting doesn't seem quite right because this for example carries with it I can say I attack the castle or I assaulted the castle right but if I say I assaulted his argument
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it's like what what does that mean that's weird the the the the the the the near synonym doesn't transfer and notice the reverse abstract thought and say instead of saying I attacked his argument I can say I criticized his
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argument but if I say ah let's criticize the castle you don't what what that sounds like a weird Monty Python routine see what I'm trying to show you is it we didn't there isn't a simple sort of identity relation we
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didn't just project this and it's not that right we're just sort of trapped between two meanings we've seen two clearly have a sense of this that points downward towards the physical assault and then points upwards if you'll allow
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me these metaphors towards the conceptual notice also something else notice the three things I used earlier I use did you see my point do you grasp what I'm saying do you understand it alright do you get it these are very different interactions
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these are very different things they're seeing there's understanding there's getting and there's grasping and yeah all of those independently converge towards making something intelligible right the act of making something until what select what selected these four very different things and drew them up to
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their common converged meaning see what I'm trying to show you is it's not simply that this gets projected up there's also something up here that's constraining and acting downward helping us select which of all of our embodied existence we are going to use for our
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more abstract conceptual topics all right so why is that important because I think that points towards a different way of understanding what the metaphor is doing so there of course is an element of projecting and projecting means to throw
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but I think there's something much more complicated and interesting going on in a metaphor that isn't simply projection which is of course itself a metaphor okay so I think that symbols are going to tap into these deeper kinds of
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metaphors not just the metaphors that are the ornamentations of language these are the metaphors these more profound metaphors that are structuring our cognition and they and I'm trying to point out to you that they have no not only bottom-up emergence they have a
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top-down emanation going on in them there's a sense in which both sides are interacting in a powerful way we mean we need a much more dynamic account of what's that work in metaphor so let's build towards that dynamic account and
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we've already gained something that symbols are going to be making use of these profound metaphors the metaphors that are not just metaphors of speech but are structuring the way we are making sense making meaning of the world now one important point of these kinds
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of metaphors the triggers on the participation gets into the profundity but doing something with it is one of the jobs of these metaphors right is to hold in mind okay so let me give you right an example of this we care about
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justice we really do it's important to us our culture of fact is really wrestling with what does justice mean and how do we best serve it how do we best realize it but that means you need to be able to reflect on justice you
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need to me to be able to contemplate it to think about it if you're going to think about it and not just emote or assert about it if you're going to think about it you need to hold it in mind but
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how do you hold it in mind if I were to ask you without repeating the word justice hold the justice in mind do it hope what are you doing even right you might be holding sort of a prototypical
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instance but when I do this and I do this repeatedly with my class what people tell me is well when they want to sort of contemplate justice - so they can reflect on it and get clearer about what it means to them they often invoke
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a symbol they invoke the symbol of the woman blindfolded and holding a sword carrying right the holding the scales so one of the things you notice is that this of course is is a profound metaphor we use the notions of balance all
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throughout our talk about justice we also use sword as deciding cutting right but let's stick with the balance this allows us to hold justice in mind that's it's like stop pause if that's all the symbol was doing that in and of itself
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is such a valuable thing we need to pause and appreciate if I can't relate to justice in a participatory fashion where I can engage in it and I'm trying to internalize it and I'm trying to get clearer about it I can't do any of that
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unless I can activate it and hold it in mind and I need a symbol to do that now the symbol is metaphorical justice isn't literally a scale a balance what's going on here and what's right and how does it
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plug in to where I'm trying to argue there's something more than just projection going on and this gets me to a notion that I've mentioned to you before exaptation that's really like really important work you gotta read his book by Michael
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Anderson on this this is the idea that your brain right is in a self-examination machine not only a cross species evolutionary but more recently in his work within a brain in its own development so to remember the example my tongue has been exacted for
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speech it has a structural functional Organization for doing a particular set of tasks but of course it has remember the robot and the battery does all kinds of side effects and those side effects are a ongoing reservoir of sets of
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capacities that I can tap into and make a new structural functional organization to do a new thing which is what I'm doing right now I'm speaking so the tongue has been exacted for speech and what he's arguing is that a lot of what
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we see in our cognition is what he calls circuitry use circuits that have been used for one thing get reused could he get exact 'add in the way I've just described by reconfiguring their structural functional organization right so that side effects become central
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effects right and and what you do is you get a new machine a new capacity created that way so let's try and think about this right we've got a clear example in the cerebellum right the cerebellum originally evolved for helping you to
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keep your physical balance right and what it does is it takes information from many different sense modalities and is constantly looking for how to find patterns of contingency patterns of relationship between what's happening in my vision what's happening in my body
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and it's really helping to do all this sophisticated coordination and smoothing out so that they start to coordinate together much better that's your cerebellum it's centrally involved in your balance but you know what you've done we've the cerebellum
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has been exacted to repeat it's been it's used not only for finding balance between like my seeing and my moving it's been exempted to find write deeper coordination between any different areas of domain in your brain the cerebellum also allows
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you to integrate your vision with your working memory so that you can do visual imagery let's put this together carefully you've got this right machinery of exaptation you've got balance and then what you're doing when you call up the balance idea is you're
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actually right notice your cerebellum has been exacted up to helping to you manage massively complex contingencies between variables you know what you have to do to be a just person you have to know how to balance you have to optimize the
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relationship between you have to pick up on and coordinate and smooth out the complex interaction between multiple variables that's justice you know what you can do if you invoke balance and don't just talk about it but try and
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participate in it you can actually do the reverse of this you can go back through balance right and trigger octave it you can go from justice through balance back to activating the machinery of the cerebellum normally I am looking through all of
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that machinery at something but what I can do with the symbol is no no I don't want to I want to actually sort of retrace reactivate go back through exaptation and activate the machinery of balance so that I can then use that
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machinery in order to get an optimal grip on this other domain which is justice see this isn't just simple projection right there's there is not only a projecting up there is an emanating back down you're also reversing and going down and trying to
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reactivate this machinery an important way there's a top-down guidance that is intersecting with the bottom-up projection and so the symbol is in that sense deeply participatory you are trying to participate in this activation of the very cognitive machinery that is
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used both in participating in balanced you know just look at balance you have to be balanced respectively participatory and then taking that machinery into being just having your perspectival and participatory machinery aligned in a certain way that's what the
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symbol is doing for you it is deeply participatory it allows you to hold in mind and then look back through to activate and then bring that back up to have insight participatory and perspectival insight into something like justice we're going to talk more next
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time about the symbol and how it relates to our experience of sacredness thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you you
Topics:sacrednessnuminousRudolf Ottohorrorrelevance realizationMary Douglasinter-categoricalmeaning crisisJohn Vervaekespirituality
