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[Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis last time I suppose I probably taxed your attention quite a bit because we got into I tried to keep it as accessible as possible it's jargon free as possible but we got into some of
Vervaeke's Ep. 33 explores relevance realization as a pre-conceptual, affective ground of meaning, linking it to Heidegger, wonder, awe, mystery and the sacred.
Key Takeaways
- Relevance realization is a pre-conceptual, affective foundation of meaning that precedes belief and inference.
- Spirituality can be understood as an expression of the brain's meaning-making machinery and our fundamental connectedness to the world.
- Wonder, awe and mystery are phenomenological markers of participation in this deeper framing of reality.
- Self-transcendence is endemic to meaning-making, but so is the capacity for self-deception.
What the video covers
- Recaps prior episodes: relevance realization as a naturalistic process grounded in self-organizing criticality and small-world network dynamics in the brain.
- Argues relevance realization is inherently participatory and affective, rooted in caring and the connectedness of mind, body, world and other people.
- Connects relevance realization to Heidegger's notion of primordial meaning and Dreyfus's interpretation of being-in-the-world.
- Describes relevance realization as pre-conceptual and pre-propositional, operating beneath belief, categorization and inference.
- Explains self-transcendence and self-deception as features of the meaning-making machinery, linking spirituality to connectedness with something greater than oneself.
- Introduces affordances and salience landscaping as mechanisms shaping perception, insight and altered states of consciousness.
- Frames wonder, awe and curiosity as overlapping states tied to caring and to the transformation of the knower.
- Discusses mystery as a phenomenologically felt sense that cannot be fully objectified or made a focal object of thought.
- Traces the historical shift in theology, citing Schleiermacher, toward experiential accounts of the sacred after the Scientific Revolution.
- Outlines a plan to treat the sacred as a psycho-existential phenomenon, drawing on Garrett's work on the agent-arena relationship.
Chapters
- 00:00Recap of Previous Episode and Framing
- 04:25Relevance Realization, Connectedness and Affect
- 08:44Pre-Conceptual Nature of Relevance Realization
- 16:16Agent-Arena Relationship and Meaning
- 25:00Wonder, Awe and Curiosity
- 30:30Mystery and Non-Objectifiability
- 42:00Historical Shift: Schleiermacher and Experiential Sacred
- 49:00The Sacred as Psycho-Existential Phenomenon
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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the nitty-gritty of how we could potentially give a naturalistic explanation of relevance realization and see it potentially in being implemented in terms of self-organizing criticality and small world network formation in the brain and that that in turn could help
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us to understand general intelligence insight and a lot of the functionality and I'm it was even arguing a lot of the phenomenological aspects of consciousness and that gives us right reason to believe that we may be able to
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use this machinery to elegantly explain a lot of the central features of human spirituality we've already seen that this relevance realization is changed active it's about our fundamental connectedness connectedness to the world connectedness of mind body together will
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have to come back to connectedness to other people that it that relevance realization is always deeply affective that at the core of relevance realization is a caring that goes is integral to your cognitive commitment of your precious cognitive metabolic and
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temporal resources that we can see a lot of the stuff that Heidegger was talking about when he was trying to get us back to this primordial sense of meaning in the trans jetty of relevance realization and that that interpretation of
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Heidegger via Dreyfus and our our being in the world I want to pick up on that now instead of just being suggestive I want to now try and uncared for what I want to call the phenomenology of relevance realization in terms of
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meaning making the kind of meaning making that ultimately we have gathered together by the term spirituality so let's let's gather what we've done okay so we had problem solving right and we went over this again in more detail last
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time we have insight categorization all of these things seem to be per demonstrative reference that's the fin sting and we we put that within right the salience landscaping consciousness and closely tied to it working memory and then of course tied to that of
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course is G right got inference that was stuff with journey AK we've got communication all of this right it's feeding into relevance realization we could give a naturalistic structural functional organization of it in terms of self-organizing criticality and small world networks where these are
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understood to mean families of processes right and these are deeply related together and as I've said we've already got that this is inherently transgender even sorry evolving involving that's what I'm trying to get with caring and participation and how right you know the
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the know-how is grounded in the situational awareness of respectable knowing that's grounded in the participatory transactive coupling to the world right this is this evolving evolving optimization process of your connectedness you're fitted miss to yourself to the world to other people
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in communication for example alright I've already given you an argument about how via complexification alright this gives us an account of our capacity for self transcendence a capacity to produce emergent functions and we saw that even connected with insight and we can see
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that at work directly out of this now well why why self transcendence the capacity for self transcendence to overcoming self-deception is actually endemic to your meaning making machinery ok in connection with that of course this would also explain these two are
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related your tremendous capacity for self-deception for bullshitting yourself right because this has to do with ultimately your procedure right your salience landscaping etc as I mentioned and that's part of here that the connectedness that's so central to people's sense of meaning in life being
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connected to something that right is in some sense greater than them other than them in an important way but to whom their identity is nevertheless coupled I've tried to show you how it gives us a nice account of respectable knowing and
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participatory knowing and then how these two can come together in procedural noise talk a bit more about that but the creating of affordances we've talked multiple times how affordances are the Ovation of a transgender within which my skills my capacity to
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solve problems can be reliably trained and developed okay talked about again like I said that this has an aspect of deep carrying in it so you're going to find the sense of significance here this is something you care about you bind
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yourself soon you commit yourself to in a very important way I already suggested and I try to give to you that with the account last time of insight how this can help explain what's going on in altered states of consciousness while
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you're getting both a change in your salience landscaping a change in your relevance realization machinery how it can be altering your optimal grip optimal gripping is also a case of optimization that fits within this help to explain our higher states of
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consciousness right now I want to start pointing out some other aspects of it that I think contribute to it being how do I want to say this represented understood grasped as spiritual in nature let's take a look at some of the
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features of relevance realization that have come out of this argument so these are all going to be ways in which we experience this as our fundamental framing of reality but and again but that's good but it has a sense of us
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standing outside we're inside the framing we are participating in it okay it has to do with right the framing is right at the level of the agent arena it's not just looking out its the inclusive relationship okay but I want to point
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out to the fundamental fundamental LED of this what I would argue this is a way of interpreting what Heidegger means by the prime or geology of what he was talking about I saw his Heidegger later have criticisms of him but I'm also trying to
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point out how this work which seems so technical in some sense can be connected to some very well deeply existential and phenomenological philosophy ok so first of all the fundamental fundamental 'ti of this ok so notice that this is
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ultimately pre-conceptual in nature it has to be right because it's at the level it's below your level of propositional processing in order to write in order to have concepts you have to categorize in order to categorize you have to have demonstrative reference
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sorry in order to categorize you have to have relevance realization also in order to categorize you have to have first have demonstrative reference which is pure pre-conceptual relevance realization so this is ultimately pre-conceptual in a deep way ok and in
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that important sense right it's ultimately pre propositional pretty propositional if what we mean by belief and it's often what we mean by belief is the assertion of propositions and their implications then relevance realization is taking place at a level fundamentally
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deeper than the level of belief now you understand that I'm not proposing that this is just a bottom-up process of course how we conceptualize things and how we have beliefs about things feeds back down that's why all those diagrams
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have feedback down arrows in them but we're talking about belief ultimately as an effect it feeds back and effects but it is ultimately of an effect of relevance realization because of course finding this fundamental framing is pre inferential in a deep way because
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inference it's pre communication that means you could I learn this from other people well no you can't there's a sense of which you can refine it from other people but you can't ultimately learn it from other people because learning
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presupposes it being able to pay attention to your mother and pick up on how she's communicating with you and make inferences from that so that you start to categorize the world and figure out that this is a bottle presupposes
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this and that points to something else this is pre experiential not in the sense that it's happening to you before you have like in some previous life what I mean is that you're meaningfully structured experience the level of
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common sense obvious nasira's alt of it it does not generated by the level of common sense obvious meaningful world it is generated that world is generated out of relevance realization being coupled to the environment so it is pre
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experiential it is pre egoic I think in some important ways it's also posted Gork but I'll come back to that right because your agency and the world as an arena in which you have a narrative Lee structured reliably acting ego emerges
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these Co emerge out of relevance realization that's why they are primordial II connected together in participatory knowing so relevance realization is pre egoic by the time you have you in a common sensical e obviated world of meaningful objects and
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situations relevance realization has already done a tremendous tremendous amount of work so it's pretty go ik its pre normative and that's gonna whoa some people are not gonna like that I'm gonna qualify that it's prima normative in the sense that it's your
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primordial normativity before you can assess truth things have to be meaningful to you before you can you know assess beauty they have to be a specialized for you before you can assess goodness right you have to have agency and arena
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this is this is this makes possible you our normative judgments as to what is true what is good and what is beautiful I'm not saying it those judgments are reducible that's ridiculous I'm not saying that but I'm saying this is
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primordial to them and that was part of what I think Heidegger was going on about so what I want to talk about now is doing a little bit more of filling out putting all of this together notice notice how much this points to aspects
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of human spirituality you have self transcendence but you also have foolishness you have the connectedness you have the perspectival and participatory knowing you have the co-creation the co emergence the co determination of the agent arena you have the core right binding together of
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your agency your caring and your cognition thing about Plato right it it it it helps to explain the association of altered states of consciousness and especially higher states of consciousness with human spirituality and notice a lot of the
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features then you know that our spirit is somehow it's deeper its deep like we have all these deepness metaphors and profundity metaphors right because look what I'm showing you that it's it's deeper than your ego it's deeper than
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your judgments of truth goodness and beauty it's deeper than your propositional thinking it's deeper than your conceptualization the way that can be spoken of is not the way it is pre inferential it is pre communication it is pre experiencial it is a fundamental
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grounding of your being and your being connected because I'm arguing that those are one and thus saying a lot of what is captured by your spirituality is captured by this the way this machinery unfolds phenomenologically perspective a leap in
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a participatory fashion there's these aspects of this that are therefore in a fundamental sense unconscious but there are these aspects of this in our consciousness and there are these aspects in this in what how are our cognition and our consciousness can are
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connected to the world I want to use a term here and then I'm going to develop it for the whole right hand side I want to term for all of this right so that I don't have to keep which
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is sort of gesturing and flinging my arms in a semi organized fashion at the board I'm gonna use a term here I'm gonna use the term religio and I'm using it deliberately let me explain why first of all as soon as you see that many of
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you are hearing religion but I'm not using the word religion I'm using the word religion but I want the associations with religion nevertheless to be there religio is one of the purported etymological origins of the word religion Religare which means to
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read back which is importantly similar this means to bind together to bind together to connect so it obviously is pointing to this but it carries with it many of these aspects the the primordial 'ti the fundamental framing of relevance
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realization and all of this machinery so when I invoke religio I am basically invoking the right hand of this diagram so religio is in that sense I'm using the term I'm using it in a spiritual sense okay so the thing here you know
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Paul van der Clare would probably say that you know this is a word that fudges you know spiritual and I don't want to be fudging I am trying to specify how I'm using this word in detail and in
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organization religion is a I'm using it in a spiritual sense as the sense of a pre ago ik ultimately supposed to going binding that simultaneously grounds the self and its world now I want to pick up on that and pick
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up on the evolving involvement carrying participant like all of this and I want to read you a couple quotes from an article by Paul Acosta and a book called the joys of secularism alright he has a fantastic article there called a secular
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wonder and he wants to try and explain what's going on in wonder and think about one you think about how it's pointing towards the insight the sense of opening up but also the connectedness how perspectival and participatory how
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it involves you caring how it often can merge with awe and altered states and potentially higher states so wonder is central right but notice how he how he the machinery he uses to explain wandering this is a quote the very
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ordinary fact that things always matter right he puts it in quotes in some way or other to us and that we cannot help but be affected by things as if we were immersed in a sort of bubble of
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meaningfulness notice it's the relevance realization how things matter to us and no he uses the word matter because it's that importance that can that constitutive kind of relevance realization and we're immersed in it we're immersed in it we're merged in
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sort of a bubble of meaningfulness or better in an atmosphere of significance an atmosphere of significance and import notice the word import it's already here that we do not create from scratch we do not create it but are absorbed by the
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metaphor of the atmospheric exerts not only the image of a global container but also of a rhythm of breathing breathing the compression and particularization the generalization and the particular the specialization the assimilation and the accommodation the breathe are the lifeblood of our spirit the
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metaphor the atmosphere should success not only the image of a global container but also that of a rhythm of breathing and of a light refraction it's doing well it's realization it's refracting the light structuring the intelligibility to which a living being
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must listen to this word must attune or adjust herself all the participatory night this is from somebody who's commenting on secularism he goes on to point out there's a central consequence of what he calls a bubble of significance this is another
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quote the experience of having a world here the Heidegger in here has its roots not in a head-on and focused relationship with a clear-cut object it is it is not something that we have is a focal object something that we can write
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objectify with an i8 conceptualization the experience of having the world has its roots not in a head-on and focused relationship with a clear-cut object but in the emergence of a bubble of significance that for a sentient being plays the same role that is played by
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the atmosphere with regard to the earth you participate in the atmosphere you contribute to it but you emerge from it and you did not make it it creates that is special conditions of life where existentially crucial distinctions between inside and outside are drawn
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that primordial ground makes all the distinctions between the inner and the outer possible for us the transitivity is deeper than our subjectivity and our objectivity because the constitution of subjectivity and objectivity require all of this machinery he then goes on to argue that because we
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aren't aware of the atmosphere in a focal objectified way I mean as a as a perceptually focalized object I don't mean as an object of thought right he then goes on to argue that the atmospheric nature of the bubble of
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significance means that we don't experience it as a focal object but through non-focal states such as and here's the point of his article wonder and awe or I would add their opposites which we'll talk about later absurdity and horror right so wonder is that state
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in which we become aware in a participatory and prospective way not in a focal way but in a perspective of am participating are of the significance and our involvement and our indebtedness new to and our participation from and
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our committed 'no stew right the atmosphere of relevance realization one is tempted here and I I'm I'm worried here about being sacrilegious so I I'm using this analogously please but the analogy is meant to be a strong one also
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right this atmosphere you see what Kostas doing here he's invoking you know that you know what what st. Paul said you know God is in whom we live and move and have our being I'm not claiming that relevance realization is God that's
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ridiculous I'm not doing that but what I'm saying is I wonder and awe which are often directed towards things like God are ways that cost is arguing in which we disclose the relevance realization and it's spiritual and significance to
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its spiritual significance to us right the way in which we with it with it with within it we live and move and have our being again this is from a person who is trying to articulate a secular sense of
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spirituality now somebody who is aligned with this but I don't think is I'm secular is the the masterful work by Robert fuller on wonder his book on wonder it's just a fantastic book and he also argues how central wonder is now
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what's interesting he does two things that align with this so well and I highly recommend this book he argued because it's a book from you know emotion to spirituality and what he argues what fuller argues is that of
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course wonder is responsible for some of our deepest spiritual experiences our deepest experiences of what I'm calling religio but he does that by precisely explaining the fundamental functionality of things like wonder see wonder wonder is basically in the being mode where
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curiosity is in the having mode in curiosity right now I'm using these terms in their prototypical senses we use these terms in very slippery fashions so I'm not claiming that every time we use the word wonder every time
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we use the word curiosity but I'm talking about the kind of wonder that can overlap very readily and prototypically with awe and I'm talking about the kind of curiosity that overlaps prototypically with our solving our problems and our manipulating the
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world in a way that we find powerful and efficacious see an inch again remember what I said and it's not that one mode is good in the other modes bad but you've got curiosity within the having mode and that's great right because
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curiosity is problem-solving its it focused it has a focal object curiosity is directed what is that what does that do how does that work wonder is its non-focal it's the opening up it's the it's the sense of right the atmosphere
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it's the perspective and participatory sense of Oh Oh ah right and what fuller argues is and it makes use of work like people like Frederickson and others it's these this emotion like this the the point of wonder is right if if curiosity it gets
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you to focus in like on specific features of the world specific objects wonder tries to get you to participate in the gestalt the whole how does it all fit together all pushes you towards on opening an ongoing accommodation a sense
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of the inexhaustible nest the combinatorially explosive nature of reality and the ongoing evolving adaptability of your relevance realization to that explosive potential within reality itself that's what wonder does wonder isn't about solving a problem wonder is about remembering sati your being by putting
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you deeply in touch notice the language in touch with religio okay now that brings me to another aspect that overlaps with the primordial 'ti or what I'm calling the fundamentality the fundamental framing think about how wonder gives you something like the off
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again it gives you the sense of participating emerging want from co-creating with the ongoing course of your world not as a story though but something you can talk about with the soy like we talked about evolution as a
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story but it isn't a self it isn't itself a story it's grounded in something deeper so wonder aah it's not about solving problems remember the having mode is about solving problems the being mode is about confronting a mystery okay I'm gonna
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take it that this has been now etched into your brain and I am going to just say I'm gonna rely on the word religio to invoke all of the right side and the fact that is dependent on the argument
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that came from the left side as well okay so think about wonder think about ah and what we've been talking about and this remembering of the being mode which is so central to spirituality right so that's another aspect of this okay so
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think about this as accommodation got opening up having to go right this is you when I accommodate I come to know something by how I am transformed in order to come into contact with it and in my own myself knowing of how I've
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changed and my and the disclosure my realization of that what that is are bound together like prototypically when you're in love with somebody to off okay so this is accomodation and it's in the being mode you're remembering sati
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and in the mean mode you're confronting a mystery do you remember talked about Marcel's idea about how a mystery right and notice the machine we got here's how I framed my problem and then I realize there's a kind of insight that
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my so initially there's an insight that oh that framing is itself problematic and I move to a more encompassing frame and oh no and then what starts to happen is ah I'm opening up ah right I'm opening up and my insight goes from a
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reframing from a to a trance framing because I stopped having insights about my focal problem I start getting an insight not about just the the problem or the world I also remember remember the sensibility transcendence I'm also getting an
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insight into of the inadequacies of my my style of framing my way of framing I'm getting a trans framing happening you get this trajectory of trans framing it doesn't stabilize and that's the point it can't land on a focal object all
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that's disclosing all that's disclosing in the trajectory of trans framing is the machinery of religio and yet you find that like flow you find that deeply meaningful to a point if it's pushed too far it becomes deeply meaningful in a
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negative sense of horror now think about this think about how right and here's we have to be really careful here I want to talk about the that the mystery of religio but I need to make a distinction here that's a distinction
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I've discussed before but let's go over it very carefully there's a distinction between something being a phenomenological mystery and it being something that I cannot theoretically explain to equate them is to equivocate between propositional and prospective all knowing for example and we should
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not equivocate between them because they're not identical so for example it is phenomenologically impossible for me to respect i valino what it is like to be dead because whenever i try to conjure up a frame oh i'm in a dark room
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but wait i'm still there in the dark room there's the hereness and there now - oh well then I'm nowhere well then I'm just an empty no matter what I do I can't get a framing that has within it
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my own non-existence prospectively but that is not proof that I'm immortal it is not proof that I've existed for all time course not that's ridiculous that's a mistake that's an equivocation so when I'm talking about mystery I'm not talking
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automatically you need an additional argument you need an additional argument to go from phenom illogical mystery to the claim of theoretical in explica bility they do not follow because they are not identical for the deep reason they're propositional and prospective
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all-knowing are not identical that is an equivocation so I'm talking about a phenomenological mystery here well what is it what what's at the core of religio well the death example actually points to something more primordial right it points to the fact
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that I can never make a focal object of my framing my capacity for relevance realization I mean prospectively what I mean by that is I whenever I am thinking right or doing anything I'm oh it's always framed because if I'm unframed
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I'm facing combinatorial explosion which is non intelligible to me so whatever I'm thinking of it's inside the frame but what is precisely not inside the frame is the framing process so here's the frame or here's the frame even
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better right and here's the framing and what's not in there is the framing oh you say Oh what I'll do is I'll do this haha that was easy John haha John I got you that was easy no you didn't get me because what's
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outside here still is what is framing that you cannot have this in a part right well you can't have it as a focal object it is mysterious it is phenomenological mysterious James pointed to this and in a wonderful
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distinction and we between the eye and the me these are the aspects of you that you can bring into view well Who am I well I'm John Verve a key and this is what I look like here's an image in my
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mind and what's not there is whatever it is that's generating that name in that image and then I go deeper and say ah but here's the part of my right that was generating the part that was in and I
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can never stand the pun again right I can never see the eye I'm always seeing by means of the eye it is phenomenologically mysterious - but it doesn't mean that I'm unaware of it I always have to use older language from
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the course I mean I always have a subsidiary awareness I'm always aware through my eye of my me I'm always aware through my framing of my framed its I'm not completely out of touch with it it is not inaccessible to me but I cannot
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vocalize it I cannot make it a focal object I cannot frame it right the machinery of relevance realization is that sense deeply phenomenologically mysterious to me doesn't mean I can't talk about it theoretically I've just been doing it but it has a deep
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phenomenological mystery to me the fact that it grounds and makes possible my subjectivity and the objectivity where that where what I mean by that is things constellated into objects that we can make inferences about etc right I can't
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use the grammar of subjects and objects subjects and predicates conceptual categories to talk about this in the sense of exemplifying it I can use words to talk about it in the sense of pointing to it but I can't produce it in
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subjective and objective categories precisely because the whole argument points towards its transductive nature again that only that only that only makes it phenomenologically mysteries it doesn't make it a theoretical inexplicable 'ti I can look you you cannot confuse properties of your theory
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with properties of what your theory is about if I have a theory of light itself right isn't light if I have a theory of war my theory isn't itself an instance of war if I have a theory of gravity my
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theory isn't it self generating gravity my theory of vagueness doesn't itself have to be vague in fact my theory of vagueness should be clear okay my theory doesn't have to exemplify what it's talking about and there are cases
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where it cannot exemplify what it is talking about but that doesn't mean I can't talk about what I'm talking about it has to be that I have to understand the limitations that are given by that differences between the kinds of knowing
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and also the ways in which I can and cannot bridge between these kinds of knowing so there is something deeply phenomenologically mysterious and in that mystery the mystery opens up an affordance of a trajectory of trans framing that allows us to participate in
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prospectively that kind of Wonder and awe of religio we can get into something very much like a transgender Ector e flow state in which we are basically celebrating in flow our participation in religion and we do this I would argue
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for the very good reason that to make significant to reflect upon to celebrate and enact religio is to fundamentally enhance our agency the disclosure of the world and our connectedness to it and what else could be more valuable to us
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what else could be more valuable to us so I think there is now a major objection that could be leveled against the argument that I am building and I take this objection very seriously this is the argument that yes John I will
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grant you with Costa there's all kinds of wonderful spiritual meaningful things on this side and you're capturing a lot about mystery and self transcendence and also the capacity the negative capacity of you know bullshitting ourselves and reciprocal narrowing and falling into
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right the despair and and and addiction and you that you're capturing all of that I'll grant you all of that perhaps you're not but look just for the sake of the argument I'm granting you all of that but there's still something missing
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that I think is central to what how I use the word spirituality and what I would smell what's missing from religio that's found in religion is to confront the sacred I'm trying to use a term as neutral as possible here because it's
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unclear I think if we should apply the term divinity for example to the Buddhist notion of Shunyata or the Taoist notion of the Dao I don't think calling it divine is a plausible interpretation whereas God is divine I
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don't think you should call the Dao divine but the Dao is clearly sacred in an important way and I think for many versions of Buddhism that Shunyata has a kind of important kind of sacredness so the thing here is
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there's two there's two things we have to talk about and we have to talk about them carefully but keep them distinct but also show how they're connected so the sacred is typically when we want some account of the metaphysics of what
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grounds our experience of sacredness so this is some this is basically a metaphysical proposal a standard Western proposal although I've already given you an indication that it's not Universal it's not in things like Buddhism or Taoism is that the sacredness is
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grounded the metaphysical proposal is grounded in being supernatural in some sense and of course that's again a very loaded term I'm gonna use it and the way I've argued for in this video series right something that you know is
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historically constructed running through people like Aquinas and beyond okay that now that's so this is the metaphysical proposal and then you ultimately have a psycho existential proposal over here which is proposal which is right well this is what it's like to experience
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sacredness this distinction comes to the fore for example historically and there's so many people right I wish I could talk about more I need I need you know I need three more series but if I tried to run this for 150 episodes my
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crew would kill me and then then there'd be a tragedy they'd up in jail it just it just be a mess so I'm going to stick to the 50 right but this proposed did pulling these apart you find this of course
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prototypically in the work of schleiermacher where he sort of puts aside this proposal because it's coming into serious disrepute because of the advent of the Scientific Revolution and he shifts towards well but what's the psychological existential experience of
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sacredness and you know his up his proposal that it's the experience of you know sort of absolute dependence and coupled I would argue with things like Wonder and awe but that's that distinction right it came to the fore
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and work by share market you can see a lot of theological debate I would argue I can't do the argument here but you could see the lot of theological debate as the debate between a side that wants to emphasize sacredness and a side that
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wants to emphasize the sacred so I want to talk about this but I want to talk about this in a way that reflects back on that why do I start here I start here because of course I've argued that
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religio is exactly a psycho existential very powerfully read this though no this has to do with modal right with you like the being mode it has to do with you modal existence it has to do with trans Jack tippity it has to do with
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primordial tea you have to read this in a deeply high daguerreian sense right but that's what I mean it's a and psycho meaning right having to do with your cognitive processing all the kinds of knowing right your embodiment your
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embeddedness so reading psycho psychological in also a very comprehensive way but I'm clearly arguing that religions on here so first of all I should start here because that's where I'm starting from and I want to talk about sacredness as a
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within a cycle existential sense and then if I can if it's already done this right around this and our our relevance realization then I'm going to make proposals about what this tells us about the kinds of constraints that are
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available to us in our metaphysical proposal and I'm going to propose an alternative to this which I imagine will be controversial but I hope that the controversial will be controversy will be constructive rather than merely adversarial all right so let's I'm gonna
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start here I'm trying to be honest with you I'm trying to be clear about what I'm trying to do I'm not trying I don't want to be shuffle any cards from the bottom of the deck here right and trying to be as upfront
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as I possibly can be of course I'm not I'm biased or any kind of magical claim like that but I'm trying my best to put the machinery that I'm aware of using and then I'm deliberately putting into play out front so that we can talk about
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this as clearly and as honestly as possible okay so let's talk talk about sacred nips as a psycho existential thing and where I want to start right is in the machinery of the agent arena relationship and I want to bring back the work of Gerrits
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and we talked about the work of Brian Walsh and we talked about this when we talked about DOM aside and Dom aside as the loss of something and this points to an invariant Rafi Chur of sacredness that is so so central that we can it's
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so back rounded that we can I think inappropriately trivialize it but remember what dama saw how disastrous dama site is remember what happens if you actually experienced homicide if I if I fling you into another culture and you experience deep culture shock or I
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isolate you in solitary confinement okay so that deep loneliness that deem homesickness that deep cultural shock that's dama side and so part of sacredness gets argues right part of sacredness is to home the world what that's I mean I understand why he puts
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it but it's not homing the world it's homing us and the world together right the world we are home into the world and the world homes around us very much like Kostas atmospheric bubble so this is the idea that one of the functions of
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sacredness is what Geerts calls a meta meaning function now he talks about this in his work on religion but he's definitely in the clear marker side of things so this is not appropriate for me to do it this way and this is
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something that fits in with our argument very well geertz argues and be careful here because people jump he argues that religion isn't a system of meaning oh no ok wait wait he thinks it's a system of meta meaning
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right so whatever whatever distinct meaning systems we make here's a legal system here's a moral system here's a fashion system right here's an entertainment system we have all these meaning systems but notice the argument that we've already made those are all
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dependent on the primordial 'ti of the trans jacketed relationship between the agents of the arena if that relationship doesn't hold none of those other systems can work which is why we if you go to another culture and you don't go through
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the participatory transformation alright if you don't and you're just experienced in culture shock daaamn aside the agent arena relationship isn't in place that none of those other meaning systems can work for you they'll be absurd they won't make sense
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that's what he means by it being a meta meaning system what it does he argues he argued that religion I would argue what the experience of sacredness is because again the word religion fudges between are we talking about the slurm akheon
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sense or are we talking about sort of the metaphysical referent okay so remember I've I'm pulling these apart to try and avoid that confusion so but what Garrett is talking about here is right yeah if you don't have that that none of
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your individual meaning systems work and religion in the sense of the experience the cultural and individual experience of sacredness is what gives us the meta meaning system that protects us from domicile it protects us from the horrors and the absurdities of domicile so one
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of the one of the functions of sacredness right is this the meta meaning process of homing us against horror we're horror would be to be overwhelmed by loneliness would be overwhelmed by homesickness cultural shock and a tremendous sense of alienation absurdity
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and anxiety okay now that's important I think that's a very important function of sacredness we what we do when we go into a sacred setting is we play with Menem we we we have psycho technologies and I'll come back and give a definition
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of like a clear definition as we work that out of a psycho technology but we have psycho technologies that allow us to do this serious play right with sacredness so that we are constantly being home de gainst horror and of
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course many of you are aware of all the research showing that people that belong to religious communities or spiritual pathways are much more resilient in the face of the tragedies and horrors of life that's a reliable finding one of
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the ways in which I mean you you have to seriously consider the other costs but one of the ways in which you can improve your capacity to make your way through the world is to be committed to a
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spiritual community and a spiritual path and presumably it also has a history behind it it has institutions etc and that would make it more prototypically like a religion again you know me by now I'm not advocating for a nostalgic return to
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religion I'm trying to point out though the functionality so worldview attunement homing us against horror remember cost even used the word attune in there that's definitely a function of the sacred now here's where I want to criticize kids I think that while this
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is definitely an important part up sorry I slipped I should have said a function of sacredness I made a mistake this is definitely a function of sacredness but I think that there is a mistake if we think that sacredness can be reduced to
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or identified solely with the machinery of worldview attunement and hommina get us against horror it's very plausible to me that this is a necessary feature of sacredness but I do not think it is a sufficient feature so if we go back to
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Hellenistic Damas idea if you remember we talked about the different kinds of responses there was syncretism and then there's things like stoicism and the remembering of the being mode but there was also Gnosticism and Gnosticism keeps reverberating right it keeps
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reverberating through everything we're doing here a nossa system of course is a way of trying to awaken us to the primordial tea and the mystery in some important sense of religio that's definitely what's going on but there's something interesting about the Gnostics
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and that's the element that the kana emphasized that the trajectory of trance framing is ultimately understood as transgressive it's trying to write overturn the grammar of a world view it is transgressive in a deep deep sense and I think that that points towards
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something else that the sacred does for us and right and this goes towards the work of Auto deeply influenced by cohn I hope you see how in a way my work is deeply influenced by current also by Hagel but OTO in his book which
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is translated the idea of the holy very bad translation many people argue a better translation would be something like the experience of the numinous because Otto's argument is precisely this notion has become very clouded for us okay it is it is plausibly related to notions
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of wholeness and completeness there's there's probably connections to words like health which people wouldn't automatically think of right but we know that people typically think about this connected now in terms of a moral term or righteousness all right but the this
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association says what's something else is going on here right again the etymologies are contested of course for the word like that we know that this is also weirdly associated with this and I mentioned this before glory the glory of
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God which is the predicate most often applied to him in the Old Testament and that's not a moral term so what we've got to get to is what's going on here in this experience of the holy and Otto
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created this term the numinous picked up of course by young right to describe what what the original the word our primordial experience of the numinous is before all of these but what this is most pointed towards a little bit of
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this not so much this right what the numinous is is the fundamental experience and here's what I'm going to talk about next time that the experience of the numinous is ultimately to experience the transgressive side of the sacredness how it opens us up in Wonder
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and awe and even takes us to the horizon of horror thank you very much for your time [Music] you you
Topics:relevance realizationmeaning crisisspiritualityHeideggerwonderawemysterysacredphenomenologyJohn Vervaeke
