Ep. 35 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred

Vervaeke explores sacredness as a tension between awe and horror, linking it to relevance realization, metaphor, and symbols as participatory tools for transformation.

Key Takeaways

Sacredness involves a dialectic of awe and horror that expands and humbles us.
Symbols are participatory and bidirectional, unlike one-way metaphorical projection.
Engaging symbols seriously can cultivate virtues such as justice through embodied skill-building.
Symbols can both integrate worldviews and transgress them, depending on how they are engaged.
Relevance realization is the underlying mechanism connecting sacredness, symbols, and self-transcendence.

What the video covers

Sacredness is framed via Geertz (homing vs. horror) and Otto (the numinous, awe mixed with humility and limitation).
Awe and horror are presented as opposing aspects of sacredness, mapped onto meta-assimilation and meta-accommodation within relevance realization.
A symbol is distinguished from a mere sign: it exemplifies and participates rather than only referring.
Metaphors are described as pervasive and functional in cognition, drawing on Lakoff and Johnson.
Vervaeke critiques purely bottom-up projection theories and proposes exaptation and activation as bidirectional processes.
The cerebellum's role in cross-modal coordination and contingency detection is used to explain how symbols engage embodied cognition.
Examples such as the Booba/Kiki experiment illustrate how people spontaneously bridge sensory modalities.
Symbols can transform the perceiver, enabling participation in qualities like justice by literally cultivating the relevant skills.
Symbols can also be transgressive, triggering trance and reframing worldviews, both transformative and potentially entrapping, as with the Gnostics.
Sacredness is ultimately tied to relevance realization as a self-organizing, self-correcting, self-transcending process.

Chapters

How does Vervaeke distinguish a symbol from a sign?

Vervaeke argues that a sign merely refers to something, whereas a symbol exemplifies and participates in what it represents. This participatory aspect is central to how symbols engage our cognition and agency.

What role does the cerebellum play in the symbolic process described?

Vervaeke draws on recent neuroscience showing the cerebellum detects complex contingencies across brain areas, not just balance. By activating this machinery through a symbol, we can cultivate skills like justice through embodied practice.

Why can symbols be both transformative and entrapping?

Symbols can reach into and reframe our worldview, which may open us to integration and growth or trap us within a limiting framework. Vervaeke links this duality to the Gnostics and to the transgressive, trance-inducing power of symbols.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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[Music] welcome back to awakening from the meeting crisis last time we were continuing our exploration of sacredness and I talked about that in contrast but also in concert with geertz's notion of sacredness as homing against homing us against horror we have the proposal from

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Otto that sacredness puts us into contact with the numinous which basically exposes us to what is horrifying at least the limits of us because it has an aspect of awe with a little bit more which is right to remind us humiliation

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in the original sense of the word to to keep us to give us humility to remember that as we are feeling that sense of expansiveness with awe that we are precisely ultimately limited creatures and so I propose to you that these two

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opponent aspects of sacredness can be seen very readily within the light of the machinery of relevance realization where the right the worldview attunement is a form of meta meaning and therefore meta assimilation ultimately compression integration right things fitting

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together we get an opposite which is the meta accommodation afforded by confronting the numinous in awe and potentially horror and we talked about how horror is about exactly the demand the confrontation with that which demands from us unanswerable on

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achievable accommodation so I propose to you that what sacredness is is to play with seriously play with the machinery of relevance realization as found within the primordial aspects of religio and that doing this would be deeply advantageous to us because it is

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so foundational to our agency to the world as an arena for our action to our capacities for self transcendence and so forth but caught up with that when I invoked music as an example of this right was the idea that we often do this

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serious play by engaging in symbolic behavior and so I'm putting the symbol here as something that has the capacity to write and function both ways it can bring us into Metta accommodation but of course it can also bring Metta

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assimilation it can bridge between these two and it can go in both directions and so we're starting to unpack what the symbol is and then I propose to you to first of all emphasize its distinction from a mere sign a symbol doesn't just

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refer a symbol exemplifies it has a participatory aspect to it right from the beginning and as I've already mentioned that's going to be central to what we're what we're talking about here because these are at the level right of

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our ultimately our participation in the agent arena trans Jen relevance realization processes so suggested to you that at the core of a metaphor a symbol is a metaphor already we know that this has to be participatory we'll come back to that

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and I pointed out that the metaphors we're talking about here are profound in the sense that they are pervasive in our cognition and they right are highly functional and pointed to here to the work of lay coffin Johnson and their

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idea about their work yeah right in metaphors we live by and a whole bunch of other books that about how much our cognition is metaphorical I then said there's some issues here and this goes to some critiques made by Verve icky and

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Kennedy and Kennedy and Verve a key basically saying that they have this sort of purely bottom-up notion that the the physical sensory motor domain is just projected up into the conceptual I suggested that it's more complex than that

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and we took a look at that and I suggested to you that instead of just the machinery of projection which tends to be this one way that we should think of the participatory relation as reflecting our capacity to play with

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exaptation we can we can go sort of both ways with our executive machinery and I try to bring all these ideas together the notion of participatory no Sh knowing the notion of exaptation with this idea that what a symbol is it's a

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it's a metaphor that allows me to hold something in mind that I normally can't hold in mind so that I can activate the machinery the machinery that was at work in AK septation and I can and since reverse go back through it I can

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have a symbol of a scale and right now I could just stay there and think that well what I can do is I can actually try to participate right prospectively I can engage with actually balancing and then what I can do is reverse that process to

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some degree by which right my capacity for balance has been exacted via right and some executive processing on my cerebellum so that I actually use it to find complex contingency relationships between any areas of my brain so what's

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been happening in fact in neuroscience over the last 10 and 15 years is this revolution of our understanding of the cerebellum we used to think the cerebellum was primarily about balance and now we know that the cerebellum has

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all these terrific cognitive functions because what it does is it basically here's two areas of the brain that are often correlated together the cerebellum picks up on trying to improve smooth out find the patterns of contingency and dependency between them and so what I

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can do is I can activate if you'll allow me this way of talking my cerebellum and that machinery is which is precisely the machinery I need to practice the skill of being more just I need the ability to

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coordinate to find to sense complex contingencies between multiple variables and make that better and the cerebellum is exactly the machinery I want to write and I want to activate I'm using activation sort of as like the reverse of exaptation I want to activate it

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because that will actually allow me to participate in the processing that will allow me to cultivate the skills that will make me just that will then ultimately ground my conception of justice so this holding in mind activating process right allows me to deeply

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participate in justice because I'm literally becoming more just the symbol is affording me by making use of the excitation machinery which is to see that this is bi-directional in a way in which the projection isn't right the symbol is doing that for me in a

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powerful way and you're saying well how's this is so really come on okay you are much more symbolic in a participatory fashion than you might think okay look at these quickly without thinking which one is booba and which

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one is Kiki which one is boo-boo which one is Kiki overwhelmingly and I mean because this experiment has been done by Rama Chandra and others this is booba and this is Kiki I do this all the time of my class what's going on there

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why is this booba and it's you've never heard these words before they don't mean anything for it to you and people will say things like well this is sharp and spiky and so is this and I say to them

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what do you mean how is this sharp I can't cut myself on it and how is this sharp and spiky and they're doing all this bridging and this cerebellar coordination between different sense modalities and different ways of acting

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and you're doing it like that there it is now this is playful all right I'm just activating it to no purpose but of course I can activate this machinery to a purpose that's what I'm doing when I'm holding up the scales but you have to

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participate in it you have to live with this symbol you have to internalize it it's almost like you have to savor it the one of the one of the things we need to pay more attention to I would argue

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is the work of Jonathan pazzo I mean his work on the symbolic world is largely about trying to get us to remember the symbolic aspects of our existence and I mean this in a deeply respect to for way and I hope Jonathan

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takes it that way to get us to savor the symbolic and how deeply functional and active it is in us all right so symbols are participatory in this fashion that I've tried to explain to you and then because of that symbols have a capacity

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to put us into this relationship with something so here's justice here's the symbol here's me right and as I try to do art we've got the symbol and what it's doing is it's actually transforming me in a powerful way it is

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reactivating reconfiguring my machinery so that I become capable of interacting with the world so that I now start to be able to see through the symbol here's the original remember like how you're looking through the pig at Sam I'm

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looking through which means beyond and by means of the symbol right I get to see more and realize and make more justice so I'm becoming and activating the machinery of balance that's allowing me the perspective of awareness the

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sensitizing me to the contingent relationships we variables it's actually helping me to cultivate the skills of justice right and of course as I start to get better contact with this this is disclosing itself in a new way and it

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discloses himself more through the processing I'm doing and so what starts to happen right is this interesting thing that's going on so let me try and give you an another example of this and let's use something at the

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other end something that's not so conceptual at least in one sense so I'm meditating and I'm following my breath in meditation breathing in and out following my breath some of you have seen perhaps the videos I've given on

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the instruction on how to how to practice the past not now what's happening is normally I am focusing on my breath right and that act of focusing and following my breath is helping me to scale down and we've talked about that

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scale down my attention and for a long time it can stay that way but what can happen is I can become sensitized by scaling down because you increase your sensitivity to how much in process my mind is so I'm not only thinking of my

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mind that they think I might even think of a that my mind is a container that contains things like here's my mind and in it is an experience of pain for example but when I practice watching my breath I start to realize that that's

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that's I start to realize but that's not actually how my mind is unfolding my mind really isn't like I think a container in that sense it's much more like my mind is is a very fine-grained process and even something like pain

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isn't a thing there's painting and it's it's multiple when I'm watching my pain for example I've got a pain in my leg while I'm meditating there's all these different layers there's all these things unfolding and happening in a complex

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fashion it really isn't a noun is much more like a verb and it's really not something I possess it's really much more something I participate in and so do you see what what I'm saying the the the breath starts to become a

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participatory symbol of the impermanence of things how much they are interconnected and flowing that can then of course have an impact on my sense of myself that maybe I'm much more impermanent and interconnected and so the breath can become in that

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sense symbolic for me I can start to see into impermanence and then I could start to see into I see I look through the breath into impermanence in interconnectedness and I start to look back and so of course what's happening

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now you can also train this deliberately is in addition to scaling down I might suddenly find myself scaling up and seeing how all of reality including myself is impermanent and interconnected so notice what the symbol is doing for

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you here right and here I want to go back to Michael Polanyi again let's take another symbol here's the Patriot looking at the flag right it's Canadian flag perhaps well this the Canadians have a weird attitude towards their patriot let's make an American

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flag because that's that's more prototypical there's an American flag okay it has to do with America was born out of a revolution where what we sort of were birthed from from Great Britain and a much more familial relationship

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there's nothing that's just there's nothing deep there I'm just pointing out why I shifted my example so Plan E says when you're looking at a flag of course you're always doing that thing he talked about all their subsidiary awareness is

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being right integrated together into your focal awareness now normally what I'm intrinsic I'm doing all of this because what I'm interested in is what I'm focally aware of I'm interested so when I'm when I'm normal when I when I

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want when I want to drink I'm doing all of this subsidiary integration into my focal awareness of the bottle because what I'm actually interested in is the bottle I need to get the bottle into Drake right but sometimes and again

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notice my language we play with this we look at the flag not because we're actually intrinsically interested in using the flag in some fashion we're using the flag symbolically right I'm looking at the flag because by looking at the flag I'm actually integrating

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different aspects of myself together so although I'm doing this process normally what I'm inherently interested in is the focal object but sometimes when I'm acting symbolically when I'm act although I'm focusing their attention on this like focusing my attention on the

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breath what I'm actually interested in is playing with the process so by contemplating the flag right the patriot is bringing up all kinds of emotions and associations and other things and think about the cerebellar activity here right and integrating them together by looking

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through all of these and think about a metaphor looking through by looking through all of these things like I'm looking through all of these different subsidiary things onto the flag and by doing that I'm actually integrating all of these aspects of myself together and

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I'm becoming more patriotic I'm actually participating in patriotism now that's powerful right now put that together with what I just did I'm looking at my breath and I'm doing all this and the point about all of this is

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to write so let's change this now this is my breath I'm looking at my breath but the point is to get all up to integrate all of my processing together but what can happen right and that's one way in my twin

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which my breath is symbolic so one way in which my breath is symbolic is it gives me a focal thing that I'm aware of I can activate all of this stuff and I can you know integrate myself on to the

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thing I'm becoming somebody else but as I just said a few minutes ago but the thing is the breath can also suddenly disclose reality to me the breath can also reveal an aspect of reality okay let's try and put this together right

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it'll very carefully here at one stage I'm doing this and what I'm acting what I'm interested in is this this is my inherent interest although my vocal awareness is here I'm focusing for Tracy because I'm trying to write via a

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metaphorical process by looking through all of these subsidiary elements and right I'm actually integrating them together I'm not actually trying to get an insight like I normally do in metaphor but what can happen is right I can actually get an insight this can't

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suddenly reveal aspects of the world to me the impermanence and interconnectedness and now I'm actually interested in my breath because my breath is a symbol in another sense my breath is a symbol in that it allows me to see into the impermanence in

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interconnectedness of reality notice I could what can happen is I can resonate between these okay let's do it I'm looking at my breath I become more integrated and precisely because I'm much more integrated my processing becomes more powerful and then suddenly what happens

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is I see something in my breath I get a realization the world is disclosed to me and that opens me up in powerful ways and then now now like when I refocus on the breath again now I'm reintegrating

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all of that but then what can happen of course is right now as I reintegrate and recored innate again I can more deeply see into what the reality of that my breath is disclosing to me and I move

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more deeply do you see what I'm saying you get this symbolic resonance that's going on as I see more deeply into the object it draws me in and then that affords much more powerful integration but the much more powerful integration

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actually coordinates my cognition much more so I can see more deeply into the reality if I'm relating to it symbolically cymbals are in this sense capable of affording and a GOG a they are capable of giving you this capacity whereby I

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get inner optimization and then I see more deeply into the thing and then by seeing more deeply into the thing I get more inner optimization and the whole process flows and agog eclis so I'm looking at the balance and then I

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activate all of this machinery and then I looked through it out the symbol and I'm looking through it at justice and coordinating all the things right but then I start to see aspects in the balance that I hadn't seen before

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precisely because of how sensitized I am to this symbol I thought I start to see how right it's actually never completely stable if you look at the pictures the scales are often always off balance is something right very much a process not

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a thing and then that causes me to activate different aspects of myself this is like you remember when the mother-in-law has the bi-directional insight the sensibility transcendence not only seeing her daughter-in-law differently but seeing her own seeing differently that trans framing

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so cymbals have the capacity to do this let's return back to something that I think is purely symbolic in the sense that I mean which is music right so you're listening to the music right but it's not like

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when you're listening to a sound and you're trying to make out what's what's causing that sound is that an is it a tiger was it a noise in the book you're listening to the music and although you're focusing on it right there you're

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not trying to get behind it you're focusing on it because the way in which you're being integrated it together by right onto the music is crucial but then what happens of course is that aspects of the music are disclosed to you and

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you realize things you see things that you haven't seen before and that changes and alters how you can then understand and listen to the music and so you get drawn in in a very powerful way now let's put this together with all of

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this machinery together with another aspect of the symbol that I've already hinted at right which is of course the way in which symbols are putting you into confrontation with what is potentially mysterious so here's your frame right and here is a frame you

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aspire to more comprehensive one now you need something that can reach you inside this frame but it can't be totally captured by this frame because if it's captured by this frame you'll stay in this frame it has to insinuate itself

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into this but change stuff such that you are capable it actually drives you to expanding your frame so it has to both activate you but draw you beyond yourself to to a state of trijet like I'm trying not to use some technical

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terms here what a symbol has to do right is it has to reach into your worldview but remember what the Gnostics were talking about here remember how your existentially entrapped you want to be in another world view you want to find

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that worldview viable you need something that come they can come into this world view but won't won't be stable within it it has to be trendy right it has to be transgressive it has to shake things up and and then right put you into all of

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this machinery all of this machinery that we've been talking about but in a way that is making you move to move to and become capable of dwelling within that more expansive worldview in this sense symbols are deeply ecstatic

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we get our word ecstasy from this but what this literally means is a symbol helps you to stand beyond yourself so even let's go back to the example right that I'm trying to use as many examples as possible I've got the scales I'm

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activating balance that allows me to start doing the skills that gets me some sense of justice I start to see I start to be able to see justice and realize justice in the world that I couldn't before because of my sensibility change

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my skill acquisition my sensibility transcendence and that starts to make me more just and and then what's happening is I'm my world is being opened up and I've be in a coordinated fashion I being transformed to fit that expanding world

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is of course why symbols often are associated with Wonder and awe etc so symbols are ecstatic in that fashion as I've tried to show you throughout this they're participatory and I try to show you how they're integrative not just in

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a simple part whole but in the antig accents sensibility transcendence there they're integrating you together integrated right they're whole language slows you down so much I they're integrating you together they're integrating a new world together and they're integrating that new world

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together as they're integrating you together in an integrated fashion so when a Christian sees the cross of course first of all the cross is right it's tapping into that exemptive machinery it's taking all this perceptual machinery and it's playing

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with it the vertical and the horizontal that's being exerted and all of that machinery that we normally look through is being exact and it's being used and then we're looking into there and if we are receptive and of course the question

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is why some people are why some people aren't right but if we're receptive then that interact chené starts to affect us we start to become a different kind of person as we're integrated in our attention on the cross but that of course starts to also

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disclose to us aspects of reality that we normally might not be able to hold in mind like suffering like the relationship between eternity and time and and those go from being ideas to things that we are confronting engaging

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with and they can draw us in which then of course integrates me more powerfully while disclosing a world and if I if I'm willing to play the serious play with the symbol I will start to be transformed in a coupled fashion to my

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world such that perhaps Christianity becomes viable for me for example this is how symbols work so they're integrated in the an agogic sense this is of course what if you remember why people do things like Jeep form finally

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symbols are complex and we have to remember I'm using the scales to stand for for justice but justice isn't a single thing and even when I talk about the breath and it's relating is showing me impermanence and interconnectedness those aren't single

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static things there are complex unfolding realities so symbols often are multifaceted you'll get Athena she's the symbol of wisdom but she's also the symbol of you know weaving she's the symbol of warfare all these different areas are actually being drawn together

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because the symbol is also the potential for radically reconfiguring reconfiguring the shape of your salience landscape connecting things that you normally do not connect together such that you might have an insight into reality notice how the symbol is trying

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to do all of this because trying to set you in motion it's trying to get you to do this and in that sense if you'll forgive the little bit of playfulness it's epic it's trying to draw you into something epic

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it's trying to afford a way in which you can radically open up your world in met accommodation triggering it participating in it confronting it but also trigger your best machinery for being able to draw it in to relate it to

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right who and what you are so that you can become capable of dwelling within that expanded world so meta accommodation and meta assimilation are both at work within the symbol so symbols are inherently Transjakarta two worlds the world you're in the

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framing you're in and the world you're trying to move to the world do you aspire to they are transgressive in all the ways I've tried to suggest to you they try to trigger trance framing their transformative now how does all of that machinery

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relate to sacredness well I've already shown you how it can be bound up with awe and horror and wonder but let's try let's make this a little bit more precise I'm going to propose something to you I'm going to propose that we can

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use this term as I have been throughout this series differently we don't mean I'm gonna use myth us rather than myth to keep that distinction by mythos I mean I mean something that's always deeply connected to ritual where ritual

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and I've already argued this doesn't mean some neurotic routine that I engage in ritual means inactive analogy inactive and agar gay it means the processes by which I try to activate the machinery of transformation okay so what I'm saying mythos don't just hear

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patterns of representation here patterns of interaction these are deeply enmeshed together and then what we have of course are symbols and the way that I'm describing right and these symbols right are always going to be a messed with

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story because you have to bring in the perspective all participatory knowing and we've talked a bunch about how important narrative is for participatory and prospective lenore-- and of course the story connects to the ritual because of its storied you can enact it okay so

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this is what I mean by mythos this is what I mean by mythos when we have a mythos that is about religio such that we can activate religio and seriously play with it in order to enhance it enhance its

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capacities for met assimilation met accommodation that sacredness that sacredness of course we can in vote we can make use of mythos right for other things we could write for other patterns that we care about we can of course our religio

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is always at work just in our day-to-day interactions with the world but when we want to activate accentuate articulate religio itself we rely on mythos to do that because our relationship to religio is one that can only be born symbolically because of the

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primordial participatory nature of religion now here's something else of course at the core of religio as I've argued as relevance realization and one of the things we know because of the phenomena of insight and the phenomena of flow is one of the things that

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relevance realization is intrinsically interested in is itself relevance realization because it is a self-organizing self-transcending self-correcting process member and insight you are correcting for a misleading salience pattern given an incorrect problem formulation relevance realization is intrinsically set up to

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be interested in itself it is it this is part of its structural design if your relevance realization machinery is not right directed toward to be interested in itself it's ultimately not a self-organizing self-correcting self developing process which would mean it

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would cease to be relevance realization it is constitutively necessary of relevance realization that it finds itself inherently interesting so we can find the process okay so this is just deeply valuable to us because it's constitutive of our being or being

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in the world right we can use this mythos to activate articulate accentuate celebrate religio and of course we find that a deeply interesting thing to do because we relevance realization is set up by its evolutionary heritage to be

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intrinsically interested in itself and so we're gonna find all of this deeply valuable deeply meaningful this is the machinery of meaning making and then we're using myth offs to celebrate it and trigger the fact that relevance realization is constituted to finding

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itself interesting so what we have is I think a way of talking about a lot of the aspects of sacredness we get the experience of sacredness out of the deep machinery of religio and when we're using the centrally important machinery of mythos

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to activate it accentuate it articulated celebrate it and that in itself is developmentally important to us but serious play is the way in which we go through development but we also find that process intrinsically interesting like an insight or the flow State

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precisely because relevance realization is constituted to reflectively be interested in itself as a process now the question is yes okay maybe all of that right maybe what I'm doing in sacredness is using mythos in order to like to celebrate and appreciate and

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accentuate religio and I and I'm gonna find that valuable because religio is inherently valuable to me and relevance realization is inherently interested in itself I get all of that and I get why this can be so deeply transformative of

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people and why it can like open up their world and open up themselves in this way that feels like making love with reality but still still you're not getting the essence of sacredness because the essence of sacredness is in the sacred

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and the sacred Rite takes us back to the metaphysical proposal the metaphysical proposal is the proposal that what ultimately generates the experience of sacredness is something that is right a final hmm that might that might be misleading something that has an

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absolute that's what I want value because it has a particular metaphysical status namely it is super natural it is above nature and it's above this means that it is always inherently valuable to us and therefore we will find it

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sacred because of its absolute value now this carries with it a particular way of understanding the process of meaning making its to claim that ultimately I think that's what people are claiming that this there are things maybe that's

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the wrong word but I don't we languages really well use this word as neutral is like it there are things that are always of relevance to us what I'm suggesting to you is that this is the claim that

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there is an essence to relevance that there is a final formula for being relevant and that that essence in here's in some particular thing object and so if I come into the relationship with that object the relevance the essence of

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relevance is in hearing in it and I will therefore find that object sacred i I'm trying to be respectful here but I think this is ultimately a mistake the reason why I think it's a mistake is because there is no essence to relevance

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there isn't there isn't even a thing there is only the ongoing process of relevance realization there is nothing other than itself that is intrinsically interesting to relevance realization and the relevance realization isn't even absolutely interesting to relevance realization because of course your

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salience machinery can actually lead you to kill yourself you may even find your own existence is no longer relevant or salient to you so again to say its intrinsic even that is not to say that it's absolute the notion of sacredness

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here seems to me to be a category mistake it seems to me to be saying that there is some thing someone someplace that essentially absolutely always is relevant but that is to misunderstand the nature of relevance it's to confuse

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the products of relevance realization with the process of relevance realization and that of course is a hallmark of one of the ways in which we make mistakes we get fixated on the products of our cognition and not paying

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attention to the process let's go back to the Gnostics remember that one of the things that they're contemporary apostolic Christians criticized them for is that they were constantly indenting new myths in this sense of mythos because they saw

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the relationship to sacredness as an evolving one a deeply transgressive one the one that was supposed to always be launching you into a trajectory of trans framing might this suggest another way of understanding sacredness that I think would be respectful to a lot of the

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texts considered sacred without committing us to or needing the supernatural as a category or maybe it's gonna mean an ultimate not that's oh wow that's so arrogant sorry that's not what I want to say maybe it means a significant yes

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transformation of what we've ever meant by this term supernatural I don't know there's an inexhaustible Ness in this whole process there's a sense in which reality can continue to disclose itself to me it's inexhaustible that's ultimately I think because of the

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reality that reality is itself combinatorially explosive there's an inexhaustible nough stew the process a relevance realization not in the sense that I'm infinite that's ridiculous but in the sense that the process is constantly evolving it is constituted by

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its evolution it is not something other than its evolution what if sacredness is not about finding the completion the Ella the essence the stabilized final form what if sacredness is actually an experience of the inexhaustible nosov reality and the inexhaustible nosov the

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relevance realization machinery in within it's coupled response to that reality what does that look like more concretely let me give you an example of where you could see these two concretely distinguishing from each other for me Plato is sacred that doesn't mean that I

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think Plato has some absolute or supernatural value that he has an unquestionable Authority Plato is or that my understanding of play dough should be stabilized or finished or complete right instead what happens is exactly the opposite I read some Plato

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and I understand some Plato I get some insight and that has an impact on me and that does all of this to me and then I go out in the world and that understanding in a perspectival and participatory way transforms me and I

Speaker A

engage and I become and the world discloses in a certain way and after that process I return to Plato and then I can see and Plato what I did not see before I can realize things I did not see

Speaker A

before and those realizations reach deeply into me again and then then again there's an engagement there's that transformation and then I go out in the world you see I'm doing the a Nagoya King right I go out in the world and the

Speaker A

world is disclosed to me in ways I hadn't seen before and then I go through transformation I become something different the world becomes different at the level of Co identification agent and arena are being opened up and then I go

Speaker A

back and when I replay oh I see something again that I didn't see before and that has happened to me throughout my life there isn't some final form there I'm meaning this very carefully this this is a mcnaught stick not in the

Speaker A

sense of the two world mythology or something like that there's Nasus Here I am constantly right finding Plato to be found an inexhaustible fount of insight transformation an inexhaustible source of trance framing of my world and who and who I am if it's ongoing that's

Speaker A

filled with a kind of developmental wonder for me I don't think Plato is supernatural I don't think Plato is absolute I don't think Plato has the final account I don't think Plato can give me a final definition of what is relevant

Speaker A

but nevertheless again and again and again I get into symbolic resonance with the text I see through it and then the world reaches back through it to me I mean even Nietzsche has this right if you stare long enough into the abyss it

Speaker A

begins to stare back through you he has a kind of sacredness around that but it's of course open-ended deeply symbolic read also sprach zarathustra but as I said I think it's bound up with a problematic grammar of simply

Speaker A

inverting Christianity I don't want to invert Christianity that's not what I'm proposing to you at all I'm trying to suggest to you that the idea I proposed to you about what sacredness is can be connected to an alternative proposal of

Speaker A

what the sacred is the sacred is the trans jected relationship between the combinatorially explosive nature of reality the reality is ultimately a no thingness that ultimately it is not a thing that you can frame reality will always transcend your framing that's

Speaker A

what combinatorial explosion says and this is right linked to the no thickness of yourself the eye that can never be captured the framing that can never be captured in the frame the ongoing never-ending not in you particularly but

Speaker A

as a process right it doesn't come to a completion is what I meant by never-ending process of relevance realization there's a deep non-logical identity a deep symbolic resonance between these two I think it's what a lot of the Mystics we're talking about

Speaker A

this is a deep participatory identification the inexhaustible nosov reality and the inexhaustible nests of relevance realization are deeply deeply coupled at the primordial levels of religio this is the sacred as this the inexhaustible that powers the experience of sacredness in a deeply profoundly

Speaker A

participatory fashion thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you

Topics:sacrednessrelevance realizationsymbolmetaphorawenuminousexaptationcerebellumGnosticismmeaning crisis

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