Know Thyself - E122 - John Vervaeke: Humanity’s Meaning Crisis: What Ancient Wisdom & Modern Psychology Reveal

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

John Vervaeke delves into the concept of the meaning crisis facing our planet and explores how we can cultivate lives filled with purpose and wisdom. He shares his personal journey through a meaning crisis and reflects on how Socratic wisdom has shaped his understanding. As he examines the broader implications of our current societal struggles, John highlights the main contributors to this, drawing parallels between modern times and historic civilizations and examining  four essential aspects that define meaning in our lives. He addresses the impacts of scarcity mentality, technology, and loneliness, while offering insights into the contemplation of death and the fear of the unknown. The conversation also touches on the four types of knowing, the existential significance of love, and the process of relevance realization, which frames our perception of reality. Ultimately, he presents a vision for humanity's future in the aftermath of the meaning crisis, contemplating the inevitability of suffering and drawing wisdom from great philosophers throughout history.André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro 1:57 John's Personal Meaning Crisis 14:55 How Socrates' Wisdom Opened His Eyes 21:53 What Our Culture Gets Wrong About Love27:29 4 Aspects that Define Meaning In Our Lives36:15 Our Planet’s Meaning Crisis45:50 The Main Contributors to this Crisis56:08 Relating Modern Times to Historic Civilizations1:02:59 Scarcity Mentality, Technology, and Loneliness1:07:21 Contemplation on Death and Meaning1:16:14 Our Fear of the Unknown & How It Fuels Our Beliefs 1:20:20 The 4 Types of Knowing: Go From Intellect to Embodied Wisdom1:34:18 Love as an Existential Stance1:38:35 Relevance Realization & Framing How We See Reality1:50:27 Intuition & How Psychics Use Implicit Learning2:01:21 Increasing Cognitive Agency2:08:25 What Makes Something Profound?2:13:42 IQ as a Predictor for Success in Life2:17:18 Defining Enlightenment & Flowstate2:35:50 Vision for Humanity's Future, Post Meaning Crisis2:44:55 Is Suffering Inevitable on Our Planet?2:52:10 Wisdom from the Great Philosophers2:55:22 Rapid Fire Questions2:58:43 Conclusion___________John Vervaeke, Ph.D. is an award-winning professor at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology.He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, flow, metaphor, and wisdom. He is the first author of the book Zombies in Western Culture: A 21st Century crisis which integrates Psychology and Cognitive Science to address the meaning crisis in Western society. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.Book: https://amzn.to/3UdpgoxWebsite: https://johnvervaeke.comThe Philosophical Silk Road: https://johnvervaeke.com/series/the-philosophical-silk-road/___________Know ThyselfInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/Website: https://www.knowthyself.oneClips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKgInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

We are so prone to dynamics of self-deception, much of which we are ignorant. Around the world, places of significant affluence, you have an increase in suicide, and then you have a significant optic in anxiety and depression, the loneliness epidemic, the addiction crises. How can you make sense of all of this? The golden threads that runs through all of this is hunger for meaning in life. Mattering is the sense of being connected to something bigger than yourself. So these are the three questions that ask yourself to see. be our matter. We want it to be real. We want the really real. When people have mystical experiences,

transformative experiences, and they encounter the really real. They will change their lives. They will change their relationship just because it is really real. That opportunity to break free is intoxicated. When we truly open up, we find that reality is already ahead of us, opening up to us. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Know They Self podcast. I'm honored to be sitting down with somebody who is a professor of psychology and cognitive science with a focus on reasoning, thinking, and cognitive development. He also focuses on the development and psychology of wisdom and growing intelligence. He's also an expert and Buddhist psychology and philosophy, and so he's really able to articulate bridge our modern understanding of the mind with ancient wisdom. John Verbeki,

thank you for being here. Andre, it's a great pleasure to be here. Yeah. I'm looking forward to opening up the wide umbrella that is the meaning crisis, so where we find herself. But I would like to first, if you're open to sharing with your own personal meaning crisis, because I know that really drove you to understanding it better and supporting so many people with their own. You grew up and were really raised in kind of a Christian fundamentalist time. And what was the transition out of that like? Can you please walk us through your own personal meaning crisis. Yeah. So as you said, I was brought up in a very stringent, strict fundamentalist Christianity, not just my immediate family, my extended family on my mother's side. Didn't see much

of my father's side of a family. And it was very, it was very psychologically fraught because my father was largely an absent person, even when he was physically present, he was a very challenging figure for me growing up, and I only now know looking back. Both my parents are dead, and so I've been going through quite a process of reexamining my relationship with them. But now that I have the requisite expertise, I would say it's quite probable when my dad was autistic, and I didn't know it, of course, when I was a kid. And so I couldn't get why he couldn't pick up on my mental states and why he was sort of radically oriented the way he was.

But that meant he was in many ways absent. And so my mother was the dominant figure in my life. And something that I only found out about her that has caused me, I think I could say, I've come to forgive her, and it's been kind of a difficult journey. I found this out only much, much later. But when she was 15, her family forced her to marry

because basically it was kind of like prostitution. They forced her to marriage so that there was a source of income for the family. And as you can imagine, someone that young being forced into a marriage, She ended up having an affair. And the person she had an affair with was my father. And so I am literally a bastard. And my birth caused the breakup of two marriages. And my mom was, of course, immediately the black sheep of the family for committing the sin of adultery.

And so she, instead of giving up on the, the Christianity and pulling away from it, she wanted back in. And so she doubled down and became stricter and more puritanical than anybody else. I didn't know all of this. I just grew up with my mom being that way and sensing a deep ambivalence she had towards me because, as you can imagine, when she's looking at me, she's seeing her greatest sin that destroyed so much. Yet, Andre, you'll have to forgive me. This will sound a little self-promotional. I don't mean it to be.

But she saw something in me. She once told me, she said, John, you were born with an old soul. And I named you John because you're a gift. Because she saw that I was unlike all the other people in my family. And I'm the only one to go on to university and et cetera. And so I think she saw in that some sort of redemption. And so she was always torn. And so she wanted to promote that side of me, but she really also tried to suppress the, well, to put it in a sentence, my sexuality, because that had been the source of her sin.

So I grew up in, I know, it sounds like a Freudian novel, right? I grew up in this very, very fraught, like very, very psychologically fraught, deep ambivalence, weird communication patterns with my father and my mother, right? They were not physically abusive or anything like that, right? And all of that was enmeshed with this very, very oppressive God that was given in a fundamentalist Christianity. Very, very terrifying. I remember once I came home, my mom. was always at home.

And I came home when I was around 10 years of age. And there was no one there. And I thought the rapture had occurred. And I was obviously too much of a sinner to be taken into heaven. And I'd been left behind and the Antichrist and the Dominioners were coming. I was, well, you can imagine for a 10-year-old, it was absolutely terrifying. I think that's the single most terrifying moment in my life. I've been in a hospital emergency room, Andre.

I had an infection in my chest in the doctors didn't know what it was. And I was looking up from my bed and I realized, Oh, crap, they think I'm going to die. And that was scary. That wasn't as scary as that moment back then. And other moments, I remember I was reading in the Bible and I read about the unforgivable sin, and I was worried that I had somehow committed it

because what is it and how have I done it now? And I got, and I was just, I fell into, like, just profound anxiety. My mother could tell I was distressed, and she took me to talk to the pastor of the church. I was around 12. And he said even to a 12-year-old's ears, absolutely useless platitudinous stuff that did not help at all. And so I, as soon as I could, you know,

teenager, already teenager rebellion, I broke away from that as, and I became as anti-as-as-I possibly could, sort of an anti-religious, you know, aggressive atheist, anti-Christian, through and through. But the thing was when you've

like your religion is like your mother tongue, right? It goes deep. And I often say it left a taste for the transcendent in my mouth. And I had this model of Jesus as a profound sage figure.

And so I was hungry. I was experiencing that lack of a field of transcendence, a sage role model that I could aspire to that was lacking for me. And so I fell into a kind of profound nihilism. And I became almost Nietzschean and irregular about this. And I would sort of pronounce things. And I became sort of, this is really hard to talk about.

I became sort of strangely popular in high school because I had this weird status of people kids are at that age they're really fascinated by people who are willing to question things in a profound way and so that was also very inflationary and that was very problematic so I was getting into the

very dark place and went to university and I decided to take a philosophy course because I was sort of interested vaguely in philosophical things and read the Republic by play

and met the figure of Socrates. And that resonated with me profoundly. And I realized that's who I want to be like. I started diving deeply into Plato. I'd already started meditating because I was already interested in the aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism at that time. I'd have to do it at night.

We were very poor. I lived in a small bedroom with my sister on a bunk beds and I have to wait until it was dark, and I would meditate at the top. But around the same time, I had my very first mystical experience, and it was an experience of the platonic forms. And so I became an ardent follower of Socrates and a devoted student of the works of Plato. But then what happened for me is I wanted to follow that way of life.

And academic philosophy is not the place to do that. I appreciate the education. I got a PhD in four. philosophy. I appreciate all the tremendous skills that academic philosophy gave me. But academic philosophy today, even today, although it's getting better, especially at my time, was not a place where you go to cultivate wisdom. And so I, there was a literally down the road. For me, there was a Tai Chi and meditation center. So I went there. I'd already been interested in Eastern philosophy. And they taught what I would now call it.

and ecology of practices. They taught me Tai Chi Chuan. They taught me Vapasana meditation and meta-contemplation, and I was just, I was opened up. And I knew there was some connection between the Socratic platonic and this, but I had no way of making connection to it. I'd done my MA by then, and I got very frustrated, disillusioned with academic philosophy.

I dropped out for a couple years while I was doing the Tai Chi Chuan and everything. And then I heard about this new discipline, cognitive science. And I realized that cognitive science was the best modern analog to ancient philosophy. So I went back and I got a BSC in honors, a specialist BSC in cognitive science and started to get introduced to 40 cognitive science. I met Evan Thompson, friend and colleague at one time. Well, he's still my friend, but he wasn't my colleague at University of Toronto. Then I went back and did my PhD in philosophy but on cognitive science. And in cognitive science, especially 40 cognitive science,

they were talking about mindfulness and transformative experience and mystical experience and states of consciousness. And it all started coming together. So Evan was supposed to teach a course called Buddhism and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. His schedule got all mangled up and he couldn't do it. And they said, well, who else could teach that course? And he said, well, John could teach it. So I started teaching that course.

I was already teaching a psychology course on thinking and reasoning, and they asked me to teach another one. I started and I turned it into the psychology of wisdom. And then I took those three courses and started integrating them together and talking more and more about meaning in all those courses, and my students' eyes would light up. And then when I talked about wisdom, their eyes would, and I realized, oh, this is something deeper than just my own personal baggage.

So I started doing this much, much deeper work. And I did that for about 10 years, really diving deep and integrating all that. One of my students came and he said, you know, you got to put this on YouTube. I'm a, I'll donate my time. I'm a professional videographer. My father's a professional editor. We're donate our time. His name is Alan Kian.

And that became awakening from the meaning crisis. And that's how I got into it. Wow. Thank you so much for sharing. Obviously, the difficult parts of your journey to. relive, but it really says to stage so perfectly because there's many things you brought up. We're going to spend the rest of this podcast unpacking. One is we all often at different points in our life go through our own personal meaning crisis.

The religious aspect of things, I feel like, is pretty relatable in modern society where there is this throwing out of the baby Christ and spirituality with the religious Christian bathwater. And like you said, it left the taste of the transcendent in your mouth. I really like that because there is obviously that fulfilling so many needs that no longer get met when you leave it and say all of it doesn't work. And I'm just so fascinated how you discovered Plato and Socrates and these trans personal experiences that you had shortly after. Because that to me is so vital on the path to one's awakening, having an experience beyond. the conventional notion of self. You know, the understanding that like,

it's like reading a menu verse having a meal and we're in a society with so much information, an abundance of information lacking wisdom and these experiences that really taste, like tasting truth and talking about it are two completely different things. And so I'm really looking forward to weaving the golden thread between all those as best as we can.

But I first wanted to go back to what, specifically about Plato and Socrates, what captured you so significantly about the place in which they were coming from in perspective of life? Well, I mean, the great thing about Plato, I'm going to use a metaphor he does, and it's a little bit fraught given our sort of current identity politics and such. So I'm asking for some charity from the audience when they hear, but it's his metaphor. And Plato talks about the fact that people have to be seduced into philosophy. If you just come at them and just sort of present philosophy face on, well, he saw what happened to his mentor. They killed Socrates.

And he realized, I need to do something else. Right. And so what initially often attracts people to Socrates is, you know, I'm a young adult. He was winning every argument. And that sort of really appeals. and, you know, it's very egocentric. But when you get drawn in, and then you realize Socrates's profound humility

and his profound ability to wonder, wonder isn't curiosity. Curiosity is when you lack a piece of knowledge and you go looking for it. Wonder is a profound willingness, and I mean an enacted willingness, to call yourself and your world into question. And then Socrates gets you doing that

because you identify with Socrates and then you start doing that. And I realized that that calling to a humble wonder immediately touched the wound in me. And it took time for me to get this retrospectively in reflection, that it wasn't so much that I needed to have something. I needed to become someone, which is a very different thing. our culture, this is Eric Fromm's critique, our culture often confuses having things with becoming. And so that shift out of that modal confusion,

that realizing, oh, I need to become someone, I should get out of this mode of trying to get and have, but open myself up and be willing to not know, as Socrates said, in order to better know myself, You have it right here. I have a tattooed on my back right here, brother. Is it in English or Latin? No, in English.

I've got some, I've got, like I've got Chinese on my arm. I have ancient Greek on my legs. And also that shift, right? Even there, because you can know themselves. People can hear it from that having orientation about having their autobiography and how wonderful it is and how unique it is. and all that stuff that I think is very, very dangerous, actually. The know-the-self that Socrates is talking about is not your autobiography.

It's your owner's manual. It's like, how do you actually function? How do you actually work? And you are really deeply unaware of how much you pretend to know and how much you self-deceive. And then what you then realize, once you've been sort of taken through that seduction, is you realize how enchained you. you are.

Right? And of course, you get Plato's famous story of the people chained in the cave, and they need to be liberated and work their way out and see the world. And that opportunity to let go and break free and to see the really real is intoxicating. It's intoxicating. I mean, human beings, this is one of Plato's greatest arguments, that in it, addition to whatever we want to satisfy our desires, we want what satisfies our desires to be real. I regularly do this with my students. I'll say, so our society treats romantic relationships

as the surrogate replacement for God, tradition, culture, the cultivation of wisdom, self-transcendence. You find the one, listen to the religious language, you find the one and they will make you whole incomplete and all and no human being can bear that and that's why you know our society's in this weird bind in which people are convinced that the most important way to have meaning in life is a romantic relationship well but if you do regular uh surveys the thing that causes the most suffering in people's lives is romantic relationships and that's because we're we're idolizing romantic relationships i'm in a profound one in it i'm with the love of my life and she's a fantastic woman, but romantic relationships can't bear that burden.

But I'll ask my students, how many of you are in deeply satisfying romantic relationships? And they'll put their hands up. And I say, okay, I'm now only talking to you. Of you guys, you folks, I should say, how many of you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you, even if that would absolutely terminate the relationship? And they almost all put up their hands. And I'll pick somebody. I'll say, why?

Why do you want it to end? this is giving you all and they said well and and you can think of this they're all sort of cynical and social media and they'll say without without hesitation well because it wouldn't be real they want it to be real they want it to be real we want it to be real there's a we want the really real when people yaden when people have mystical experiences transformative experiences and they encounter the really real they we know this research they will change their lives they will change their relationships. They will change their occupation. They will change their habits in order to come into greater contact and conformity with the really real just because it is really real. We have that

profound need to be connected to the really real. And Plato and Socrates opened me up to that and oriented me to it and showed me a way that afforded me aspiring towards it. In relation to relationships, I've heard you say that the relationships, that the relationships shouldn't be the ultimate, but they should be nourished by the ultimate. Exactly. Well said. You said it. Okay. Well said, John. That's a really powerful distinction, though, because I think that we do have this Disneyification

of romantic relationships as so much expectations and weight put on what they're supposed to be for us instead of sharing a horizon and being nourished by the ultimate. So any extra thoughts you have on that before we move forward? Yeah, like I said, I think I want to be careful here because I want to make sure people are hearing me. I'm trying to speak in a way that's helpful, although it may sound a little harsh. Treating another person as that which will give you ultimate meaning is actually, it's selfish of you to do that. and because you're demanding something from them for you that they can't ultimately give. And so that puts them into a deep no-win situation.

And we can often think, but I love the person so much, and it seems like an expression of love to do this. I revere Sarah. I dedicated the book to her, right? she's easily one of the best, if not the best person I've met in my life. I think very, very highly of her. But there's a, there's a dip. Do you know the difference between an idol and an icon?

An idol is something you look at and you want to control it in your grasp. Right? Because you think it is it. or as an icon. Like think of a Catholic person looking at an icon of a saint. They don't think the saint is God, but they think that the saint is like

a stained glass window through which they can have an aperture. They have a lens by which they can better focus and realize God. Sara is that for me. And so that means for me she becomes a way through which I actually

properly carry out the Socratic task of transcending myself. And I reciprocate. I and I want to be a place within myself through which she can transcend herself to what is beyond her and beyond me.

And we reciprocally open. And I just want to share with people that and this is not because I'm some great relationship guru. I have screwed up so many relationships, right? And marriages and like the whole bit. I'm finally with the person I'm going to be with for the rest of my life. This is through long study and lots of failure. But that relationship where you have where the other person is an icon and not an idol

is so humanizing. Look, Plato's great lesson is we need to have the English. word isn't good. It's tension and tension is just negative for us, but the Greek word is tonus, like the tonus of a bow or a liar. It's the tension that makes things possible.

So for Plato, we are the tonos between finitude and transcendence. I get this from Drew Highland. I love it. So we are, we are, we are fallible and finite. But if we just identify with that, we will fall into despair and we

will become survival. and we'll become victims of oppression. Because we are also capable of transcendence. We can make great poetry, great art, we can engage in great philosophy, we can participate in profound living conversations. We can enter into deeply nourishing, loving relationships. We're capable of profound transcendence.

But if we just identify with our transcendence, we will go through inflation and then we'll become tyrannical and want to oppress other people. But if we hold the two together, they will correct each other well. And this is what you do when your beloved is an icon. You constantly are keeping their finitude. They are not God, if you'll let me speak poetically.

But there's a tonus through them to something that is ultimate. And so they shine with something that is beyond them. But that's something that is beyond them isn't trying to eradicate or destroy them. It presents itself by presencing them even. more. So well said. I love that we are the tension. And I feel like I've read in one of the Buddhist texts saying like a blessed life is

something approximating just the right amount of suffering. Yes. The friction in a way that is provided, afforded to us. It gives us through the experiences, people, circumstances in our life, the opportunity to refine and realize hurt your nature. Yeah. In the Buddhist cosmology, you don't want to be born as an animal or a god. Right?

The middle realm. Yeah, and there's a Nietzsche quote, you know, Aristotle, Nietzsche's quoting Aristotle and says, this is Nietzsche, Aristotle says in order to live alone, one has to either be an animal or a god, but one can be both a philosopher. I'm so, I'm lit up by all the directions of which we're going to explore in this conversation, but I do want to set the stage a little bit more with, because relationships are one aspect in which we kind of deify, right? Yeah.

This in search of meaning. And this amazing book that was obviously inspired by your life's work, research study, the amazing YouTube series that you did on the meaning crisis. For people that don't know, what is the meaning crisis? And can you share some stats and some context for just how bad it currently is on the planet right now? Yeah. So my co-author is Christopher Master Pietro, and we wrote it with the amazing help of Madeline Abramian.

And so when people talk about whether or not their lives are meaningful, they're using meaning as a metaphor. It's like the meaning of a sentence. Sentences are meaningful. If I say, it doesn't mean anything to you, right? But if I say there's a cat on the mat, that means something. Now, what goes into that? If we slowly unpack the metaphor, we can get a sense of what people are gesturing to with the metaphor. So think about how all the words cohere together.

They cohere together, right? They make sense together. And what they do is they connect you to the world with the possibility of truth. It could be true that the cat is on the mat. And then you're connected to reality. So there's this coherence, there's connectedness, and the sentence signifies the world to you in a certain way. It makes the world significant to you in a certain way.

Now, if you look at all the work in, and I do, because in the psychology of meaning in life, not the meaning of life. The meaning of life is some metaphysical proposal. We're talking about a cognitive psychological phenomenon, the meaning in life. This is what people are talking about when they say, even though my life has been filled with frustration and failure and betrayal and guilt and shame, I still want to keep going because my life is meaningful.

And we can maybe talk a little bit later about how it's not the same thing as subjective. well-being or mastery of one's environment. So if you take a look at the four, there's four features of meaning in life. One is coherence. What people mean is there's something like the structure of their experience that's like the coherence of a sentence. Well, what does that mean? Well, coherence is the opposite of absurdity.

Absurdity is when you have two perspectives that are clashing so that one of undermines the other. So here we are, you and I, we're in this little perspective. We're here on the, and we're doing all this stuff, and it's also meaningful. And then I get you to zoom out to the entire universe, the cosmic perspective. And from that perspective, our little lives could seem insignificant, right? They could seem absurd. There's a clash. Now, before that gets too dark, realize that we have a way of dealing with potential absurdity between perspectives. and reconciling it with an insight. So we already have a sense of humor.

That's what humor is. Humor is when there's a clash between perspectives, and then you get an insight that reconciles it. So just to hold that out so people don't amit. Because when I sometimes say that, that's kind of a dark thing to say. Okay, so you want that. The next is, right, when I said the cat is on the mat,

it oriented you. It made you look in a particular direction, gave you a focus. So the next factor is called purpose. But the problem, I don't like that term because our culture is all about purpose. And we think of purpose as some end goal state of something we have to have, some status, some power. I got to get to, got to fulfill my purpose. The problem with that is if you, and I realized this in high school, and I went around writing there is no purpose.

Because I realized even then, before I saw any of this research, that doesn't work. Because if you never get it, your life was meaningless. And once you get it, once you got your thing, your purpose, then your life becomes meaningless. So don't think about purpose that way. Think about it as orientation. You need a North Star, something that orientes you, helps you consistently focus, helps you navigate and track through reality

and narrate and keep track of how you're tracking through reality. It's an orientation that allows you to narrate and navigate. That's what you need. The next is significance, like the sentence. You have to have a lot of significance. things have you have to have things that seem very real deep not ephemeral superficial to you okay and then finally and turns out most importantly is mattering mattering matters the most mattering is the sense of being connected to something i'm going to put in scare quotes because it's another metaphor we have to unpack

something bigger than yourself but this goes back to what i pointed out about plato we want to be connected to something that's really real. So these are the three questions to ask yourself to see if you have mattering. What do you want to exist even if you don't? What do you want to exist even if you don't? That's right. Got it. How really real is it? It's not virtual, not ephemeral, not superficial. How much of it, how connected are you? How much do you matter to it and how much of the difference does it make to you? How significant? So mattering and significant or turning out to actually be two sides of the same connectedness.

I use the ancient word religio for that sense of connectedness. So I'm basically asking you, do you have religio? Is it connected to something that's really real? And so much so that you care about it beyond your egocentric concerns. Those are the three questions. Now, a prototypical answer, that people give, and it's a right one, is when my kids. And, you know, Elizabeth O'Field, like, these, their kids are sacred in that sense.

Sacred is something you wouldn't exchange no matter how much money somebody was willing to give you for it, okay? So, well, do you want your kids to exist when you don't? Well, yeah, that's the whole project. Of course I want them to exist when I, and I'm trying to make the world a better place for them. So when I'm not here, they will flourish, right? Are they really real? well if you aspire to being a good parent they're way more important than you and they're really real

I mean having a child is one of the best ways to turn the arrow of egocentrism out to something other than yourself you're let you you you come to this stark realization as wow that being is more important than me right and if I and if I don't live that that child will die right it like I remember that having those moments and they're almost terrifying right and then do I matter to my kids I long long to matter to my kids. I long to make a difference in their life. And they're super significant to me. And so,

right, kids are a typical answer of that. Now, here's one thing, and then I'll shut up so you can reply, right? When you have a kid, all the measures of subjective well-being that sort of, I feel really good about myself, the thing that shows up in beer

commercials, and I feel really good, I'm good, I'm happy, I'm good, yeah, yeah, yeah. That, all of that goes away when have a kid. You're sleep deprived. You're not eating. It's like being in a shipwreck. You're wet all the time for some reason, right? There's alarms going off. That's the kid crying. The person you thought loved you most in the world, your partner, doesn't like you anymore, right? And you're getting sick all the time. Why do people do it? The subjective well-being is collapsing. Their finances are going down. Kids are wickedly expensive. So those are the two things.

we're supposed to be wealth and subjective well-being. They collapse. What goes up that more than compensates for the collapse in wealth and subjective well-being, meaning in life? And that's what's at risk in the meaning crisis. I know you wanted me to say what it is, but maybe I'll stop so you can pick up on anything.

No, I would love for you to keep going. I just think because the kids is an amazing example where we can see that clearly and people have, whether they have them or not, or they could project when they will, they could see clearly being connected to something that is sacred, that they want to exist and make a difference to irrespective of their own egocentric desires.

And collectively, right now, as you're about to go into, there is a crisis of that meaning. So please. Yeah. So, I mean, Chris and I did, whenever I say Chris, I mean Christopher Master Pietro. So after Sarah and my kids, Chris is the person I love most in the world. I aspire to be Socrates.

He's my Plato. And so Plato was a friend and disciple of Socrates. And he, Plato was the beautiful lyrical writer. Socrates never wrote anything down. So we talked about the symptomology of the meaning crisis. a bunch of things that we can see happening. So around the world, you've got a weird thing happening in,

so, for example, in places of significant affluence, Silicon Valley, you have an increase in suicide, a significant increase in suicide. You have in the affluent countries, so affluence is supposed to make everybody just want to be happy and continue to live. You have, the general, the two generations that are sort of coming up, suicide rates going up.

In the United States, children are now committing suicide. So the age at which people are committing suicide is going down. Of course, then you have the massive increase in the deaths of despair happening in the United States. But there are similar things happening elsewhere in the world. And then you have the significant optic in anxiety and depression disorders that are sort of overwhelming our institutions. I'll give you a personal anecdote.

Rather than giving empty statistics, I'll give you a personal anecdote that I think is exemplary of this. And I want to make it clear that I'm not criticizing any of my students when I do this. I'm expressing compassion. So when I started teaching at the University of Toronto way back in 1994,

I'd get one, maybe two students a year coming in with sort of mental health distress or needing an extension for an essay. Once in a blue moon, I'd have a student come in and cry, break down. I now get five to ten a week regularly, reliably. I'm not trained to handle that, and the university is not the institution to handle it. Even though it's being mandated, I don't know what it's like in the United States, but in Canada, the government is putting increasing pressure on us to somehow provide mental health services and accommodations.

And there's an issue of justice there that I'm not challenging. That's what I'm talking about. I'm trying to point out a level of mounting distress. And the universities are canaries in the coal mine for the culture. But you've got the prevalence of that. You've got the loneliness epidemic. Reliably, decade by decade, the number of close. friends that people have is going down. The UK government has set up a ministry of loneliness.

It sounds like something out of George Orwell. So you have that. You have the addiction crises that why are so many people falling into addiction and various, and we even coming up with new forms of addiction like video game addiction. And video game addiction, by the way, is really, really bespeaks the meeting crisis. Because why did the kids get addicted to the video games? Because the video game has what is lacking in their real experience. The video game makes sense. It's coherent, right? They have an orientation.

There's a journey that are going on, and they're navigating, and there's narration. And they have a clear role. They're connected to it. They matter to it. They make a difference. And they know how to transcend themselves. They can literally level up. And so this is an intoxicating drug compared to,

the poverty of that in their lives. It's like a coherent shadow reality in which they derive meaning and a career. And you better believe that the LLMs, the large language models, the emerging AGI is going to exacerbate that. Already, I know, because people are writing to me about it. Already people are taking pseudo-religious relationships up with these entities. I've only heard of, and I haven't dug into the report in depths, and you should never think there's a single cause of somebody committing suicide, but there was a 14-year-old that recently committed suicide,

and we're talking to an LLM that was an avatar of some figure from Game of Thrones, and it looked like the discussion with the LLM brought up the topic of suicide, why the child even proposed suicide should come to our mind, and then the tunneled down, the opposite of that reciprocal opening I was talking about, reciprocally narrowing into suicide. And we get this overwhelming fervor around mythological worlds. Like, look at the anger,

and it's religious anger that people have with the, you know, with the corruption of the MCU or their Star Worlds. They get like, it's like people used to be about their religion. They get so incensed and so angry about these completely fictional characters in this completely fictional world. Right? You have, of course, the psychedelic renaissance that psychedelics are booming. The mindfulness revolution in which mindfulness is being taken up and people are exploring in both of these alternative states of consciousness. There's good and bad in that.

You have the reemergence of otherwise deeply neglected. and I mean academically neglected philosophies as a way of life like stoicism. Can you imagine stoicism is now a burgeoning industry? Like what is going on? Stoicism. And so I think all of this, what we argue is how can you make sense of all of this? Well, what the golden thread to use one of your terms that runs through all of this is a hunger for meaning in life,

hunger for that connectedness, that clarity, that orientation, that capacity for getting more and more deeply in contact with the depths of reality within and without aspiring to be something more than you are, coming into relationship to something more real than your egocentric existence. There's a hunger and it's growing. So if you take a look at the nuns, the N-O-N-N-E-S, the fastest growing demographic group, Well, doesn't that prove that atheism is on the rise? No, because if you take a look at them, they are not primarily atheists. They are seekers primarily. And they are filled with people that are filled with various kinds of supernatural beliefs and weird alternative metaphysical orientations. Many of them are spiritual but not religious in a profound way. If you take a look, just a few more stats. If you take a look at, you know, sort of the enlightenment, I mean that people. period of European history, you know, the 17th and 18th century that has so, has given us our fundamental grammar for how we think about ourselves in the world. It gave us a story about

why people are religious. Well, people are religious because they're not clear thinkers, right? And people become atheists when they become, they're analytic and clear thinkers, or they're religious because they're in, you know, very dire circumstances. And once they're sort of economically situated, that, you know, then they stop being religious. And when I'm a scientist. actually look at the research done by and large by atheists by the way showing that that's not why people are believers or not believers that's not why people are believers because they have lived with other people that they consider credible trustworthy individuals that are wiser than themselves and what we do with those people is we internalize their perspectives you you and i we reflect on

ourselves because we have internalized how other people reflect on us and we imitate them doing it and that's how we get our ability to know ourselves we get it by internalizing other people so if your parents were particularly religious and you found them wise you will be so if they were atheistic and you found them credible you you will you will be so now why does that matter to the mean crisis well you know how the west really lost god by ederstadt if you look at countries that are by and large There's a high correlation between being secular and how much people live alone. They live by themselves, right? And when we live by ourselves, we lose that network.

We lose that network that gives us a greater capacity for metapestival awareness. And one last connection, and then I'll shut up again, I was privileged to take part in a published paper, high-impact journal, led by your Grossman, somebody I know. We got as many of the wisdom researchers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, philosophers in one place either physically or virtually. We called ourselves the wisdom task force. It sounds really exciting. And we actually turned out a consensus paper on what wisdom is. And one of the core features is prospectival metacognition, the ability to take multiple perspectives on a situation and reflect on yourself through alternative perspective. So as we've become alone, we've become lonely, we've lost wisdom,

and we've lost that, we've lost that prospectival metacognition that's at the central of wisdom. All of that has contributed to the meaning crisis. All right. So in the realization that this is what's happening, we observe the many different compensatory behaviors that arise, such as parisocial relationships, consumer identity, new age spirituality without rigor. A lot of these things arise out of that space of individualism and not being connected to like what we were speaking to with community and so many different things. And so if you had to boil it down, which is probably unfair to try to make you do,

for the reason of why collectively this meaning crisis is happening, what would you say are the main contributors? So because our cognition, it's so intelligently adaptive by being really dynamically self-organizing and complex and multi-leveled. And that makes it so powerfully adaptive, right? And it orientes us and it binds us to the world. It's also profound engine of self-deception. We are profoundly capable. And this is a lot of work on irrationality and rationality. We are so prone in ways of which we are, myself included, I'm saying we.

to dynamics of self-deception, much of which we are ignorant. So, you know, one thing that people do, and this shows up in social media. People have probably heard of this, but that doesn't mean you're not being affected by it, because it largely affects you unconscious. Confirmation bias. You will tend to only look for evidence that confirms something you want to believe is true, and you will tend to not find salient. That means it attracts your attention and makes you interested.

you will tend to discount or reduce the salience of things that might challenge your belief. And so, right, when you go on social media where you have the pretense that you're interacting with independent other people who could challenge you. But in fact, you're selecting who and what you can hear from. So you're pretending that you're getting critical feedback and you're not. You can magnify the confirmation bias and engage in something sort of like confirmation porn, right? And so we are, and that's just one of many examples. We are beset by self-deception.

So, and this is not largely a matter just of belief. Like you were talking about earlier, it's how we taste things. It's how we perceive things. It's our state of consciousness, our traits of character. So we need practices. We can't just change our beliefs. We have to change our skills, our traits, our states, and our relationships. And so we need practices to do this.

Now there is no panacea of practice. There's technical reasons for that. There's no one practice that can alleviate all of your problems of self-deception because every practice has a bias built into it. So what you need are you need practices that complement each other, that work in opposite directions. So for example, I went to the Tai Chi. They had a meditation practice.

Meditation makes you stand back and look at how you're framing the world. Now, that's good. But if I always only do that, I'm in trouble. I also need to put my glasses back on and see if I can now see more deeply. Well, that's contemplation. So you need to be moving between a meditative practice and a contemplative practice. You need to complement a seated practice, like the meditation and the contemplation, with a moving practice, mindful practice, like Tai Chi Chuan.

See, they all compensate and correct and constrain each other. So you need a, it's like an ecology of organisms, right? need an ecology of practices and you need role models. Remember what I said, you have to internalize other people. So you need an ecology of practices, you need a common unity, a community of role models, and you need an overarching story that orientes you and helps you navigate and narrate. You need a mythology in the positive sense of the word. What used to do that for us was religion. Religion, religion, religion was about when it's working. Because religions can go wrong, just like everything else can go wrong.

Politics can go wrong. The market can go wrong. Science and technology can go wrong. But we'll talk about when it's working. What religion is doing is it giving us a tradition, a community, a mythos, and an ecology of practices for addressing self-deception and enhancing that connectedness, that religio that's at the core of meaning in life. it was a place for people to go to cultivate wisdom in a way that transferred back into,

that was crafted over generations to transfer back into their lives in a regular and reliable way. Now, for a lot of historical reasons and a lot of moral reasons, and I'm not here to challenge those, and I'm not here proselytizing. As you said, we've thrown out that Christian framework, but as you said, we threw out the baby with the bathwater, we've taken away all of that functionality. So now, and wisdom is not optional, wisdom is not optional.

When we are confronted by challenges, when we're confronted by absurdity, alienation, anxiety, when we get confused between having and being, when we idolize things inappropriately, when we're disconnected, when we feel our world and our reality is beset by bullshit, right? We have very little resources.

So I'll ask my students, where do you go for information to hold up their phone, like cyborgs? I'll say, where do you go for knowledge? And they're a little bit jaundiced about this, right? The university science. And then I say, where do you go for wisdom? And there's an anxious silence. And they look at me like, tell me where I should go. and that's a dangerous position for somebody to be in, right?

So we lost all of that functionality. We tried to replace it. We've tried to replace it with various isms, pseudo-religious ideologies with nationalism and Nazism and Nazism and communism. And we drenched the world in blood because ideologies can't do it. Commercialism, celebrity worship, all of this. All the stuff we've been talking, we try to fill it, and it doesn't have the function. Yeah, we've so largely, in modern society, traded nutrient-dense behavior with those vapid and poor substitutions.

Oh, I love that phrasing. Wow. Love it. But, yeah, you're speaking to, like, you know, for example, porn instead of real intimate connection with another, so to speak, sitting around the campfire, real intimate personal connections with social media. Yes. the innumerable examples of this, right? And so in search of soul food, we have these poor substitutions. It's like we're lacking nutrient density, quite literally,

and we're malnourished. Yes, yeah. And so that's a really important thing that I want to continue to highlight. Yeah, this is a beautiful metaphor. Sorry, you really sparked something in me. Because one of the things that can happen is you can be malnourished without being hungry because you're eating a lot of junk food, right? So let me play with this for a second.

One of the things is that people can often be beset by the meeting crisis without realizing that they are because they're malnourished, but they're not currently in distress. And what they don't realize is like when you have nutritional malnourishment, your physiological resilience, your ability to resist disease or to heal from trauma is radically reduced. Now, until the disease or trauma comes along, you don't notice it. But when it comes, you're in a disaster. It's the same thing for the meaning crisis. People are sort of drifting around, I'm okay, right, until something happens. And then they realize, and I see it at the university, like I said, there's no depth of resilience. And COVID showed that.

When so many people were thrown back into a genuine challenge to their everyday routines, many people went like in, like they got into very dire. I predicted one of the negative things, I predicted, sorry, This is one of these weird things where you're happy about something to, you predicted because you're a scientist, because you're a human being and you hate that it came true. I predicted a massive increase in conspiruality, which happened. I predicted a mental health tsunami that would happen. Those are the indications. Spirituality is a terrific symptom of the meaning crisis.

COVID hit. There was no resiliency, and the meaning crisis then demonstrated. Conspiratuality, conspiratorial, spiritual. ideations. Yeah, so if you, if I was privileged to watch a really good documentary where somebody went to a Q&on meeting, and what's really interesting is it's got exactly the, the, the, the, the structure of a Christian service. There's like a, there's a sermon, that there's singing, there's readings, there's social networking. It's not just a conspiracy theory. It's a shared worldview that gives people a orientation, a sense that they've cut through the bullshit to something that's

real. They're connected to themselves to other people. There's something that matters. It feeds the meaning crisis and it feeds it with a pernicious narrative. This is good stuff. Yeah. This is important. Any other main contributors

you want to highlight for because it... Well, you can see the entertainment world and the political arena. Two more. So we've got this turn towards the dark.

in our popular meeting, increasingly dark. And I've seen people praise something just because it was dark. And I'm tired of dark. Like it's like, oh, it's so dark. And it's like, and? And? But see, the dark is at least closer

to the reality of the situation. And that's why people like it. Does observing how past civilizations have risen and fallen inform us how we, like about our current situation? Oh, very much. much, very much. Let me just say the thing about the political arena. A symptom of the meaning crisis is people feel increasingly disenfranchised, disconnected, like it doesn't matter,

it's all just an arena of bullshit. I'm using that term technically, Harry Frankfort's notion of it, right? And at the same time, everything is fraught with the political fervor. Everything we do is politicized. Even, like, you can't do anything now without the political aspects of it. And people, right, and the relationship, the political positions people take up are very much religious. There's cultish relationships. There's symbolic acts of tearing down. I'm metapolitical. I think both the left and right are guilty of exacerbating the meaning crisis.

So I want it clear that I'm criticizing both sides here, right? And you've got this, it's sort of religious behavior all over the place. All these symbolic acts we're doing, and we're doing it for these very, very comprehensive worldviews. and people completely identifying it, that's a religious phenomenon. I'm not the only one saying that. Everyone's now, so anthropologically, what's happening, especially in American politics, but you can see it in European politics too, and Canadian politics, is it's trying to take, it's acting as a, I'll use your metaphor,

a non-nutricious surrogate for religion. Now, to your question, excellent historical question, we talk about it, Chris and I in the book. the West, or whatever that ultimately refers to, has gone through a significant meaning crisis before. So Alexander, the great, conquers most of the known world. I mean, that's not really true. India and China, we're still out there. But you know what I mean, right?

And, you know, and he hellenizes all of that. And so, and then he dies without leaving a determination. at air and then it breaks up in these smaller empires that are all fighting each other. So I want you to compare somebody that's living in the time after Alexander with somebody who's living in the time before Alexander, the time of Aristotle, the guy who taught Alexander. So in the time of Aristotle, you live in the same place as the people who govern you do. And you and your ancestors have been there for multiple generations and your neighbors

too, and the families all know each other. And you speak the same language and you share the same religion. have the same concerns, the same projects. And in fact, you're so bound to this that you'd rather be killed than suffer the punishment of being ostracized, which is forced to leave your home. That is one of the greatest punishment. We look at this in the ancient world. They threatened him, they threatened to ostracize him, and we go, okay, I'll move from Hamilton

to L.A., who cares? This is the Titanic punishment in the ancient world. now you go to after Alexander where you're living the rulers are thousands of miles away you could go to bed and you're in the Ptolemaic Empire and you wake up and you're in the Seleuciate Empire the people around you speaking different languages

worshiping different gods you've probably migrated they've probably migrated you feel completely at a loss of home you have a dwelling but you experience what's called Darmicide you don't feel at home so you can see in the arts

and especially the philosophy of the time and anxiety it's called an age of anxiety this Hellenistic period and what happens is philosophy changes it takes on an extra dimension they build on what was given to them by

Socrates Plato and Aristotle but they add a dimension the philosopher becomes the physician of the soul Epicurious, one of the great Hellenistic philosophers captured it perfectly. He said, call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others. So the philosopher takes on this therapeutic dimension, and you get these entire ways of life like Stoicism and Epicureanism that attempt to diagnose your anxiety. And it's existential anxiety. It's a meaning crisis.

And they diagnose and then they prognosis, and they give you a prognosis, which isn't having a bunch of beliefs. It's about, they give you an entire ecology of practices and they give you a community and they give you exemplary figures like Epicurus, like Socrates, like Plato, that are then take, they basically turn philosophy into a religion in the positive sense of the word as a way of addressing the meaning crisis. That's by the way why Stoicism from that time is so popular right now. And it also points to another thing in the meaning crisis. We're going through massive therapy. Every third person you know is in therapy, right?

And a lot of these therapies are deeply influenced by the Hellenistic philosophies. Like cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the most pervasive form of therapies, is explicitly derived from stoicism. None of this is coincidence. The scale we're seeing it at is just obviously puts us at exponential risk to the metacrisis. in so many ways because, I mean, you go to like, what, 18, 10-ish where there's like 500 million people in the planet to now, just in 200 years to over 8 billion. The scale in which things have transpired is quite astonishing.

And I'm just curious because you can look back at those times and kind of pull things from, but like we've never experienced the scale of individualism as we currently are in today's day and age. And so obviously that puts us at risk for so many things. And we have massive technological powers that was not out of growth. Yeah, I mean, we were like. And, you know, before, well, I mentioned it with Alexander's Empire. There's still the terrifically deep civilizations of India and China. And there's all what's going on Mesoamerica, you know, the Incans and the Mayans and all that.

But now we have this global thing. And I'm not saying there aren't indigenous cultures or things like that. but it's global. There isn't something outside. So not only is there more people and there's more technological power and that technology has the potential to run away with itself like the LLMs, there isn't also there isn't an outside civilization. We have the one global civilization.

And the meaning crisis is a form of what's called scarcity to make mentality. scarcity. Whenever you're lacking something that's nutritive, I'm going to keep playing with your metaphor because it really sparked me. Okay, so you have scarcity. You lack food. I don't know, but I get hangary when I lack food. And so what happens when you're in a scarcity mentality, think about when you're hungry, right? You become very short-term in your thinking. You become very narrow. You become very aggressive. You become very egocentric. and you become very rigid, right? Does this sound like our political arena, by the way? So when people are starving for meaning,

they go into a scarcity mentality that actually really harms our cognitive ability to deal with the poly crisis, the metacrisis of challenges we're facing in the world. So the metacrisis is, so people look out at the world and the metacrisis helps even dark, more the meaning crisis, because the world seems even more threatening. And then the meaning crisis hamstrings us so we become less and less capable of dealing

with the world. And what's happening is we're reciprocally narrowing. The world is getting, we're losing options in the world, and we're losing our cognitive capacity in the face of it, and we are reciprocally narrowing down where we're feeling trapped. It feels like the way that you even just physiologically kind of disqualification. displayed that was, you know, one of the worst or perhaps the worst punishment one could give someone as solitary confinement. Oh, yeah. And we've kind of been somehow societally convinced to willingly

put ourselves in a version of that in our own bedrooms with technology. And like you spoke to earlier, I think you would assume that an increase of affluence and comfort and technology would increase well-being, but like you're speaking to that knowledge and information without wisdom is like exacerbating the issue even further. And so for everyone who's listening, I promise we're going to come up for air soon and explore those ecology practices and things that can really develop our own individual personal meaning crisis. But any other thoughts you have there on the aspect of how technology and comfort like... I want to pick up and do you, that's also, I think, very insightful, amplify it. So think about...

you know, like you said, loneliness. Think about these really deeply effective and there's very comprehensive. They sink into the depths of your soul and they color and purveyed your whole world. When you're lonely. Think about when you're homesick. So we have done this thing where we're making people homesick within their culture. So they're lonely. They're homesick.

They're starving. and the technology is not helping. The technology is magnifying. It's like I said with the confirmation porn, right? It's magnifying all of this and it's giving us the Ertzats, surrogates, the false substitutes. Oh, well, I don't have friends, but I have all these social connections, right? Well, I'm not at home, but I can go into this virtual world where I play an important role. while I'm starving for meaning.

So what I'll do is I'll fill myself with more and more intensity of experience. So, you know, music colleges have talked about the fact that the complexity of popular music is rapidly eroding because we are more and more pumping the intensity and the salience at the expense of any attempt to convey profound transformative meaning. It's like a dopaminergic roller coaster. Right, right. Yeah, and so what we happen, people are attracted to that because they're in scarcity mentality, but it doesn't feed them so they stay hungry, and then the whole thing exacerbates in a vicious cycle. Yeah, it's like the hungry ghost analogy for Buddhism, yes, yes. Excellent. You're on fire. Oh, thanks. You're on fire too. Fire conversations. Okay, so bringing this a little bit more into the personal.

Please. for our own personal quest for meaning, you know, how does contemplating what will matter most upon death reveal what we should, how we should change our behaviors and values and how we're living currently? Because I think on the personal quest for meaning, I've heard you speak to the importance of wisdom and friendships, you know, and being connected to like what you said earlier, things that have value and meaning to you beyond your own personal, ecocentric survival. And so I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on what is going to matter most to us when we're going to face death and how that should inform how we live. This is brilliant.

So if you give people, priming is when you just give people information and you don't make it sort of explicit, but it affects their behavior. So when you prime people about markers, like you're having people read a whole bunch of words and they're just reading words, you tell them, It's a reading, comprehending task. But in the list, there's words like coffin, skeleton, corpse, right? All this, you know. And when you make that sort of salient to people in that way, people go into scarcity mentality. And they get very rigid. At least this is what's called mortality research or terror management theory shows.

I have some questions about the methodology, but I think overall it's reasonable that they found a phenomenon. So if I just give you the proper. Propositional facts. Notice what that does. That locks you down. But now let's move away from the propositional. Let's move to the prospectival. Now I ask people to imagine that they're dying.

They're in death reflection, and they can have the people around them. That has the opposite effect on them. Now they come out of that and they open up and they start to wonder and they start to look for these deeper connections. because people through death reflection, sounds morbid, through death reflection, people come to the realization of the things that really do matter to them.

They'll say, I care about the relationships I've had. Not only to other people, but to reality and to myself, I care about the good I've done, I've cared about the truth I've said. And the things that, we're told our good, like we're supposed to be pursuing, they don't come up.

They don't matter because they don't matter. They don't contribute to meaning of life. Because you see, when you're facing death, subjective well-being and wealth are going away. The only thing that, the only thing you're going to carry with you to your last moment in your confrontation with death. And this was the great insight of Epicurus and the Stoics, is your meaning and wisdom. That's it. And so that, what, so if you shift off the propositions of, mortality and you shift to no no take up the perspective take up the lived experience of you know

actually imaginally reflecting on death what becomes salient are the things that have contributed to meaning in life is that in a way our attempts to exist for like to to live longer in a way so you might think that um but um i mean i've done a lot of buddha Buddhist practices and it's just something similar in stoicism. And those practices are designed to make one horrified of immortality. So, I mean, I can't do the whole practice here, but it'll give you an intuitive sense for it. So you want to live forever, right? Well, you watch all your friends die.

Oh, well, then they have to live forever, too. And then all of their friends and all of their friends, and basically nobody can die. Okay, that's a problem. So what are we going to do? Does that mean nobody's going to be born? there's no more kids. How meaningful is existence without children? And now, is it just that none of the people can die?

Well, none of their pets should die. And then, oh my gosh. And then what you realize is the entire universe has to freeze and not change at all. And then you realize, okay, I'm going to go on forever and ever, which means I'm going to have an infinity of events where I screw up, where I fail, where I let myself and other people down, where I betray, I'm going to have an infinity of those. Can I bear that? And then we're all going to get to a place where we have an infinity of guilt and shame. Are we going to, can we bear that with each other? Can we forgive

infinitely each other? And then, if I live, I've lived, I've, changed a lot since I was four. If I live forever, will I change so much that I'm virtually unconnected to the person I am now, inevitably. So even though I don't die physically, John Verviki, it's gone, absolutely. And so it's even futile. And when you really live this, you realize, wait, I don't want any of that. That's horrific. And so then you have to ask, What is it people think they want with immortality? This is at least the Buddhist proposal. But people, and this was the Stoic model,

people think they want to have a long life. But what they want to do is they want to be, they want to live as deeply as possible. So here's a story from Julian Barnes' history of the world in nine and a half chapters. And spoiler alert, this was in the good life. Okay? So the Good Life made use of this.

I don't know if they've explicitly, but the connection is obvious. This guy dies and goes to Heaven. He meets St. Peter, and he plays golf until he can play it as best as he possibly. He does all these things. And then he comes to St. Peter's and he says, you know, and this is what happens in the good life. I'm kind of done. I'm kind of done. And St. Peter said, good, that's the point of heaven.

The point of heaven isn't to live for Hever because you're not God. You're finite. and you have to remain finite. The point of heaven is for you to die willingly. What the Stoics say is that, now that's a mythological thing or it's a TV show. The Stoics say, but that is available to you right now. If you practice, you could get to the place

where you would be happy to die now because you have touched the depths of existence and got the most religio that is possible. for a human being, and that's what they lived for. And that's why they were so courageous. That's why they would, and you have to be really careful about this, that's why they were willing to advocate for suicide in this very limited circumstance, in which it was the only way to prevent them from engaging in immoral, vicious behavior.

And Seneca, for example, did this. So I do think that we, I mean, obviously there's a biological urge to, keep on living, but we can reflect on that. We can move from a scarcity mentality. I just want to live to a wise perspective, a reflective perspective where we say, no, what I want is I want to live as deeply as possible. Death and our own mortality, I feel like, really affords us an opportunity unlike anything else to truly confront. I'm glad that I'm mortal. I'm I'm glad that I'm mortal. What you're saying is I'm very, very glad.

I don't, I mean, if a truck is bearing down, I'll get out of the way, but I deeply don't want to live more than another 20 years. But I would push back on the notion and say, let's jump to 20 years from now. Would you want to live an extra day? One more day. I've seen people dying. I've been with people dying. I'm old enough now.

And I've seen the difference from people dying who wanted to live another day. and the anxiety and the terror, and people who are ready to go. And I don't mean people who are ready to go because they're beset by pain. They're done. And their lives are done, and they feel the completeness.

I've been with them. I want to be them. I aspire to being them. So will I be like that? You're asking me, I don't know. Do I aspire to be like that? And is it possible? Yes.

Yeah. I think it's a really beautiful place to arrive to, also similarly strive. and to live life with a sense of abandon in that regard as well. How much do you feel like in regards to belief in our need to make meaning and believe things as human beings is driven through our insecurity of not knowing? Because death is obviously a huge uncertainty. And sometimes, oftentimes, we as humans create all sorts of beliefs and dogmas to cure that insecurity of being.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this goes more towards my cognitive scientific work and the work I do with some terrific colleagues, a dear friend of mine. He was a former student of mine, and now he's a dear colleague of mine, Mark Miller, and the whole predictive processing framework, the idea that the brain is trying to anticipate the world

as much as it possibly can as a way of being adaptive. And so radical uncertainty can be horrifying. But, of course, and we've tried, Part of what the Enlightenment promised was we'll give you certainty. We'll Descartes, will give you certainty. We'll give you a formal system that is complete and consistent and will render everything certain. And we now know because of Godel and Einstein, that is logically and physically impossible. And the world is actually complexifying with emerging information.

So it is radically uncertain. It's not just that there are risks. Risks are probabilities, negative or positive, negative usually, that we can count. Uncertainty is we are radically ignorant, right? And so what we have to do is give up that Enlightenment promise of certainty, obviously pursue as much knowledge as we can. But instead, the shift, and you see this in all of the Hellenic philosophies, you see it in Buddhism and Taoism. And this is like really, I mean, especially in Buddhism and Taoism, where Zen, you get Zen by integrating Buddhism and down it together. Let's try something else. So I'll use an analogy from biology.

There's the evolution of traits, like, you know, we've evolved this particular trait, but biologists, and biology is the science that's going through the scientific revolution right now. Biology is the philosophically important science right now. My colleague at the University of Toronto, Dennis Walsh, is a clear example of that. Physics is theoretically more abundant. That's why they had to give the Nobel Prize to a cognitive scientist, computer scientist, colleague of mine for the University of Toronto. And yes, all truth does come from the University of Toronto. Jeffrey Hinton got the Nobel Prize in physics because they can't find an actual physicist to give it to.

But in biology, they're now talking about the evolution of evolvability. So you're not evolving a particular trait because a trait depends on a certainty in the environment. what you evolve is the meta trait of evolvability, which is the capacity to constantly redesign yourself. Adaptability, adaptability, but a constantly, well, I'm constantly evolving adaptability, yeah, so that you can constantly refit and readapt yourself to an environment that always will contain an element of uncertainty in it. I think this is one reading. This is one half of the First Noble Truth of Buddhism that, like, you know, the word, is pervaded by duca. The world is radically uncertain, and that's the world's side, and our side is

we are radically prone to self-deception, and we can do a lot to reduce the self-deception in the face of the uncertainty so that we can significantly reduce the loss of agency and suffering. And I think that is what we should be striving for. amazing this conversation is very nutrient dense for me and i'm excited to keep unpacking a few different aspects now a little bit more in the realm of understanding our mind leaning and pulling from your buddhist philosophical understandings and cultivating a life of wisdom and so where i'd like to start is for you to share what are the four types of knowing and how is that useful yeah yeah i've been alluding to it throughout so thank you for giving me a chance to talk about this so one of the things

the Enlightenment did as well as it convinced us of two interlocking things. It convinced us that all knowing is propositional knowing and that we do not have to undergo transformation in order for certain truths to be disclosed to us. Descartes proposes a universal method of calculating with propositions and Leibniz proposes a universal calculus. And you don't have, you don't have to transform in order for reality to disclose itself to you. All you have to do is master the method and then apply the method universally and you'll get all the truths that are possible.

Now, if you go before the Enlightenment, you get a much different picture. If you're taking a look, for example, within the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, there is the radically alternative proposal that there are many aspects, dimensions of reality that will only be disclosed to you

after you go through significant transformation, self-transcendence. So as soon as you get rid of that transformative notion and then you lock everything into the propositional, you lose the other kinds of knowing. So each kind of knowing has its own kind of memory, like psychologically, own kind of memory and its own sense of realness. So the one where I'll fixated on is what's called propositional knowing, knowing that something is the case, like knowing that, and I always state a proposition, the cat is on the mat.

There's a proposition, and your sense of realness is a sense of conviction that it is true. And you have a type of memory for that called semantic memory. You know, by the way, that cats are mammals, yes? And that's it. You just have that sort of fact proposition, right? And you nod, you have a sense of conviction for it. Now notice how that's very different from your procedural knowing. You're knowing how to do something.

You're knowing how to swim. You're knowing how to catch a football. So propositional is knowing what a bike is, procedural knowing, is how to ride a bike. How to ride a bike. And notice the difference there, right? Propositions are true or false. You're not riding a bike right now.

So does that mean your skill of bike riding is false? That doesn't make any sense, right? Skills apply or not. They have conditions of application, not conditions of referential completion, right? So you're not talking about something. You're causally interacting with it, which means the sense of realness is the sense of empowerment.

You know, what it's like to ride a, like you get that sense of, ah, I can ride a bike. And then you have a kind of memory that's distinct from your semantic memory called procedural memory. Now, why aren't you riding a bike right now? I presume you're not riding a bike right now because you have consciousness, which means you know what it is like to be you here in this state of mind, in this situation. Or we use an artistic metaphor for that. You have a perspective right now, and you are, you have a viewpoint, a point of view from that perspective. This is a way of talking about that perspectival knowing. You know what it is like to be you here now in this state of mind in

that situation. And you have, you have its own kind of memory. It's called episodic memory. So compare the memory I'm going to ask for you now. Okay. What did you have for breakfast this morning? I had nothing. What are you doing right now? Searching. And are you sort of a mouse? imagining it a bit? Well, because I had nothing for breakfast that... Oh, it's not going to work. It's not going to work as well. Okay. Did you brush your teeth this morning?

I did. Okay, so what happens when you remember doing that? I remember this series of events that I normally always go through. Right. So you remember the series of events. You relive a sequence of events. And so what you do is you go back and you have a little tiny narrative, a little tiny story. And what that story reflects is your perspective on the situation. That's what an episode is. An episode is a slice of prospectival knowing.

So you have episodic memory. And this is the memory we cherish because, you know, it's about the events that matter to us and are significant to us, which are different than the facts that we think are true. All right. Okay. So, and your sense of realness for perspectival knowing is not power. it's not a sense of conviction.

It's a sense of presence. So I can do it with you right now. Reality is presencing. It's the sense of presence, right? As opposed to things not being here, being absent. It's present. It's really present. And that's another sense of real.

And some people often have that sense really powerful when they're having a mystical or psychedelic experience or when they're really it, when they feel like they're really in a video game. It's so real, I'm in it. That's a sense of. presence. That prospectival knowing is that like similar to where I suppose Gnostics and mystics derive their sense of knowledge from? Like it's the interior experience. So let's talk about the Greek

words because you're using a Gnostic. So the Greeks have epistame for largely propositional knowing where we get epistemology from. They have techne for procedural knowing where we get technology from. they have noesis, which means knowing by noticing. And it gives you, you have insight. Notice how this is all events of consciousness and perspective. That's noesis. And in the Neoplatonic and the mystical traditions, you move into a noetic understanding.

But you involved another word, gnosis. And it goes into the Gnostics, and it's in our word prognosis and diagnosis. Okay, let's talk about the Gnostics. What kind of knowing were they after? Thereafter, I'm knowing that liberates you. Gnosticism has a terribly tangled mythology that's got a lot of danger to it. So I'm putting that aside.

I'm talking about the psychology. A Gnostic feels existentially, they feel entrapped, and they're trying to be liberated. And what they're trying to do is realize their true identity and bring that true identity, the spark within them into, move it into relationship to where it really belongs and connects to what's ultimately real. It's about realizing the doctor when they're diagnosing you. They're trying to figure out what's going on inside of you and transform you into another state of being.

This is what nauseous is. Is that? Okay. So this is participatory knowing. This is the knowing that is about how you are coupled. to the environment, how you and the environment are participating in the same patterns, the same processes, the same principles, right? So, like, for example, you can walk around in this room because you and the room both are participating in gravity. Does that make sense? Okay, you don't have to know this.

Participatory knowing can be largely unconscious. Like when the doctor's diagnosing you, your body knows that it's ill, but that doesn't mean you have a conscious understanding. of it. Okay. So you can be coupled or not to the environment, right? And now that coupling can often call for transformation. You have to know thyself in order to know the world differently. There has to be a change in the way the agent and the arena. So when the world makes sense to you, it's an arena for your agency. And the agent and the arena have to be mutually transformed. That's Gnosis. That's participatory knowing. So participatory knowing is stored in a very weird kind of memory. It's your sense of self. You have a sense of self, don't you? You have a sense...

Knowing through relationship as well? Yes. It's knowing, it's knowing, it's the relationships that shape your identity. So your roles, participatory knowing involves the knowing that has happened through the roles you take up. You're a friend. You're a podcaster. You're a lover. You have different roles. And then you have to do a through line. I assume, like most people, you don't want to be suffering massive cognitive dissonance in which all these roles are undermining each other. You want them to be coherent, right, and make sense together. And so you try to draw a through line between all the roles, all the patterns you participate in. That's yourself. That's what your sense of self is. Right. So why does knowing the distinction between these four, how does that impact our life? Well, what's the sense of realness for the participatory knowing? It's a sense of, and you won't, because it's largely unconscious, you will probably only become aware of it when it's disturbed.

When the sense of being connected to reality and having a genuine, authentic agency in that arena is lost, the sense of realness is meaning in life. the participatory knowing is where a lot of the meaning in life is being held. And then above that, right, it's held in the perspectives you take, what you notice in the world, what's salient to you. We're talking about that. And then that gives you your skills for actually navigating and making your way. And then only on top of all of that, only after all of that is running,

do you get the causal interactions that give you your beliefs? But if you fixate on beliefs and ideologies, which are just systems of beliefs and a political system that is just about one ideology killing another, you are cutting yourself off. This is why I'm metapolitical because it is fixated on the propositional level. But if you're fixated on that propositional tyranny and you don't think you need transformative truths, you cut yourself off from the procedural and the below that, the prospectival and below that the participatory. And that's where most of the meaning in life, machinery is running. That's why it matters. It's really amazing how you gave that analogy, almost like the weight of an iceberg and the deepest part of us is the foundation,

yet we've deified and kind of flipped it on his head. We're propositional knowing. Another form of idealization, another form of idolatry that we engage in. What we know is kind of the God. My beliefs. My beliefs are ultimate and what really matters and who and everything I am. A lot of your behavior are not driven by your beliefs. A lot of your behavior is driven by your skills.

It's driven by your states of consciousness. It's driven by your traits and habits and deficits of character. So would you say there's a distinct correlation and relationship between suffering we experience collectively and individually and the identification with propositional knowledge is kind of the new God. That is why I call it propositional tyranny. And you see, religions for all of their ills were about, well, before the Enlightenment. Because one of the things the Enlightenment did was convince religions that their belief systems. People equate religion with belief systems.

But what religions were, and if you read the literature before the Enlightenment, it was understood that religion was primarily addressing the noisis and the Gnosis of us, right? And inviting us into deep transformation because depths of reality will only be disclosed to us after we undergo deep transformation. And so, again, yes, that is why we suffer. Where do you go to bring about the deep transformations of the non-propositional knowing? And, you know, and that's, think about that, that's what wisdom is. Knowledge is about what you know. Wisdom is about how. It's about the procedural and the prospectival and the participatory.

Wisdom is about the how. And so we've lost that as well. Lars is identifying in the top-down processing. Very much, very much. Yeah, and not having the ecology of practices that evoke the bottom up. When I meet people, I will often say to them, don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you practice. Because that is going to give me a lot more information about who you really are.

Your beliefs, yeah, they matter. They're necessary, but they're very, very far from sufficient. I think there is a big shift that once they start to deepen their practices of meditating and silence or really cultivating the capacity to listen, you start to not. prioritize what somebody's saying as much as the place it's coming from. You can very clearly kind of see that. But notice, brilliant. You start to shift from what they're saying to how they're saying it, the tenor and the

tempo. And the place they're coming from, that's that prospect of knowing. Where is there a viewpoint? And then what's their understanding? What are they standing upon? What's their participatory knowing? Yes, you try to sense behind or through. the way I'm looking through my glasses. You try to sense through the proposition into the non-propositional,

and you start to get genuine compassion. You start to be able to, like, I'm not just understanding what they're saying. Like you said, I'm understanding where they're coming from and who they are and what they're saying. And I'm going to try and make myself open and responsive and responsible to that. Yes, yes. That's, yes. And because it's like we all want to gent. like we want to be connected to what's really real. Like we're speaking to. And when it comes to relationships, there is that saying,

I believe, decency is the absence of strategy. Right? You know, and so in many ways, we can see in relationships people are trying to get something instead of having a genuine sincere interaction.

Right. They're trying to get something. They're trying to have rather than trying to become. Yeah. Right. And notice we say we have sex, but we want to be in love.

Like love, like this is another thing we've done. we've trivialized love. We think that love is a feeling. What a ridiculous proposal. Like, love isn't even a single emotion. Like, I love Sarah profoundly. Right now, that is making me ache.

But when I see here, it'll make me happy. Sometimes it makes me angry because that person is threatening, Sarah. Love is a existential stance. It's a whole way of configuring my agency and how I'm connected to reality that gives a whole living network of emotional responses. That's what love is. And what that means, right, is exactly what you're talking about. I can't come in trying to have something.

I have to become someone. And I have to, a part of what love is is a willingness to, and this requires tremendous vulnerability. Greg Enrique, a dear friend of mine colleague, we're writing a book on consciousness together. He's got this amazing proposal that language, Language is a superpower because it allows us to coordinate our behavior. Like, we're useless as individuals in biologically.

Like, you know, a really angry dog can take you out. But give us language so we can coordinate our behavior and we get some pointy sticks and then we can train the dogs. Then we can kill anything on the planet. Right. So language is really powerful, but language makes you so vulnerable. Language discloses you in the way nothing else can. Bertrand Russell famously said, no matter how. eloquently a dog barks, it can't tell you that its parents were poor but hardworking.

So what we need is we need a way of managing that. And what people do is they, like, you're so insightful. They think what they'll do is they'll have a method, a strategy. Here, Descartes, I'll have a universal method, a strategy for doing this. I won't have to be calm. What I'll do is I'll create this defensive strategy to protect my vulnerability. Or you can get the recommendation of Jesus of Nazareth, which is, no, what you'll do is I'm going to take that vulnerability and I'm going to entrust it and I'm going to turn it into an opening so that that person can as much as possible see through my pretences. That's what Socrates does. He offers also the chance for you to, he said, I'm like a mirror and like you look into somebody's eyes, and he says he's a midwife helping

you to give birth to yourself, you know, you can, you allow the person to so profoundly, and they, and if they reciprocate and they allow them, and they make them, this is called mutually accelerating disclosure. It's how you fall in love with somebody. If I make myself vulnerable and open myself up so that you can see through, and you can see where there's pretense, but you can also see where there's hurt, but you can also see where I'm coming from better, and you reciprocate by opening up. And then I see that and, and we, and we, do that, that's love. It's erotic love or it's friendship love or it's familial love. And that, that's the alternative. Those are the nourishing connections. You know, I think authenticity has

gotten a good publicist and marketing agent to where it's now the thing that you, you know, should do. I'm very suspicious of authenticity as a virtue. But what you're speaking to in the absence of that strategy of like really sharing being with somebody, right, is, That is authentically actually showing up in connection with other people instead of the authenticity that's got in a good publicist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, where the authenticity is sort of being true to my inner self that is unchanging and permanently who I am. It's a thing that's used again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is relevance realization as it as it, I think this flows in actually here because when we're talking,

trying to understand the mind and what our priors are. And, you know, it's, it's important to really understand not just how we're thinking about things, like what we're thinking about, but the place we're coming from when we're thinking about it. And I always enjoy examining inwardly, you know, where are my own self-held dogmas or perspectives that are keeping me stuck in a less fluid way of living, you know, and so I think this has immense importance for today's day and age. Thank you. I laughed because I wasn't laughing at you, was laughing at myself because relevance realization

has been sort of the obsession at the core of my scientific work for, what, three decades. I've been working on it since before my PhD thesis. So this will take a couple of steps, so I'll need a bit of space if that's okay. So here's a proposal. You demonstrate a fantastic ability, ability we're trying to give artificial intelligence right now. So what are people talking about? They're talking about artificial general intelligence, AGI.

What does that mean? Well, it means previously our AI was siloed. The AI was a single domain, single type of problem solver. And that was radically unlike you. You're a general purpose, a domain general problem solver. You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains and a wide variety of ways, which makes you astonishingly adaptive. So your adaptivity is that you're a general problem solver.

All right. And so the idea is what makes you a general problem solver? Obviously for specific problems, you have to have specific knowledge or specific skills. But being a general problem solver, there must be something that's general that's at work. And so here's the proposal, my theoretical proposal. And I'm pleased to say more and more people are finding this plausible. And so it's been a long haul for me, but I'm very grateful for the recognition. That what makes you generally intelligent is that you solve two meta problems.

Meta problems are any problem you have to solve in order to solve any specific problem. These are basically the meta problems, the two aspects of adaptivity. Seder as peribis, all that's being equal, you want to be an adaptive problem solver. Does that make sense? Okay, so adaptivity being really adaptive in a comprehensive way. Okay. So what are these two matter problems?

And why are they interlocking? We've already talked about one. And this comes out of the astonishing work of Carl Fristin and Andy Clark and work I've done and published with Mark Miller and Brad Anderson on predictive processing. all that's being equal, the more you can anticipate the world, the more generally intelligent you are. Michael Levin has a water and full way to talk about it. He calls this your cognitive light cone. And I want you to remember this point.

He talks about it just about what the organism can care about. Okay. It's interesting. Just side note. Oh, yeah. I rewatched the Matrix a few days ago. Oh. The significance of the Oracle and I guess their ability to really anticipate the forthcoming events.

places them on the top of the hierarchy of society in a way. That's right. Yes. Side note. Well, no, no, that's a good note because think about it, do you want, like the or do you, do you want to, do you want to react to the tiger or avoid the tiger? Do you want to happen upon where the salmon are or do you want to anticipate where the salmon are going to be? You see, when you anticipate the world, the more deeply you can anticipate the world, the more adaptive you are. That's why you think a dog is more intelligent than a frog because you know a dog can, you can say to a dog,

Go into the next, we're raising a dog right now. A frog. Not a frog. You would have surprised me. That would not have been my anticipatory knowledge. No, no. It's a dog. And you can say the dog, hey, Sadie, go into the next room and get your ball and come back.

You can't do that with a dog, with a frog, I should say. Right. And so you actually attribute intelligence when you get an intuitive sense of the cognitive light cone of an organism. But here's the issue. And it's interlocked. See, as soon as the more. more I start to anticipate the world, the more my goal state, my problem solution is in the future, because I'm anticipating more, I hit the problem of relevance realization. This is

the amount of information that is available to me. Now, you are generally intelligent, so the amount of, just in this room, the amount of information you could pay attention to is astronomically vast. Even think of just the potential combinations. You could look at this. edge of the glass, that spot there, that over there, and then feel the tip of your nose. Or you could do your knee, the tip of my finger, that spot. It's overwhelming. It's combinatorially explosive. The amount of information you can pay attention to is astronomically vast.

The amount of information in your long-term memory and all the possible combinations, you could connect, you maybe can find some connection between the Nile River and the politics of Uruguay right now. I don't know, maybe there is, and you could somehow do that some way, right? Combinatorily explosive. All the possibilities you can consider, all the possible sequence of actions. The number of possible sequence of actions, the possible pathways of actions in a chess game is greater than the number of atomic particles in the universe. And that's just a chess game.

Right? Now, here's what you can't do. you can't check all that information to see if it's relevant to your problem. It would take you infinity. Yeah, you can't. Yeah. So you can't check it and see, no. And this sounds kind of like a Zen Cohen.

You're intelligent because you ignore most of that information rapidly, and you zero in, you home in on what is relevant, such that it is salient to you, it becomes perceptually attractive to you, right? Even to the point of being obvious to you, what you should be paying attention to, what you should be remembering, and what possibilities for action you should be considering. And you're doing it right now like that. It's pre-conscious, right? Oh, totally.

In fact, it's pre-egoic. It's er everything, because if you're not doing relevance realization, you're not capable of any, anticipatory problem solving whatsoever. You can't start any learning project. You can't form any categories. Look, I'm going to form a category. Well, there's two glasses. Oh, well, how did I do that?

Well, I noticed. I noticed that they're similar. Oh, what do you mean by similar? You mean they're absolutely identical? No, no, no. They share some properties. Oh, you mean, as long as any two things share property? of properties, a lot of properties, they're similar? Of course, that's what I mean by similarity.

Okay, a lawnmower and a plum. They both have curved surfaces. They both contain carbon. They're both found in North America. Neither one existed 300 million years ago. Both way more than a paperclip. Both have a distinctive voter. Both have a shiny surface. Neither one is a particularly good weapon. How many true things can I say about a lawnmower and a plum? So they must be very similar. And this is Nelson Goodman's point. I can do that for any two objects. Logically, everything is similar to everything else.

And then what people will say, but those don't matter. You have to pay attention. Yeah, exactly. You pay attention to the relevant factors of comparison. So before I can even categorize, I have to do relevance realization. So this is obviously immensely important,

right? If life is a certain amount of time and energy, how we use our attention in that span of time and energy is what I've said before is attention as our spiritual currency. That's why you pay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, what are the pre-conscious, pre-egoic drives in which we decide what is important to give our attention to? And that is going to drive unbeknownst to us in many ways, the direction of our life. Right. So that relevance realization, framing, my glasses, they have frames. And it excludes a lot of what I can't see, right? And

I'm not paying attention to, but it also affords me, it focuses me and makes things stand out for me as I look through it. And it's transparent to me. I'm typically not aware of my glasses because I'm aware through them of the world. That's how I am paying attention. And this is really important because there's a lot of really valuable stuff outside of our current frame. Yeah, you better believe it. So, yeah, and you have moments where part of your general intelligence is you have a self-organizing capacity for correcting when you have mis-framed things, when you have focused on the wrong things and ignored the right things. So hopefully this will work for people. You'll have a situation where you'll say, oh, oh, oh, I thought she was

angry, but she's afraid. And everything shifts and your perspective shifts and what you pay attention to shifts. And what's foregrounded and background shifts. And what's salient and relevant shifts, that's insight. That's insight. Insight is your brain's ability to correct when it has misframe. So part of what relevance realization is doing is also always checking to see, If it's framing, well, it has this recursive dimension to it.

And that is almost also happening outside your conscious awareness. So, for example, can you just do an insight? Like, you're in a situation, you need an insight. I don't know how to do this. I need an insight. Well, I'm just going to do an insight, right? It doesn't work that way, right? But you also can't just passively wait for an insight.

You have to, and here's we're back to it. You have to take up the right perspective, because you have to start shifting around what you're noticing, and you have to get into the right participatory mode. You participate in a prospectival flow that can afford the emergence of an insight. I study how insight works. But your point is we also suffer from the opposite, the lack of insight, which is foolishness where you don't notice that she's afraid,

and you double down on that she's angry, and you keep interacting with her as if she's angry, and you're making the situation worse and worse and worse, and you're deceiving yourself about who you are in that situation and about what's going on. And so the very processes that make you so radically, powerfully, intelligently adaptive, make you radically prone to pervasive and profound self-deception.

I think that's part of the first noble truth of Buddhism. that really frames the reality of us either living an ignorant or a wise life, including what is going to be most beneficial to our and others' well-being with the proper framing. There is this infinite warehouse of information and stimulus and signals in our surroundings. And I'm curious how you think intuition relates to this, because they seem analogous and supportive and one or another in many ways. So, I mean, and this is in the book. Which, by the way, we mentioned many times, but it's awakening from the meaning crisis, book one, you and Christopher, and we'll link it down the description.

About the cognitive continuum between what's called fluency and insight and flow, and then into mystical experience and enlightenment. But let's talk about intuition. And this is deeply influenced by the work of Arthur Rieber and Hogarth and his book, Educating Intuition. So Hogarth has a very powerful, I think, I'm convinced it's highly probable that it's correct, account of what's the cognitive process at work in intuition. And he says intuition is the result of what's called implicit learning. So Arthur Reber did a bunch of experiments, and this has been well replicated. So what you do is you come up with an completely artificial grammar.

It's just a set of rules for how you can string letters or numbers together. You have to have two vowels, but you cannot have more than one consonant, and you can never have two odd numbers. Just random rules, and then I create letter number strings that follow this grammar. And I generate a whole bunch of these. And now in the first part of the experiment, what I do is I give them to the participant. Here's one, here's another, and they're long. They're like nine strings, so you can't hold them in working memory. Here's another.

Here's another. Here's another. Okay, that's the first part. Now, what I've now done is for the second part of the experiment, I generate a bunch of new strings. Half of them come from that same artificial grammar that I used in the first part of the experiment. The second half come from a completely different artificial grammar, right? Completely different set of arbitrary rules. And so I have a mixture of new strings, some that come from the same grammar, some that come from an alternative grammar.

Then I give all these new strings to people, and I ask them, which one of the new strings belongs with the old ones? That's it. That's your task. people score well above chance reliably on this. They say, that one belongs, that one belongs, that one doesn't. Because of our subconscious capacity for pattern recognition? Well, basically. And it's very important because what's going on there,

I hesitate to, I don't mind you using the word subconscious. The problem is the notion of consciousness got the whole thing around implicit learning into an endless debate. And so I just say it's not deliberate and explicit learning, just to sidetrack all of that. And so, now if you ask people what they're doing, they'll give you one of two answers. One is, I don't know how I'm doing it. You see how that's so much like intuition already? The other is they'll confabulate. They'll give you a method that they claim is using, but that method actually doesn't predict their success.

So they make something up, right? Here's a third thing. If I take the same experiment and I make it an explicit task, right, which is, these have been generated by rules, try to figure out the rules generating these strings. I make, I give them the explicit, I turn it into an explicit problem. Performance degrades. It gets much worse. Now, here's the problem. Okay, so you have, and I think a lot of so-called psychic phenomena are actually very sophisticated implicit learning. I'm excited to ask you more about that. Okay, I'm happy to talk about that. And so

the problem, and this is where Hogarth's particular genius comes in, the problem with predictive processing is its peril, sorry, is power, which is implicit, because it's implicit is also its peril. So predictive processing, sorry, implicit learning. I said predictive processing. It's a version

of predictive process. I'm trying to keep that out of my mind. The implicit learning, what it's doing is it's picking up on complex patterns without your reflective awareness. That's what makes it so powerful. That means, though, that it suffers from these two deficits that make it perilous. It can't distinguish between kinds of patterns. So it can't distinguish correlational patterns from causal patterns. It can't distinguish illusory patterns from real patterns. Also, it can only pick up on presented patterns. It can't go

looking for patterns that have not yet been presented. Now, those are two significant deficits. So that means when you like what implicit learning does, when it's been powerful for you, you call it your intuition. When it throws up something you realize was illusory, you call it being a racist or being a bigot, or being a sexist, or being insensitive, or et cetera, et cetera. It's the same process, that which makes a sense.

adaptive makes us prone to soft deception. And so Hogarth talks about how do we educate intuition? Because we can't replace it with explicit learning. So what can we explicitly do in order to make intuition better? And so I can go into that at some point if you want, but that's the answer to what I think intuition is. Okay. Well, since we're here, I want to ask you about psychics. Okay. Because there is this one person who I, I, somebody connected me on a call with. She knew nothing other than my first name. And she was 100 on 100 for many things that she told me.

I've since gotten her on a call with a few other friends. And she said things that no other human possibility. No, you could not search up on Google. Ancestral things, things that are happening within my own psyche. She knows nothing about me. Did you record it? I did. I'd like to hear the recording.

I would like to say, yeah, I'll share it with you. Because when this. is typically done. What happens is because we suffer from reconstructive memory. Okay, so memory is not about accurate recall from the past. It's about intelligent prediction of the future. It's about anticipation.

So, classic example. I'll give you a bunch of cards and they have random dot patterns on them. I give you a whole bunch of them, right? And then what I do is I'm going to give you some cards you haven't seen before. And I'm going to ask you if you've seen these, if they replicate the patterns. What I'm going to do

is I'm going to take those. I'm going to a pattern you did not see, but it represents the mathematical average of all the cards you've seen. You know, because what I can do is I can plot them on a grid. That's the one you'd be most confident you saw. Yeah, no, I have totally thought about this. And like I've, in relation to my own, I guess, desire to believe or not believe. But there is, maybe I'll just, maybe if you're open it as an experiment to get on a call with her and see what happens then. Well, I wouldn't, I don't have the relevant expertise.

I want a trained stage mentalist with me because whenever we do these experiments properly, we have a trained stage mentalist, they tell us exactly what the person is typically doing. Okay. And then they put in controls and the psychic thing goes away. Yeah. I'm so fascinated. This is very interesting. I'm not claiming that all these people are charlatans.

I think some of that is because they have crafted very powerful implicit learning. You actually, and I, by the way, and we now know this because the LLMs can take stuff. Right. Patterns in our speech and make powerful predictions about our ancestry and our connections. That data is there. But it would be like giving no data to an LLM to start with. But how long were you talking to her?

None. I said nothing. She just named my first name. And she just started telling you stuff. Listen, I'm very skeptical person. I don't believe stuff. I don't want to bully your phenomenology or your memory. All I know is that reliably when this is put into a test situation, it goes away. Maybe in between, if we do another conversation, we'll try to set something up with a mentalist and really try to poke at this because I'm very, I'm intrigued by it.

I'm baffled by it, and I'm also trying to poke holes in it logically always. And your knowledge of what is available about you is also, how. How did the call get set up, for example? Somebody recommended her because they thought that it would be interesting for me. And I was like, I mean, people ask me this stuff all the time. I'm like, all right, fine. It's like 100 out of 100. So, she knew nothing other than my first.

Because when I've done this with people, and I've asked them to record, and they said 100 to 100. And then we went back and listened to the tape. And I was able to say, well, was that right? Oh, I forgot about that. Okay. Well, we can put this aside. Maybe we'll explore outside of this call.

I hope you understand that I'm not saying that I think you're false. I'm trying to be agnostic. No, I actually do exactly what you're trying to do with me as well, which are just like poke holes into, you know, into all of this. Because of what we've been saying, I know our proclivity for confirmation bias, and I know our proclivity for relevance to realization and for ignoring and for not finding salient and for not remembering. And I also know tremendous capacity. that people have for implicit learning and picking up on very, very complex patterns.

There's been some famous experimental work on so-called psychic abilities that showed that what was actually going on was very powerful implicit learning. There was a notion of Sheldrach of the feeling of being stared at. And you would have people come into a room and you put plugs in their ears and everything. And then randomly people would come in and stare at them. and the people were report of, I'm being stared at or not, and people were scoring well above chance.

And, oh, wow, that's really powerful. Well, then when they tried to replicate it, it's two different things. What they did is they changed one variable. In the initial experience, they were giving people feedback. They were giving the participants. They were saying, yeah, you got that right.

There was somebody. No, you weren't. And you say, well, that doesn't matter because people are being introduced randomly. Human beings can't generate random patterns. It was actually a very complicated pattern. that they were repeating like a sequence, a pattern sequence of how they were introducing people in the room.

And people were picking up implicitly on that pattern. And they were making accurate predictions of when somebody was in the room. Because when you remove the feedback, their performance fell to absolute chance. Now, nobody's doing fraud there. Do you see what I mean? Powerful, powerful implicit learning. What does it mean to increase cognitive agency? I think what it would mean is to move through two steps.

One is to move from intelligence, and these aren't ladders. You don't leave the one behind, right? To move from intelligence to rationality, intelligence is, gee, your measure of general intelligence is only very weakly predictive, only weakly correlated with measures of your general rationality. And then to move from rationality to wisdom. So rationality doesn't primarily mean being logical, even though we use logic as a synonym for rational.

Look, if I try to make you logical, what would you need to do? You'd need to work according to standards of completeness and formality and certainty. So I want you to logically investigate all the information in the room. You're now doomed, right? So if you try to process everything logically, you're doomed. So that's not what rational means. Because you can only be logical after you've done a lot of relevance realization. Anna Riddell and I, we got a paper and revision.

We think it's going to get published soon, making this argument and more technical detail for people who want to go into it. So what is rational mean? Well, it doesn't mean simply being intelligent because you can be highly intelligent and fail most of the tests of rationality. So it doesn't mean being logical. It doesn't mean being smart. What does it being rational means? It means what we've been talking about. It means the capacity to reflectively become aware of self-deception and systematically and

systemically intervene in it. That's what rationality is. And you have to do it, right, not just for each kind, not for just propositional knowing. You have to do it for each kind of knowing because you can bullshit yourself with how you pay attention. That's how advertising works. You can bullshit yourself by taking the wrong way. rule. I suffer from this, especially like when I've gone on like this and I've been in this mode, John Verviki, scientist mode, and I go home and Sara has to say, John, John, you're not scientists

anymore. It's me, Sarah. I get back into the right, like, take on the right agency, take on the right, right? So, think about rationality is I use my intelligence so that I systematically, many domains in the world and systemically, many levels overcome self-deception. But I do that for each of the kind of knowings. That's the second stage. But now I want to coordinate all of the rationalities so that they don't conflict, that they instead are coherent and afford each other. So I get a rationally self-transcending field of rationalities.

That long phrase can be replaced with wisdom. That's what wisdom is. That's what it is to enhance your cognitive agency. to cultivate rationality beyond your intelligence and wisdom beyond your rationality. And there's a state beyond that, too, I think. What is a state beyond that? I think it's enlightenment. Okay.

We'll pick back up on enlightenment. But what is this simple practical thing somebody can do to increase cognitive agency today, for example? Someone's listening to this. Practice at least one. Remember I talked about like an ecology of practice? practice at least these two things. You have two things that are in opponent processing. Opponent processing is they're working together to make you adaptive,

but they're doing opposite things. So one is you are within a frame and you're very carefully moving step by step through an inferential argument, okay? What we typically call reasoning, although that's a bit of a mistake. So let's call that inference to make it clear. Then you have a different thing, which is, no, no, that's entitlementally the wrong frame. I need to break out of it. We've already talked about that.

That's insight. Now, they work differently. So if you let your insight machinery work inside the inference frame, you can get into trouble. So here's a pond. There's a lily pad on it. Every day, the number of lily pads doubles. On day 20, the pond is filled. on what day was it half filled with dully pads?

I mean, it's not 10, right? But you want to say 10, don't you? You want to. It's probably... Yeah, so there's a part of you with the compounding effect is I don't know, it's probably somewhere... It's 19. It's the day before.

Oh, yeah. The day before is... Oh, yeah, duh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, duh. See, there's... Yeah, right, right. So it's a day before, okay? Now, notice what happens. You've got, let's call Bob the Insight guy.

He's trying to jump to a conclusion because that's what insight is. You're jumping, right? You're breaking a frame and jumping to a new way, right? And when you like it, it's insight. When you don't like it, it's jumping to a conclusion. So you need a practice that constrains that machinery while you're inside inference. This is called active open-mindedness.

You try to look for biases. You try to look for jumping and you try and really constrain it. But sometimes you need an. insight because what's going wrong isn't the inference what's going wrong is the framing now what you need to do is you need to shut off all of that inferential machinery you need to shut it off and make that kind of jumping or leaping as it's sometimes called because an insight is a cognitive leap you need to make that more available that's a mindfulness practice mindfulness practices are shutting off the inferential machinery to enhance the insight. But you also need rational reflective practices,

active open-mindedness, that quiet the insight machinery, so the inferential machinery. And you don't want to maximize either one because both can lead you into trouble. You want to be practicing both so they're like an ecology. They're constantly acting like a dynamic check and balance on each other. That's one example. Yeah. So the practical application of trying to reason your way through something in life and you keep heading a dead end or whatever to slow down and have a mindfulness practice that allows you to create more space to come from a different frame in a way. Right, but don't over-rely on your insight and your intuition when the context requires an appropriate careful step by, so like when I'm writing a paper, of course I want insight to go into the

generation of the framing of it, but I want to be very, very careful when I'm making my inferential steps when I'm actually doing this scientific argument. As it relates to IQ, Yes. So, I mean, I feel like people will think something is profound to the degree it touches the upper boundary of their intelligence, right? And so, or would you agree? No.

Okay, please, push back on it. Because I've actually developed and been publishing a theory of what profundity actually is. and so do you want to go through that? Yeah, maybe profoundness actually isn't the right word. But go ahead. So, profundity is, it's part of how we sense the things are real. And real is a comparative. Real isn't like red, real is like tall.

Something is real in comparison, more real or less real than something else. So, for example, you think the dream is real while you're in it, but then you wake up and you move to a bigger frame, And from that bigger frame, you see the limitations and bias of the dream world and you say that it wasn't real. By the way, that's a metaphor that people use for meaning in life. They want to be connected to something bigger than themselves. They don't mean literally bigger. They want to be in that bigger picture because that has a greater chance of connecting them to reality.

Okay. So what people are doing is they're looking for an increase in intelligibility. That means things making more sense. Is that okay? Now, one of the things we look for is we look for trustworthiness. We want many independent lines of investigation to lead to the same model. That's why you regard, even babies do this. If a baby only sees something, the baby's not sure if it's real, because it might be a subjective illusion, yes?

But if the baby can see it and hear it and touch it, the baby thinks, treats it as real. Because the chance that each one of those channels is going through the same subjective illusion is much... smaller. So you decrease the probability, sorry, you decrease the probability of subjective illusion by having many converging things come in. So that's why we want independent lines of evidence that lead to something that makes sense for us. It's got to be coherent. It has to, like we talked about coherence. It has to not be absurd. It has to work. It has to fit. It has to rule things out and it has to rule things in. But that's not enough. We also want something that empowers us. We want our model to be elegant. We want it to go into many different domains and find problems

that we hadn't seen before and solve them. Einstein's theory of relativity is profound because it's elegant, right? It goes into all of these domains, right, and finds things. And so it makes all this new sense. So we want really trustworthy old sense coming into a really coherent informative model that makes a lot of new sense. And we want those two to be balanced. So if I'm not projecting very much, promising to explain very much, you don't need the model to be particularly deeply trustworthy. If I say, I like vanilla ice cream, you know, go, oh, oh. But if I say, you know, I think the English monarchy are lizards. And notice how I can explain so much of their behavior with that. You go, yeah, you can explain a lot of their behavior, but that's a really untrustworthy model.

And this is how conspiracy theories. This is one of the way we bullshit ourselves. We get things that are highly, well, think about far-fetched. They project a lot, but they're not trustworthy. We also have the opposite. We have something that's really trustworthy, but it doesn't project very much. That's triviality. And when people are hungry, they eat. You don't go, that's really profound. Of course it's trustworthy. You don't doubt that. Yeah, of course. But it doesn't open up reality. But when it's really trustworthy and it's really coherent. So when you've got convergence, you've got coherence, you've got coherence,

and you've got elegance, and you've got them balanced. Then we find something profound. We find it highly plausible. Where plausible means I take it very seriously. Yeah. Fascinating. Amazing. So one of the things you asked me a minute ago, one of the things people should be doing

is, you know, we can't control very much the probability of the information we're getting because that involves experimentation and causal interaction with the world. We have to trust other people about that. But what you and I can do is we can do a lot of. about the plausibility. What should we take seriously? Well, ask yourself, how many, and really check for confirmation bias, how many independent lines of evidence and argument have converged on this?

How coherent? How clearly does it, is it vague or is it coherent? Does it rule things out? Does it rule things? And how elegant? How much does it promise to open up and generate new understanding for me? Then take it seriously. That's some recommendation to give to your listeners.

practice plausibility more and more. And the more you get better at it, the more you will bump into something that's profound. That's really important asterisk there. How much is IQ in your understanding a predictor of success in life versus fulfillment in life? Is there a correlation? That's a brilliant question.

So I think IQ is largely a measure of anticipatory irrelevance realization. And therefore, I think it is massively predictive of your ability to learn and solve problems. If I have to get one measure from you, I want G. Because G's going to tell me how long you're going to live, how well you're going to do in your job,

how well you're going to do in your relationships, how well you're going to do in your educational projects. Which would be an IQ from some sort of reliable test that people... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not one of the Earthsats test that's on the internet. you know, one of the reliable tests, the ones that's been well there. Which you really, you're kind of like, is that just very predominantly genetic and like you're born with? So it's G by E.

So your IQ, although it's not very malleable, perhaps long-term meditation altering, working memory in your salience landscape can nudge G a bit. I think that's not a consensus. I'm not even convinced, but I take it seriously. But that doesn't mean you're just genetically determined. This is a misleading way of talking about it because people will usually create a square in their mind and then just divide it and half. But it's 50% genetics, 50% environment and how they interact that actually generates your intelligence. But what's more important about you, because your intelligence is not, very malleable, very changeable.

If I had to, like, what a better measure I want, and, you know, Stanovich has talked about this, a colleague of mine from the University of Toronto in what intelligence test mix. I want actually measures of your rationality and your wisdom. Because unlike your intelligence, rationality and wisdom are very malleable. How do you measure wisdom? So you can measure rationality, and then what you want to do is you want to try and measure all the rationalities and all the different kinds of knowing and relative tradeoffs between measures of insight and measures of inference and then you have standard we have we have validated

wisdom scales and they're still all in progress they're much better than nothing yeah but they're not at the level of psychometric level that we have for g we have some measures of rationality that are approaching the validity like that are for measures of of g and rationality is ultimately much more important a measure from you and I think we will eventually get the wisdom measures they're already better than nothing they're better than people's just intuitive judgments

but hopefully we'll get them up to that level that's part of what my work hopefully contributes towards and those measures are very very powerful the measures of rationality are very powerful for predicting what you ask me above and beyond success, well-being. Because rationality and meaning in life, which I think goes where we're starting to blend

into wisdom, are much more predictive of well-being, or at least eudamonia, or a life well-lived, than you're in measures of intelligence. What do you learn from the Buddhist understanding in psychology for the cultivation of wisdom in one's life? what is like a predominant overarching theme that you see there? All of what I said to you about the centrality importance of non-propositional knowing

and the need to bring about an eight-spoked wheel and ecology of practices that can transform the non-propositional in order to fundamentally alter my connectedness to real and see through illusion and self-deception, all of that was, well, it was originally inspired by Socrates and Plato, but it was educated through Buddhism. But then I came back to find the Neoplatonic tradition, and I got it further educated within the Western philosophical tradition.

You mentioned pointing to something beyond what we were speaking to earlier about enlightenment. Yes. What is enlightenment in your understanding? So it's, I argue, Chris and I argue on this in the book, and I've got a new paper coming out with Hussein and Daniel called flowing into mystical experience, that there's a cognitive continuum. So you have a domain general heuristic that you use for, so let me, called fluency. I give you a text and it's got standard white, you know, white print and a back, sorry, black print and a white background. I give you the exact same text, but it's now red-orange. Okay?

So the second one's more difficult to read. The content, the propositional content is exactly the same. You have to manipulate this so people aren't just directly comparing them beside each other. But I ask you, which one's more likely to be true? You tell me the one that was black and white rather than one that was red and orange. you find that one that was black and white more beautiful. You make judgments of truth, goodness, and beauty according to how fluently you process the information.

So this is called a domain general of heuristic because it's not based on what you're processing, it's based on how you're processing. Now what do we think, what do I think is going on? Because there's controversy over what is fluency, what we argue in the paper. And more and more people I think are coming around to see this

because they used to think it was ease of processing. It was just how easy things are processed. You judge them as more real. That's not right because I can make something very easy for you to process merely by repeating it, merely by repeating it, merely by repeating it, merely by, and you're not going, oh, profound truth, you're going, this is stupid, right? So it's not ease of processing. It's much more like this.

It's much more like the relevance realization that is taking a common, complex, messy, ill-defined world and framing it so that you have a clear, well-defined problem that you can work with. Right. So that's called optimal gripping, right? So fluency is measuring the degree to which you're optimal gripping, and your brain is using that as a measure for how real the information is. It's a heuristic, which means denote free lunch theorem, it's bound to go wrong, but it's

an actually, it's a really good heuristic, like all your other adaptive heuristics. It's a really good rule of thumb to use. Now, Tobolinski and Reber, when you have an insight, you actually have a spike in fluency. You have a sudden increase in how fluent you're processing is. And that gives you this moment of like this super salience and this flash and you feel more deeply connected. Now, what if you took a bunch of insights and you strung them together so one insight is priming another so that you're doing something like rock climbing and you have to continually,

non-propositionally restructure how you're looking at things and your embodiment. And so you go through one, you almost in past, but then you get an insight and then you go to another and you go to another and you go to another. And what's happening is those insights are priming each other. You get an insight cascade

and you're getting an extended aha experience and the world feels super salient and it feels like discovery and you feel deeply at one. and you're focused and your egocentric narrative is dropping away because you're so religio, you're so coupled to the world. That's the flow state. One of the things happening in the flow state.

Remember when I talked about implicit learning and it can go wrong? Well, what did Hogarth recommend you do to improve implicit learning? Well, he said you want to explicitly set up the context in which you're doing the implicit learning in order to help you track causal patterns rather than correlational patterns. Well, how you do that. Well, we know how to do that. That's exactly what an experiment is. An experiment is you set up the environment so you can cleanly distinguish causal patterns

from correlational patterns. What do you need in an experiment? You need clear information. Things can't be vague. You need tightly coupled. When I manipulate something, there has to be a tightly coupled response. And failure matters. You have to be able to say, hey, your hypothesis wasn't confirmed.

Okay, so clear information, tightly coupled, failure matters. What are the conditions Chick-Semaha said need to be the case in information processing in order for you to get into the flow state? You need clear information, it has to be tightly coupled, and failure has to matter. Do you see what flow is, it's not only an insight cascade, right? And your brain's going, ooh, that's good, lots of insight. It's also you're cultivating intuitions that are picking up on complex patterns that are also real. And so your brain's going, do more of that. Do more of both of those more, more, more, more.

That's why flow is a universal across cultures, gender, socioeconomic, status, language groups. People describe flow in detail with near-sononymous terms. And flow is optimal for people. they regard it as some of the most powerful experiences of their life, and it's their optimal performance, right? That's because it has a high, profound functionality. That's one of those two experiences, maybe two or three experiences,

where our reduction in our egocentric narrative self is experienced positively because we're actually getting enhanced meaning in life, enhanced religio. That's why, if I want to know how much meaning in life you have, One of the things I'll ask you is, how frequently do you get into the flow state? And that's quantity, quality. Are you flowing in an environment that's largely real?

Right. Now, what if flow is dependent on your skills, right? The demands have to just exceed your skills. Like you need a degree of unconscious competency to be able to. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Now, you can get domain-specific skills, skills that fit a particular domain. like I'm a martial artist, right?

And so sitting at the piano and you understand your skills that's deep in your body. That's flow. Exactly, exactly. But you have domain general skills. You have domain general skills. You have skills of general intelligence, of orientation, of religio, of connectedness. Does that make sense? What if you were flowing in those?

Yeah, that sounds epic. And Stephen Batcher has argued, and I've got the great pleasure to meet Steve, even have dinner with him, that in his book on awakening, alone with others, an existential approach to Buddhism, he thought that's what the Buddha had. He had this general flow state, rather than a domain-specific flow state. That's not all the Enlightenment is. Okay. But yeah, but it does make perfect sense when you hear the term enlightenment, and you're relating as you are to the saliency of experience where things are flowing. Yeah, you get this even more profound sense of at one minute.

sense of being deeply coupled. You get a massive reduction of egocentrism. You get a massive presence of reality centristism. Yeah. Like the reduction in DMN, what do you say in the default mode network? Oh, well, you have to... How do we not want to go there?

Well, yes, and no, it's more complicated because you're actually doing a opponent processing. You're doing relevance realization and intelligence. But that's not enough. That's a mystical experience. Okay. But... That's not enough for enlightenment. Right. Okay. So we'll continue here,

but I just think it's everybody can relate to this moment in their life where they had a deep felt connection of everything around them and a lack of overly focusing on self. Exactly. Andre, the reason why we talk about the continuum is you have fluency every moment. You've had insights. The flow experience is a universal experience. And then if you see that mystical experience is just on that the same machinery, then we're removing the mystique, not the challenge, but we're moving. the mystique around the mystical experience. And this is important. 40% of the population, by most estimates, has anomalous experiences, visionary experiences, mistralic experience. One of the problems of the meaning crisis is they don't have a framework to integrate those experiences. There's a lot I want to unpack there, but it sounds like enlightenment is this, like to the degree you have become enlightened is to the degree in which you've

created a continuity of this flow within your life. and like maintaining it moment to moment. You reference these experiences that people have, like one that you had of the platonic solids, right? You mentioned earlier, which is we don't have the right frame. I'm curious to what degree mental institutions are filled with people that have accessed,

like if there's a percentage of people in there that have access to state or experience. That's a good question. That's a very good question. And there's a lot of overlap in the phenomenology between psychotic experiences, visionary experiences, psychedelic experiences, and mystical experiences. They're not the same, but they overlap in ways. Sense of presence, Anderson Day's book on presence, we now realize this is pervasive,

and it gets a little bit freaky, and this is a sensed presence. I had one of these when I was in deep meditation. This can happen to people in deep meditation. I was all alone and it was in the house. I was in a closed room and I heard my name shouted as if it clears a bell. There was nobody around. Things like that can happen. John Geiger reports this really interesting thing.

People were doing rock climbing and I don't, I'm not rock climbing. Sorry, something much more challenging, ice climbing. And the two of them and they fell off. And one of them unfortunately died. And the other one, he's, he, like he was deeply, he went. into shock. And so he's laying there, sort of considering that he's going to die. And he got, a sensed presence,

came up to him. He didn't see anything. And it spoke to him, and it said, your nose is bleeding. And he said, so what? And he said, well, get, the sense presence said, get up. Because your nose is bleeding. There's snow on the ground. You can let the blood drip on the ground, and then you won't walk in circles, and that's how you can find your way out. That's how he found his way out.

Whoa. Now, you get really powerful things that, see how that borders on the visionary. You also get really weird ones where people just say, I have this weird sense of something just behind my left shoulder or just behind my right shoulder. Weird sense. People get voices. People say, there's a voice, there's a voice speaking to me, but it doesn't say anything. Like, this is weird gambo. Are these all aspects of our own being, or do you think there's actually any existential reality to...

being non-embodied beings communicating with them? Well, I don't think they're ontologically autonomous, but I don't think they're merely subjective. Okay. Somewhere in between? Well, that in-between really matters. Yeah, no, for sure, that's what I'm saying. It's somewhere. The religio, relevance.

Relevance isn't objective. Is that relevant in and of itself? No. Is relevance merely subjective? No, because you can be wrong about it. Relevance is, there's a Greek word for it, Metaxu. Socrates described himself as metaxu. Human beings are between the animals and the gods, right?

Metaxu. Relevance is between, beneath, and binds the subjective and objective together so that truth is possible. So what we can do, you know how you have a body image, right? And you don't actually, you do a lot of processing through the body image, not through directly interacting with every little aspect of your body. It's a very powerful internal image your body makes use. You probably also have a mind image. There's a term called exapt.

Exapt is when you repurpose something like the tongue has been repurposed for speech. It didn't originally evolve for speech. Lots of organisms have tongue, but they don't. And you are constantly exapting. You take your sensory motor patterns and you exact them into, moving through abstract conceptual space. Ideas are far from each other, close from each other. One is under another and supports another. You use all this language. We're constantly exapting. And what we can do is we can exact the body image, right? And the body image is

it's transjective in nature. It's not about our physical body. It's about our lived body. It's about how our body is connected to the environment because it's about our embodied agency. We also have, I think, and this is what Andrews in the day seems to be arguing. We also have a mind image that's not about our mind, but about how our mind is connected. And we can exact that mind image, and especially under situations of duress. And we can make it, give it an independent perspective so that it can break us out of the, it can help us break a frame we're locked into. Just like you can play with the body image. when you're doing Tai Chi Chuan.

Yeah. Did that... Yeah, I mean, it brings up a lot of questions that I want to probe further around the nature of consciousness, the possibility of idealism, all these things. But we did mention there was an aspect of enlightenment that we haven't gotten to yet that I want to make space for. Okay, so first of all, like I said, 40%.

A lot of people have mystical experiences, and they just can't integrate them or they dismiss them. So having a mystical experience isn't enough. and so it first has to be appropriate. It has to be internalized as a transformative experience. You're going to bring about, you know, I talked about this earlier, a systematic change in who you are

so that you get a systemic reconnection to reality. Now, that's still not enough. Because I think that state, that state of gnosis, that transformative connectedness that's disclosing deep truths, has to be in service of addressing the perennial problems that beset humanity. Doesn't it inherently do so by the liberation of your own being? Now, that's a really good question, and I don't know if, can we answer?

I mean, in one sense, the track record seems to be pretty good about enlightened beings, but we don't know about all the enlightened beings. Sorry, I don't, I'm speaking in the way I shouldn't be speaking, given the argument I'm making. are there enlightened beings that deign to not do anything about it? And then we have a selective bias. We would only know about the ones that went around trying to help other people. Yeah, I suppose you need to make some sort of metaphysical claims about the nature of consciousness liberated in one being

and if that has sort of value to others outside of what they do with it. But I think at least practically we should say, we should stipulate that what we reverse engineer it and say, we're not going to call it enlightenment unless that transformative, state is disposed to systematically alleviating suffering, reducing self-deception, and increasing religio for people on a comprehensive and reliable basis. That's what I think enlightenment is. And I think you can regularly see that in the Buddha, and you can see it in Jesus of Nazareth, you can see it in Socrates. What do you think about, I mean, again, this can be,

fall into the dangerous territory of trying to top-down process and propositionally know and Cartesianly split the developmental process of awakening. But I'm curious if you're familiar at all and think there's any validity to things like spiral dynamics or Ken Wilbur's map of consciousness in terms of mapping colors to degrees of consciousness and perspectives on life. I'm just curious, is there any way to measure? if it's useful, our own degree of unenlightenment and enlightenment. So I talked to Ken once, and he sent me a copy of his book with a really wonderful note about

he really likes my work a lot. And I have several of his books, and I've had groups of people from the integral community who form study groups and followed Awakening for the meeting crisis. So I want to be very respectful. but I haven't had an opportunity to study this in depth. You know, I've read some transpersonal psychology, but I was much more interested in the work of people like Michael Washburn and others that had a much more dynamical system approach,

whereas Wilbur tends to have a structural list orientation. So I want to just say, I have a sense that there's something there because of the interactions I've had, but I'm not in the place to make a good, I don't have enough knowledge to make a judgment that I would want to pronounce. Another focus I'm interested if you've connected with, do you know Charles Eisenstein? Have you chatted with him at all? No.

The name sounds vaguely familiar though. One book he wrote, which is a more beautiful world, our hearts know as possible. But he's an incredible thinker. and I'm just curious. And with the understanding of the context of this whole conversation, what does a world, what is the vision of a future of the world post-demeaning crisis where we've kind of birthed the next version of this paradigm? Like, what does that look like to you, you know?

So having... You realize you've opened up a can of worms because this is the big project I'm working on now. So I made a mistake in the series. First of all, the series was presented monologically, and we actually operate better dialogically than monologically. And secondly, I came away with that with this proposal of the religion that's not a religion and very much a top-down, you know, I'm going to engineer an ecology of practices and all that sort of thing. Now, there's been some benefit to that mistake in framing. We have an online, like a website, like a platform where you can go called Awaken to Meaning, run by my very good friend, Taylor Barrett, where there's an ecology of practices, mindfulness, reflection, imaginal practices, all the stuff we've been talking about, organized in an ecology, dialogical practices. So I'm happy about that.

But this idea of a religion that's not a religion is actually, I think, fundamentally a mistaken way of doing it. It's top down. and you can't top down an insight. Sorry, it just doesn't work. But what happened because of the meeting crisis is I got connected to all these communities, all these emerging communities in which people, and I don't mean the weird, messed up, culty,

I mean the healthy ones. Yeah. Where there are, and I get to meet a lot of them, like Rave, the work that my good friend, Rave Kelly does, and others and Benita Roy and others I've seen all these

emerging communities and practices and it occurred to me and more and more and the work that Thomas Stadinger is doing and I could name so many and when you meet these people

you just get a profound sense of something is happening something is being born through them and their work and their community I call it the advent of the sacred I think the response to the meaning Christ

is that the meaning crisis is like a grand civilization level of framebreaking. And what's happening is like a civilizational insight is beginning to take shape. And we have to properly orient to afford it and help it encourage and caress it and cultivate it to take shape, advent of the sacred. And so my next big project is called the Philosophical Silk Road, in which what I'm going to do is I'm trying to create a new genre. Me and a whole bunch of people

is I'm going to go to various places. It's inspired by the Silk Road in which there was a civilizational transformational movement of ideas. I'm no romantic. I know the Silk Road was also breached in blood and capitalism and thievery, but it also did this other thing.

That's why I call it the philosophical Silk Road. It created a lingua, philosophica, a shared language so that these different worldviews, the different religions and philosophies could deeply and mutually transform each other. You know, I think we're having one right now. When you get into one of these conversation that takes on a life of its own, well, we could afford that between traditions. We could have not only an ecology of practices.

We could have a vibrant ecology of tradition. So I want to travel. I want to travel through all of the neoplata, the, neoplata, the, the neoplatanism of because arthur vlis is right neoplatanism is the spiritual backbone of the west it's it's the mysticism in christianity in sufism and judaism it's it goes into the renaissance it goes into the scientific revolutions both the one of around the enlightenment and the one around the time of einstein so it has this massive capacity and i want to travel and go to all these places right and actually try to give people like the geography and the culture and the atmosphere and try to presence this sage so people can like nicholas of kuzzo or maister ecart

right or go to alexandra talk about saint clement right and and then and then i want to bring zen zen is the another grand unified field theory you know from the east of kyoto school of the shita and the shittani and and and and and coming from the east and then there's you know go to india and you know and nargans Juna and Sankara from the Vedanta and go into Samarkana and talk about Souravardi, go to all these places and undergo, make myself a vulnerable vehicle through which the advent of the sacred could potentially, you know, hopefully maybe I could contribute to giving birth to that lingua philosophica. And then below that level of that documentary film, there's going to be a 20-episode lecture series like Awakening for the Meeting Crisis,

but it's going to be filmed before a live audience of graduate-level students. And then below that, for people who want to dig down, there'll be individual video essays with much more technical argument. And below that, we have people working right now on what's called the Codex. They're basically making a Wikipedia of all the terms and all the languages and all the references, and it's at four levels of accessibility from grade 10 on. It's got cross-referencing and pictures and practices you can engage in to understand any of the terms. And there's going to be all four of these levels presented for people, and they can move up and down the levels as well as back and forth between the narrative story and the lecture series.

That is my attempt to afford the lingua philosophica that will bring about the ecology of traditions will bring about this meta-conversation, this meta-deologos, so that we can more. properly make ourselves oriented to afford and apprehend and appreciate the advent of the sacred. Wow. I'm excited, man. That's epic. I can't wait to see it and take part, support how I can. And that just seems like an immense service.

If people are interested, and I'm not, please, please. I'll send you the link. We have a website up about the philosophical Silk Road. We are doing fundraising for it right now. And I don't want to get into, you know, asking for money. But we are in that. So, you know, if people are interested in that, that's what we're doing right now. And we already had a lot of people very much interested, committing.

It looks like we're going to be able to raise the funds, but you never know. So you'll always ask for more until you get what you need, right? So I'm very excited about this project. I have to tell you, Andre, this is not – calling it a project is a mistake. I am called to this, deeply, deeply called. I call it a pilgrimage. I'm going to go on it. Because look, most of this is not going to be carried by the propositions.

It's going to be carried by the non-propositional. How I undergo it. Chris is going to be there along the way, acting like a father confessor and talking to me, right? And I'm going to be talking to people. And there's going to be music and animation. And we're going to try to just, it's a pilgrimage. It's a pilgrimage. So it's called Walking the Philosophical Silk Road.

Amazing. leave links for that. I'm so curious, but people can check that out in the description below. And it's an exciting time to be alive with people. And hopefully you can really receive this, you know, where your life's work has up to this point, like, you've culminated to the amount of knowledge, connections, insight to truly create some things in the world that have, that meaningfully have the capacity to evolve consciousness and make a, you know, a real true and changing impact on people's lives. So I'm just, I'm honored, man.

And I'm glad that. Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad to know that you're doing that work. Thank you. Very exciting. Thank you. So I can't tell you what the world will look like because it's not my place to do so. I'm trying my best to make that advent happen.

Last couple things, as we've been going for a while here. And this has been incredible. I love this conversation so much. Me too. hopefully to be continued. I'm just curious from a bit of the macro's perspective, we can observe both constructive and deconstructive patterns in terms of human evolution.

And like, what is the relationship you've seen between human suffering and a larger evolutionary process? Because... Do you mean, like, is there a teleological reason for the suffering? No, I suppose. What is the necessity of any organism, if you want to look at the planet at large like one, giving birth, which is usually a messy process, and how, like, to the extreme, how do we know, I guess, to where the extreme is in that process?

Is it inevitable to obviously have a degree of struggle and what is new to be emerged? Oh, excellent. So, yeah, I'm glad you refined your question. I think your question is excellent. just got a paper published Johannes Yeager Anna Riddell a student, co-author of mine, Alex Jada,

a former student of mine, Dennis Walsh, my colleague at Yiftia and myself. Relevance realization can't be rendered, can't be captured computationally, can be captured in a formal system. There's a long technical argument.

People can read the paper if they want, or if you want me to go into it, But right now, the point is relevance realization is always going to be messy. Here, it will do something intuitive. We talked about attention. You have a point of processing. I mentioned it earlier. You have the default mode network that's trying to make your mind wander.

And then you have the task-focused network that is trying to keep you focused on tasks. And they're pulling you in different directions. What does the default mode network do? Like evolution, Darwinian evolution, it introduces variation. And then what does the task focus network? Like natural selection, selective attention, it kills off most of those variations, but it keeps a couple of them. And therefore, the way that sensory motor loop reproduces itself evolves.

So your attention is constantly evolving its fittedness. Does that make sense? So you have, relevance realization is like biological evolution, and what it gives you is something deeply analogous to biological adaptivity. Okay. There is no final form of life. There is no final form of relevance. There is no perfection.

It's impossible. It doesn't make any sense. Now, I have a suspicion. I'll make an argument, but I want everybody to remember the tentativeness by which I'm talking about the advent of the sacred. Please ask for that. So in that spirit of that, I think what we need to understand is a new sense of the sacred. We've tended to think, and this is where I'm critical of Plato, who I love deeply, right?

We tended to think of the sacred as that which is perfect. complete, final, and brings about rest. That isn't going to work. There's an alternative notion. So one way of thinking about sacred that many people have talked about is the sacred is what is most real, most orienting, and most transformative for us. It is that which most enhances our religio and most helps us overcome self-deception. And you're nodding because, you're like, yeah, yeah.

That lines up with a, right? So what is sacredness? Well, what is real? Remember, real is comparative, more intelligibility. So something, why do we use a shadow as a metaphor for not real or the matrix, right? And the stick is real and the shadow is not real. Because I can use the stick to understand the shadow, but I can't use the shadow to understand the stick.

And there's lots more information to be found in the stick. not there's nothing and it's absolutely shallow the shadow yet reality this is from the philosopher polaniac really captured well in a really excellent book by esther like at me called contact with the reality realness is right is a reality is an reality is an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility that is constantly calling us to innovate constantly calling us to insight and so what and then we have this never endable relevance realization that is constantly evolving and right and can constantly evolve because reality is constantly giving us more and more and more real the possibility of more and more realness the sacred is an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility that can constantly

afford our cultivation of wisdom that was great and evolving ever so into infinity. Right. And for people who might be a little bit irked by that, within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, deeply influenced by neoplatonism and neoplatonism as opposed to classical Platonism, there was a notion, I think it was Nicholas,

not Nicholas, sorry, Gregory of Nessa, epictasis, was the idea that heaven isn't like the Bittific vision or heaven isn't, you go to a place and you look at God and rest. What you're doing is God is a constant field that affords you to continually self-transcend so that you more and more forever see things more and more the way God does. It's an unending process of continual growth in wisdom.

So there's an ancient here. There's at least one tradition that saw sacredness that one. not as perfection, not as completeness, not as rest, not as static, but it's an inherently vibrant, living and dynamic, and filled, therefore, inexorably with the messiness of life and relevance realization. So in order to remove suffering, that which makes you intelligently adaptive, makes you prone to self-deception. If I had to make you permanently incapable of self-deception, I would have to throttle your adaptivity. I would have to keep you. I would have to kill you. That is the only way to make you perpetually free forever from self-deception.

Well, well. Please don't do that. No, I don't want to. No, I know. I'm playing with you. Man, there is, there's, it really is an honor and pleasure to be speaking with you because there's so many areas in which I can explore where there will be meaningful dialogue across the board. and there is a lot more that I'm looking forward to potentially in a second conversation. If you want me back, I'll come back. Okay, sweet.

Yeah, I would love that. Let's have a little bit, I mean, this whole conversation has been fun, but I have a couple like rapid fire things that it might be painful for you to try to be as concise as I'm required. I will be as concise as I possibly can on the understanding that that's the context

in which I'm stating things. Amazing. Okay, cool. So you've, of course, studied many incredible minds throughout history. And so the first kind of endeavor I want to try to take you through is, I'm going to say a name, and you tell me the most important message that you've learned from them. I'll try.

Okay. That's all I asked. Okay. All right. Well, let's start with Plato. Identify with your finite transcendence. Marcus Aurelius. It is possible to be happy even in a palace.

we got to unpack these more at another point but that's i love it um heidegger being is not any particular thing or kind of being william james relevance matters as much as truth carl young there is a one within you that can open you up to the one without Freud You are prone to profound self-deception Aristotle The world can be made sense of scientifically Spinoza

I'm teaching of course right now on Einstein and Spinoza's God All the Cartesian decotomies can be overcome and you can find a new way of understanding God and ultimate reality John Verveiki John Vervei What have I most learned from John Verveke? What I've most learned from John Verveke

is John Verveke is capable of very massive amounts of self-deception but he does have a spark within him I'm going to scratch that don't forget what I just said, it's all there. I'm going to say what my dear and beloved friend Christopher Master Pietro said about me. He said, John Ravaki is the person, the person he knows who most relentlessly and reliably

tries to self-transcend. I aspire to keep that true. Thank you for pulling that one. Because it's important to see ourselves often how others see us too. So much amazing things to unpack there. I have some rapid-fire questions again to try to be as concise as possible and then we'll close up. Okay. All right. What are three books you think everyone should read before they die? The Republic, the Gospel of John and Spinoza's Ethics.

What's a common self-help idea about meaning or purpose that's actually making people more lost? Thinking that everything is about purpose. So tempted to unpack these more. I'm restraining myself. If you could instantly download one skill into your brain, Matrix Style, what would it be to have that comprehensive flow state that i think the buddha had enlightenment well at least the flow state yeah that yeah what's one strongly held belief that you had 10 years ago that you no longer do that there wasn't a god i don't believe in the theistic notion of god but i also reject the atheistic

rejection of god cool well we'll unpack that nontheism more supposed to I'd love to. I've enjoyed this conversation. If you want to help me back, I'll come back. From the perspective of our descendants in a 25th century civilization, what is the primary observation they would make about our current stage of development? We're in a kairos. We're in a turning point. And kairos is when the system is most unstable, that's very negative, but it's also where individual actions can make the most difference. We're in a kairos. What is the most meaningful realization that our civilization would have to integrate to make it through that turning point?

We have to recover a livable relationship with the sacred. What's the question you wish people would ask you more often? What makes me happy? What does make you happy? When I'm in Diologos and it takes on a life of its own, and I have a sense that reality within and without are disclosing themselves to me and the other person so that we're both getting to a place we couldn't get to on our own. I share that with you, my friend.

And I feel we successfully did so in this conversation. I agree, totally, my friend. I agree. It was psychedelic in some way, you know, when you really fall into that flow, you know, fully alive and just super appreciative. In closing, what's the most beautiful? pattern you've recognized studying many ancient wisdom traditions about life and reality beautiful pattern i think the one i talked about earlier and when it when you say it it can sound trivial but that when we truly open up in that transformative way of i've discussed we find that reality is already ahead of

us opening up to us john thank you so much it's been a great pleasure great great pleasure everybody I highly recommend checking out the book there's also obviously the preexisting YouTube series but awakening from the meaning crisis the book the book goes way beyond the series amazing incredible work we'll leave links for this down in the description below everybody let us know in what ways this is uniquely meaningful to you I'm really I want to know in which ways this actually impacts your life and matters to you and how it changes the way in which you move through the world again John, is there any last closing thoughts or anything you want to share before we head out?

Like I said, please buy the book and keep your eyes open, everyone, for the philosophical Silk Road. Amazing. Incredible. Everybody, thank you. Until next time, be well. Take care.