TrueLife - Psychosis, Sense Ratio, and the Written Word Part 1: Understanding Consciousness, Reason, and Expression

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/The human mind teeters between reason and chaos. In Part 1 of this series, George Monty examines the concept of “sense ratio” — the balance of perception, cognition, and interpretation — and its relationship to psychosis and the written word.From philosophy to literature, from cognitive science to mystical insight, this episode investigates how consciousness is shaped, distorted, and expressed through language.In this episode:Understanding sense ratio and its impact on perceptionHow psychosis informs, distorts, or expands consciousnessThe role of writing and language in shaping realityInsights from philosophy, psychology, and literary analysisPractical and conceptual strategies for navigating consciousness One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scar's my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. Got a great show for you. It's a real head scratcher, I think. It is getting into some of the ideas of Marshall McClellan. Some of the ideas about the medium is the message.

It sounds a bit daunting. Let me break down what I mean when I say the medium is the message. Think for a moment about how you receive information. Most of us are familiar with books, with television, with the internet. These would be the medium through which we receive our information. Another dimension of that is think about the senses you use in order to receive that information. We have audible, which is listening through our ears. We have tactile, which is feeling using our hands or our skin.

We also have visual, which is perceiving. and taking the information in through our eyes. Quite often you've probably heard people say, I'm an audio learner or I'm a visual learner. And it's true. Most of us have ways of taking an information that seem to be better for us than might be for other people. As we begin this roller coaster ride

into the mind of Marshall McLuhan, what we're going to be talking about is the medium. or mediums in which we received that. So let me start at the beginning. The first book we're going to talk about is the Gutenberg Galaxy. And this is a book that Marshall McLuhan wrote way back in the 60s. And it talks about how print, the typographical print, the kind you read in books, the kind you read in letters, text.

how this particular type of communication fundamentally changed the world around us, not just by making it possible for everyone to read information, but the way we actually process information. Here's a quote from Tocqueville. It may be that a great part of the secret of the brain's powers is the enormous opportunity provided for interaction between the effects of stimulating each part of the receiving fields. It is this provision of interacting places or mixing places

that allows us to react to the world as a whole, to much greater degree than other animals do. But our technologies are by no means uniformly favorable to this organic function of interplay and of interdependence. To investigate this question with respect to alphabetic or typographic culture

is the task at hand. So what I think is a good way to look at that quote or at least a way that I look at that quote is understanding that we need all of our senses to decode the information around us and when we can use all of our senses

to decode the information around us, we get a very good idea of what the world is trying to communicate to us. When we use just one of our senses, we get a limited view of how the world around us looks. It's an obscure view. It's an obtuse view. It's an angle that may not be able to be seen by other people.

Let me try to give you a visual example of this. So imagine putting a penny on a table. You know, just your regular penny and you put it heads down on the table. And now you stand over that table and you look at that penny. And as you look at that penny, you can make out the shape of a man. You can see some writing around the edges. You can see some letters and some numbers, some other designs. You can see that it's a circle.

You can also see that there is a little bit of thickness to it. It's got some depth. And if you look close enough and if your eyes are still 2020 or if you have your glasses on, you can see that the letters also have depth. The numbers have depth. And there's a lot of detail to it. And as you're looking at it,

you can see all this stuff as long as you're looking down at the penny. Now let's say that you drop down so that your eye level with the penny. Now you're almost on your knees and you're looking at the edge of the table and so that your eyes are exactly level with the penny. You no longer see the depth. You no longer see the circle. You no longer see the president. You no longer see the writing.

All you see is a straight copper line. Even though it's the same penny. Even though it has the same numbers, letters, the same circumference. It has, it's the exact same. Only from the angle you're standing at, you can no longer see any of those features. It looks just like a straight line.

There's another book called Flatland that points this out amazingly. And what we've done there is we have allowed ourselves to pare down the senses. And now we're just getting a strict visual

stimulation from an angle that does not allow the full sweet of our senses. Do you see how it really strangles your view, how it narrows your view, and it takes away from the whole? That is an example of what happens when we not only use one of our senses,

but we don't even use it to the fullest of the capabilities. It's reminiscent of what Plato tells us in Tamaus. In Tamaus is a story called the phaedrus. And in that story, we learn that Toth, the writer, the inventor of writing, before he allows mankind, to use this technology called writing.

Toth goes and he tells his elder, he tells him that he has come up with this great, unbelievable technology called writing. And then it's going to help humanity forever. And the way it's going to help humanity is in allowing humans to understand experiences without having to go through them. In fact, he believes that writing will allow all of mankind to understand the wisdom and knowledge of those who have come before by reading their stories.

And he is shocked when his creator smiles down on him and tells him, O Toth, my paragon of wisdom, what you have created is a beautiful technology. And it is indeed powerful. But it will have the opposite effect. on mankind. You see, it is unwise for the inventor of a technology to make predictions about what that technology is going to do over its lifetime. The technology you have created will, in fact, make mankind worse off.

You see, going forward, mankind will indeed be able to read the accounts, understand, somewhat of the experiences of those who've gone before them. And this will provide the illusion of wisdom. This will provide the illusion of understanding the experience. So you will have generations of mankind who appear to be wise. However, will be unable, will be disabled, as an individual, as a society, and as a world. I want you to think about that for a minute.

Because that's essentially what Marshall McLuhan is going to tell us in these books. He's telling us that the books we read, the accounts we read are only, and should only be a companion to the experience itself. and if you look at the way we teach our kids if you look at the university today you can see the people who teach in university

a lot of them don't have any experience in the real world they are in fact relaying accounts of people who knew people who knew people who did the thing they're teaching

does that make kind of sense and they have no real world experience and that's why in my opinion we see the things happening in our world right now no one knows no one no one any longer understands what it's like to be a statesman because they haven't had to do it no one understands what it's like to really manage other people at least not right out of college they don't and i would argue at least for the 20 i would argue that you were unfit to be a leader until you've had 25 years in the field in which you want to be a leader.

There's a funny joke that talks about a man who started a business and his business was going to go public and he got a call on the phone and this large multinational corporation wanted to buy his business and they said, look, why don't you fly out here to New York? We'll have a meeting and we'll make you an offer. The man was excited. He lived in California and he bought his plane ticket and he'd never been to New York before. So he lands at JFK and he jumps out of the, he gets out of the plane, grabs his bag and he jumps outside.

And all of a sudden he realizes that he doesn't know where the meeting point was. So he looks at his phone and he goes, oh yeah, the meeting point was at Carnegie Hall. He goes, well, that still doesn't help me. I don't know how to get to Carnegie Hall. So in a mad scramble, he's looking around and he sees this woman who's carrying an instrument case. a violin case. And he runs up to her and he says, ma'am, do you play in the orchestra?

And she says, yeah. She goes, I do. I just played at Carnegie Hall. And he goes, great. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? And the woman looks at him, looks them up and down. She pauses.

And she says, practice. Practice. You see, so it's this, It's this idea that we no longer know how to learn. It's this idea that the literature, it's this idea that we have chosen explanation over experience.

Have another listen to this quote right here. This is from Carl Popper. It is the open society and its enemies by Carl Popper. A work devoted to the study of aspects of detribalization in the ancient world. and of retribalization in the modern world. For the open society was affected by phonetic literacy and is now threatened with eradication by electric media. Needless to say, the is, rather than the aught of all these developments,

is alone being discussed. What do you think he means when he says, if we devote the study of aspects of detribalization in the ancient world and the retribalization in the modern world, it seems to me that it's been quite some time that we as the West have gone in and colonialized

and taken advantage of and attempted to detribalize third world countries we've gone in and we have tried to push our culture in the West onto third world countries in the hopes of creating well I'm a little bit it seems to me at least that

the goal of the corporations going into third world countries is to fundamentally steal all their resources and distribute those resources to a handful of people I would argue that's what's happening in our countries today, not even the third world, but in the first world. But I want to talk more about this detribalization and the retribalization. Let's shift gears here for a minute and think about the way in which language, the way in which the word shapes our world.

do you think that the interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world okay so let me try and give you some examples of the way language can change the way you see the world

think about your favorite book think about reading some text presumably a hard let's just do a hard copy of a book first so you're looking at the book and you're reading what do you notice well there's words on a page they go in a certain order are the words a certain color how about the page what color is the page well if it's a normal book you have black words on a white page most people don't think about how that sort of frequency changes the way you think. But it begins to establish a way of thinking

that is foreign to someone who's not literate. Right, you got black white, black white, black white, black white, black white, black white, black white, black white, black white. Back to the left. Black white, black white, black white, black white, black white, black white, black white, black white, all the way to the right. Okay, start over to the left. You see, as you're reading, you're getting like this free, this flashing frequency pattern. Right to left, right to left, right to left, black white, right to left, black white, right to left, black white, right to left, black white.

Do you see how that could be kind of training your mind to see things black and white? Can you see how people can get stuck believing what they read is a fact? Black white, black white, black white, right to left, black white, black white, right to left. You know, how many words are on a page? If you're reading a book that's a thousand pages, like how much training is that for your mind? It's like taking the chicken and putting its beak to the chalk line. It just gets stuck there.

And think about some of the scholars you know. Are they people with open minds that just, really in love conversations and are more than willing to have people challenge them on their ideas and even admit when they're wrong or are more scholars today people who are willing to defend their published work at any cost who have decided that their idea is right and that no other idea can in fact challenge it because they're right doesn't that hardening of position seem like the cause of a callous mind.

You see, I believe that if we were to just do some research on the psychiatry of the written word, I think we could begin to see how the written word

has fundamentally changed the way in which we see the world. There's been some work done on it. I mean, the book I'm reading right now is from Marshall McLuhan in the 60s, and we're not even scratching the surface yet. So here's another interesting point. Try and wrap your mind around the ratio in which we use our senses. If you live in the West, you probably use your visual sense more than your audio sense

or your tactile sense. We're really visually or. Do you think that maybe some of these other senses are atrophied because you use one sense so much? We all have heard stories of people who have gone blind and their other senses are heightened or they lose their sense of smell and the other senses compensate for it. If we can agree that that does happen and we can agree that using one sense more strengthens that sense, then don't we all help? We also have to agree that by forcing the world to use one sense more than the others, that we alienate other people who aren't using those senses. Maybe we alienate ourselves that way.

Here's an interesting quote from the book. The Westerner depends on a high degree of visual shaping of spatiotemporal-temporal relations without which it is impossible to have the mechanistic sense of casual relations so necessary to the order of our lives. Maybe that's why we have people just waiting to talk instead of listening. We're receiving so much information through the visual sense that our audible sense is atrophied. We're barely using our audible sensation anymore. It's quite different,

but the quite different assumptions of native perceptual life have led me to ask a question. What has been the possible role of written words in shifting habits of perception from the auditory to visual stress? When words are written, they become a part of the visual. world. Like most of the elements of the visual world, they become static things and lose as such the dynamism, which is so characteristic of the auditory world in general and of the spoken word in particular. They lose much of the personal element. In the sense that the heard word

is most commonly directed at oneself, whereas the seen word most commonly is not, and can be read or not as whim dictates. They lose those emotional overtones and emphasis, which have been described, for instance, by Monrad Crone, thus, in general, words by becoming visible join a world of relative indifference to the viewer,

a world from which the magic power of the word has been abstracted. It's a fascinating thing to think about that the written word gives you an eye for an ear. And I think there's something to be said about the great poets of the past, be it the Iliad or the Odyssey or some of our Muslim friends who were able to quote, the Quran from memory. I think that there's something to be said about poetry and verse and meter. All these techniques

of audible translations, all these techniques of using the audible to communicate. Maybe that's why when you see a great speaker, you're moved to your feet. Maybe that's when you hear a beautiful song, skin gets goosebumps.

Maybe that's why when you hear the sounds of love whispered from your lover, your face gets flush. See, to me, that verbal communication or the spoken word, when you watch someone who's a great orator who can stand in front of people and speak well, you are consuming the word with all of your senses, instead of just using one or two of your senses. I think it's a much better way of communicating. I'm not advocating. People stop reading books. I love books and I love reading. However, I think it's important to understand what's happening to our brain when we train it a certain way.

Repetition is the mother of skill. Repetition is the mother of skill. Repetition is the mother of skill. Repetition is the mother of skill. skill and if we're constantly training our brains to do something, we're going to get good at it. In fact, we might get so good at it that we no longer remember some of the things that we used to do. I think it's a good place to leave it for right now. I think that there's more, we're going to get into a lot more. This is just the tip of the iceberg here. Because I think what is happening with the internet to our kids is the same. same thing that's been happening to us, our parents, and our grandparents with the written

word, the typed word. Let me know what you guys think. I love you guys. Aloha.