---
title: "Awakening From the Meaning Crisis"
---
- Related
- **Logotherapy** (or **Viktor Frankl**)
- Resources
- [central landing page with resources](https://awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com/)
- [reading list for each episode](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W33hve1fjeACbNxasTaBT3zlk-YdmIPTrXylspDbCaI/edit)
- [notes from each episode]( Maps of Meaning 2017) with some personal comments (**Jordan Peterson**-centric forum) -
- long video discussions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGRgPVet5Tc&list=PL68A9KvUGBlpbAfU5sqgTOW-_HpQijEbF
- **Future Thinkers** - [notes](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WhacRQY-Cv34HSnfAAnBJEABET-8I__Q7RNkypf43QU/edit#)
- watch party with long discussions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t10mtKAjgo4&list=PLFtiUQof0wuetmXVhx9OIjED2SCc_FR-p
- [Notes with lots of comments (starting at ep 7)](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VEhfb09YIZLW1a__Ck4uq_618SYP4fwW5b3YimZaux4/edit)
- [Clear summaries, but not much own thought](https://kaue.me/john-vervaeke-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-summary/)
- [Most well developed critique I've found](https://medium.com/@andrewpgsweeny/kairos-a4409eb936c) by **Andrew Sweeny**
- Answer to episode 23 by **Mark Vernon** - https://www.markvernon.com/romanticism-and-the-meaning-crisis
- Notes from **Bevry** https://discuss.bevry.me/search?q=tags%3Ameaning-crisis%20category%3A44%20order%3Alatest_topic
- **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis**, episode 1
- **The meaning crisis**
- Positive factors
- **mindfulness**
- increased interest in **Buddhism** and **cognitive studies**
- **psychedelics**
- treatment rate for **PTSD** can be 20% but with psychedelics can reach 80%
- interest in **stoicism** and **wisdom**
- Dark side
- **mental health**
- **suicide**
- **disconnection**
- thinking about **apocalypse** (**zombies**)
- **social media**
- Other crises are interrelated
- **ecological crisis**
- **socio-economic crisis**
- lack of faith in institutions
- political
- judicial
- But other crises are well discussed in the public. The meaning crisis is discussed in academia, but has not been brought to the public so much
- Focus on **wisdom**, **realizing wisdom** in the two meanings of the word
- becoming aware of wisdom
- making wisdom real
- **Upper Paleolithic transition**
- Our species go back about 200,000 years. But there's a continuum because about **40,000 years ago**, we see new things.
- art
- music
- symbolic calendars
- keeping track of the moon (easier to hunt)
- projectile weapons (throwing spears and slings)
- **throwing** is reflected in a lot of the words that we use
- subject
- object
- project.
- very complex activity, which you can see from trying to teach artificial intelligence to throw
- humanity developed because of threat/pressure
- Around {70,000} years ago, humanity was threatened by extinction, only about 10,000 left
- last Ice Age
- supervolcano
- survived because of socio-cultural and socio-cognitive development (link to **Shamans**?)
- they developed larger trading networks
- allowed them to be more resilient to the different climate.
- **distributed cognition**
- networking brains together to solve hard problems.
- they developed a set of rituals that allowed them to deal with these broader social networks.
- **Interacting with strangers**
- New situation
- Currently we live in cities, constantly interact with strangers
- But very strange to be around strangers that are not part of your kinship group, that you didn't know.
- We had to develop **rituals**
- to be able to **trust** each other
- to be able to understand each other
- like **handshaking **
- to take someone's hand,
- you see that they have no weapons,
- you get some feeling, whether they're sick, whether they're stressed,
- Understand others
- you need to be able to put yourself in their position,
- need to be able to imagine what they're thinking
- **mindsight** pick up on their emotions.
- And as we do that, we gain a better ability to get **insight** into our own thinking and mental processes and this is the beginning of **mindfulness**.
- **Maintaining our own group affiliation**
- As we develop rituals to be better able to deal with strangers, we have another problem, the **trust** from our own group
- before that wasn't much in doubt, because you were always with them.
- But now, there is temptation.
- A pervasive theme of myth: **being lured away by the stranger**.
- We develop rituals to prove our **loyalty**, **initiation rituals** that involve pain or danger.
- Requires a **decentering** because we are not in the center, but our group is
- Also requires much stronger control of our emotions, and how we express them
- **psycho-technology**
- Humans are tool users. We've developed over several species to use tools. And once you use a tool it becomes an extension of yourself.
- Everything around us, our tools, our clothes, the ability to navigate a car
- The technology enhances and fits our bodies, our biological, biological systems like for example, allowing us to carry around more water than we would have been able to do otherwise.
- psycho-technologies, they fit our brains and allow us to do things mentally that we couldn't do otherwise, like **literacy**. We are born linguistic, but for most of human history, we were not literate
- a **psycho-cognitive tool** like **literacy**
- **Shamans**
- Were the key for the cognitive leap that humans made in the Upper Paleolithic transition.
- people who specialize in altering their state of mind.
- to get into **trance**
- sleep deprivation
- stay in the wilderness
- repeat sounds or movements for hours
- dress up like/imitate animals
- take psychedelics (not all)
- Allows them to do is to **disrupt patterns**. **The thing that makes us so adaptive also leads us into** **self-deception**.
- pervasive among cultures - very beneficial for groups
- health care
- Shaman is highly charismatic, wise, insightful, empathetic, coming to you when you're sick.
- He triggers your own **placebo effect**
- 30 to 40% of all medicine relies on the placebo effect
- hunting
- by imitating/thinking like/trying to become one with the animal, is better able to track and hunt the animal
- group cohesion
- **mindsight** - able to better understand people, see innovative solutions
- Example (**think outside the box**)
- some dots that you need to join with several lines.
- The only way to do it is if you draw the line much larger than the box, and this is where the saying think outside the box comes from.
- If we're stuck in our ways, then we cannot see new ideas
- Telling people to "think outside the box" doesn't help them do it. Knowing how
- **Knowing**
- **reciprocal knowing**
- **insight**
- **mindsight**
- **participatory knowing**
- not just **justified true belief**
- **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis**, episode 2
- Questions:
- {{query: {and: **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis** **q**}}}
- Reflections
- {{query: {and: {**Awakening From the Meaning Crisis** {or: {**m** **reflection**}}}}}}
- notes:
- **flow**
- So, flow is a **cascade of insights** because you have to constantly change with environment, like a **jazz** musician. has to get out of their frame and reshape every time the music changes. And insights kind of generate this energy in this pleasure. So if you have a cascade of them, it's great.
- To what extent is **flow** state the binary? Is there a range can you be a little bit in flow state? Can you be extremely in flow state or are you either in flow state or not? #q
- An experiment with people who are blindfolded and have earphones. And you bring people in. And they tell you whether they notice that they're being stared at or not. And they're doing decent. But if you do not give them any feedback, this does not replicate. Because researchers were not introducing people by chance, but there was a complex pattern that these people somehow picked up on.
- So there is something, I guess, a point that he's trying to get across this idea that we are extremely well tuned to pick up on patterns. As long as there's some kind of feedback mechanism, which is both extremely helpful for our survival. But also, sometimes we need to get transcendent Patterns is very hard because we don't even fully know them explicitly ourselves. I guess.
- This is also related to experts studies, and looking at how experts do things differently than novices. And I'm wondering how expert learning is related to flow state and changing the frame. So, when a expert looks at an X ray and recognizes the pattern, but doesn't know Why is his recognition the result of a single long term trading function or his has his pattern recognition gone through several phases of resetting or disruption
- So, if you tell people that they're looking for letter patterns, their performance goes down. So, you cannot explicitly try to train your intuition, which is interesting, given the less wrong people, but you can design the environmental conditions.
- I'm curious about the relationship between this intuitive learning and the distinct distinction between awareness and focus during meditation #q
- intuition and bias described the same mechanism. So the racist has intuitions of a race that are socially acceptable. So prejudice
- He thinks that the difference between intuition and bias is that one of them is picking up on correlational patterns and the other is picking up on causal patterns. And so you should train your intuition or your implicit learning to discern.
- I guess this might be going towards the kind of stuff that plus wrong rationalist people are trying to do. I'm curious to what extent it's possible or what are the best ways of doing this for a process that's so blackbox or is the point to make it less blackbox #q
- So, one implication of this is people who are very good at things like social skills or con men, actors, businessman, you know, promising this of ideas. So how do you train yourself? Is it related to the feedback mechanism? And does the feedback mechanism has to be in a certain way. From the experiments mentioned, it didn't sound like it. So, would someone who got different kinds of feedback on their social skills to actually be able to learn better social skills but it might be also dependent on the extent to which they can interpret the feedback. And then I'm sure there's all kinds of other baggage and Also things around motivation and identity and stuff like that. #q
- So he's saying that the three conditions that will turn information into good intuition is clear information. feedback and error matters. And this is very similar to what causes you to go into flow state.
- But what is the rock climber really learning or the jazz musician? And on the one hand, this seems to suggest that games would be a powerful way of teaching concepts. On the other hand, he previously said that games are not about reality. Also, there would seem to be a very strong potential for abusing this and misinforming people by designing experiences in a certain way. also wondering about the future of Virtual reality and even more powerful, immersive experiences. #q
- So he talks about setting up kind of an experimental condition that this is similar to what the experimenter is trying to do with sensories paribus. And I guess this brings up the whole question of causality. And I think it would be quite interesting to look at the book of why. And to Dr. Perlman, I think it's called to see. And of course, Bayesian reasoning seems to be very big in the rationalist community. So I wonder if that's where he's going.
- From yesterday, they talked about an experiment where there was some complex pattern in how often they sent the right person or the wrong person. And how people were able to learn that pattern without even trying to. That seems, I wonder if they have the exact data from the experiment. I'm fascinated by how quickly humans can learn something work. A artificial intelligence requires millions of examples. Is it in this case? The data seems quite simple. So is it just that humans have much more connections or is there some other pre wiring will be quite interesting to try to train a neural network with data from experiments and see if it was able to detect pattern #q
- People who have gone through a psychedelic experience, we can tell that different parts of their brain are now talking to each other. And if I just took two parts of your brain and connected them, you would just experiences it is noise. But if you have enhanced awareness of insight, you can use that to make them communicate.
- For the shaman insight picks up on new patterns, and implicit learning, explores those patterns. And so there's some kind of a feedback loop between insight and implicit learning.
- It's not yet clear to me exactly what insight is. And it's also not quite clear to me what the shaman is learning and how he's getting his feedback if he dresses up like animal and makes lots of weird sounds, understand that he's introducing noise into the machinery. But what is the feedback? How is he learning about causal patterns related to animal behavior that will help him during hunting #q
- metaphor, metaphorical connections. Theories from Lakoff is how you make creative connections and it's at the heart of both science and art.
- So when different areas of the brain are bridged, we perceive it as just a natural part of our cognition. But it enables us to make metaphors. And metaphors are incredibly important. And he brings back the examples of project for throw,
- which makes me question the role of language in thinking and the historical, you know all the baggage that is in language because if most people have never heard the fact that project has anything to do with throwing is it really relevant to them. #q
- So shamans were getting high. He talks about having oversight, seeing the big picture zooming above as metaphors. He also talks about, as I predicted art, role of art. And the idea that you can scratch things on bones and it predicts the moon. So it sounds like he's talking about abstractions, and symbols. And I guess this leads to all this kind of obsession with myth and symbology
- 10,000 bc Paleolithic revolution, invention of agriculture
- People who are {problem solvers} are very good at metaphors. And if people are stuck, we ask them to think of an {analogy}. Think outside the box. Strike that. And {shamans} by developing psycho technologies to this to upset their mind frames.
- They come up with metaphors and so they get deeper insight. And I'm wondering if he's now saying this is part of the reason why people started making art and also, maybe how art had a cognitive function.
- So, with every culture evolution, we settle down. We live in complex societies, which change us. But most of us have not read anything from the Bronze Age, Gilgamesh epic or Egyptian mythology. We don't feel like it's relevant to us, but we've read the Bible. We've maybe read Buddhist texts, and Greek and Latin texts. And so I think he says 800 to 300 BC. There's another kind of big shift {the axial revolution}.
- These two skills, psycho technologies, abstract thinking, numeracy literacy, not only helps us transcend ourselves, we can become better people we can improve, we can measure we can understand. But it also gives us insight into how much self deception there is. And something that we couldn't have known before.
- I wonder if a metaphor is looking at yourself in the mirror in the water and seeing yourself for the first time and and that does something very profound to you. #q
- So, the new revolution, the psycho cognitive tool, which are standardized ways of enhancing our brains by connecting them to others, including to our future and past selves was alphabetic literacy. Pass societies had literacy like cuneiform, hieroglyphs, but it was extremely hard to learn. And you had scribes whose only job it was, was to be literate. And with alphabetic literacy, much larger groups of people could become literate, which changed everything.
- Which obviously raises the question about China and also other Asian civilizations that relied on the Chinese script. #q
- It's interesting that initially, when he was talking about the new psycho cognitive tool, I thought he meant religion because he was talking about religious texts as things that we read. He just talked about second order thinking. So we all have metacognition, we think about our cognition. But with literacy, we can incorporate some of those external tools into our metacognition. so we can write things down about how we think today or we can basically we enhance, I think our ability to do metacognition.
- So, people realize that all this chaos and violence is their own fault basically. And it's up to themselves to fix
- So you had armies moving around, and he connects that to coinage to money. And the use of money, trains you to think abstractly because money is an abstraction. It also trains you in numeracy, which is hugely important. So it's interesting how he, according to him, basically numbers for most people came from money, which makes a lot of sense given trade, although I hadn't made that connection.
- It's also interesting that I just recently read a paper about the extent to which pre economic people were bartering or were gift economies. It's it's really striking. The extent to which I'm able to listen to something like this and make hundreds of different connections. And part of it is the fact that I know I might have had these things in mind before when I was listening to things but because I know that I'll be writing this down and because I, I know that I will be exploring subtrees of this topic, I'm priming my mind to look for connections and giving it the permission to do so without overloading it with having to remember a certain argument. And so there's a connection here to this concept from meditation, the mind illuminated about an intention because I can tell my brain to make a connection because that's connected to awareness, I guess, or is it system one and system two, but I can hold an intention to want to Question and two wants to make relevant connections and lo and behold #m
- But then he starts talking about indirect learning some experiments in the 60s with language learning, where they chose some rules, and they generated random strings very long, and had people look at them. And then they had a second set of strings, following the same pattern as well, some random strings, and they asked people to discern, and they were very good at that, or decent. But if you ask them why they would say they had no idea or they would come up with rules. They were actually deceiving themselves because those rules would not have worked to do the prediction that they were doing
- **reflection**:
- I am now walking round after round along around this beautiful, calm lake with these incredible stars above me. And I'm feeling very, very good. My body's not tired at all. I am not disturbed by anyone. There's no noise or cars. I have time. I am learning incredibly interesting things. I'm not stressed out about my memory because I'm able to capture my thoughts and go back to them later. It reminds me a bit of monks or, you know, all kinds of people walking and learning. I'm curious how this differs from reading and taking notes. Certainly being in front of my computer, I would I have a much harder problem concentrating. moving my body is a kind of great background thing. I'm also curious if there's any difference in the processing, listening versus writing and reading and speaking and so on. Of course it's not a dialogue at all. I'm listening to him at one point 75 x speed and I'm recording myself. It's It's incredible how little we learned about any of this at school, at least I feel like it or we were never really given a reason why this was so important. All of the different civilization he talks about. It's also interesting how I've never really showed any kind of interest in most of this during my life. Of course, I'm curious about the credibility of the things he says although they seem to make a great deal of sense, and why he chose this particular format, as opposed to really writing a bunch of books 50 hours of lecture is quite insane. I'm also curious about whether there are communities of people reading or going through these and discussing them in an interesting way. So I haven't found kind of sub communities of people interested in this in the same way I've found for other thinkers
- **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis**, episode 6 on **March 8th, 2020**
- Aristotle was Plato's disciple for 20 years breaks away from him interested in change and growth. So, when you have a piece of wood, it can become a ship or a table or a chair. What is it that makes the wood act like a chair? It is actualization act like something because it has the potential. So these two terms come from Aristotle. It has the potential to become a chair and we make it into a chair. But this is actually an analogy for how organisms grow. But they do it themselves.
- So things can so organisms create themselves through actualizing this potential and this is also a metaphor for, for spiritual growth. But this happens over time. And the Newtonian physics talks about things happening because something acts on it. So, I push a pen and the pen moves and then the pen pushes something else. So A to B to see. And Emmanuel Kant was interested in why did the Newtonian worldview so quickly gain currency after the Aristotelian worldview had led for 1000 years
- According to Kant, the advantage of the linear causal view is that it avoids it's easy to explain and it avoids circular reasoning, like the homunculus theory that when you see a triangle goes into your brain and there's a little man sitting there seeing it, executive function. And but then how does little man see it, maybe there's a little man inside his head. So we fall into this fallacy very often, and linear reasoning where each cause has to be independent, and proceeding, we avoid this. So this sounds to me related to **The Book of Why**, around **causality** and **Bayesian reasoning**
- Kant is frustrated by seeing a tree, because how does a tree grow? It gets sunlight through its leaves. So the tree causes itself to grow. And so it's a self organizing principle, our structure and we cannot explain it without using circular reasoning, which we know leads to vacuous claims. So there can be no biology, but obviously we have biology. So where does his reasoning go wrong? And this woman is explaining it using dynamic systems theory and constraints.
- Newtonian physics is not completely true theory of relativity and quantum theory. So when I push this pen, it moves. It's not only because I pushed it, it's because there is empty space in front of it because it has a certain shape. And so these are constraints. They're not events, they are restrictions. And this is the potential potential is shaping possibilities and this is the formal cause.
- The reproductive evolution theory is the first dynamic systems theory because you have a feedback cycle, you have you have to have scarcity, which is the limiting factor, the constraint. And some anthropologists think that for the first few hundred thousand years there was no selection because there wasn't an A high enough population. And, but you also need to have enabling factors and that's diversity which increases the options
- When you combine a governor which limits for example, the output in a steam engine with a generator, you get an engine and a dynamic system theory is laying out the virtual machine have a system. So, for example, the that evolutionary reproductive theory
- So this so there's a link between the word virtual and virtue. And he talks about the difference between character and personality, personality you are born with character, is your internal virtual machine that regulates your growth and development. So when you say someone is out of character, out of character, you mean that they are, I think differently than what their internal feedback mechanism, they're their set of regulators would normally let them act. So you could say that by reading and listening to all of these things, I'm acting out of character, but of course, I'm changing My character. So yes, how much time are you spending on cultivating your character because it can happen both surreptitiously but also, intentionally,
- side thought, I guess my current interest in all of these things are a bit related to Maslow's hierarchy. That because I have a safe job that not only guarantees economic income, but also societal status, mental challenge, sense of purpose and sense of interesting coworkers. I can see in a much longer perspective, I can start a project now, that might take me 10 years to finish and I can focus more on self actualization.
- Reading about the listening society I feel a little bit like when I was exploring the ideas of veganism and animal rights, because I had already been talking to **Espen**, and preparing myself to the possibilities. I was much more open minded to ideas about the fact that how we treat animals is cruel. Whereas had I read the books without this preparation, I might have completely rejected their conclusions because they were too much in congruent with my own identity and worldview. Similarly, because of my opening to ideas around, meditation, trauma therapy, mental growth, and so on. I am much more able to appreciate the ideas in the book The listening society.
- Aristotles and the golden mean like courage. You don't want to be a coward but also not foolhardy. So, when you lack generating or constraining constraints, limiting constraints you need to set up situations where you train yourself because you are a self organizing system to calibrate
- So we are a self organizing system because we generate our actions which results in feedback, which organizes future action. So, are we just letting that process run? Or are we trying to steer that process to build character
- We talk about people not living up to their potential. So training the characters, and the virtues is about actualizing. Your potential. And the deep kind of foolishness that Aristotle talks about is called akrasia, which we call lack of willpower because we're Protestant, but a lot of research show that the concept of willpower is not meaningful. So we do things that we know are bad for us.
- distinction between ignorance and foolishness. Ignorance is when you don't know the right thing to do. foolishness is when you know the right thing to do and you still don't do it. There seems to be a parallel to the distinction between lying and bullshitting
- living things are not just self organizing, but self making or autopoetic. A tornado is self organizing, but it can quickly destroy itself and it does not seek out certain conditions that further itself but people can and the purpose of our being is to further ourselves
- Your purpose is to become as fully human as possible. By that Aristotle means actualizing your potential for overcoming self deception, rational and ethical thought
- Your purpose is to become as fully human as possible. By that Aristotle means actualizing your potential for overcoming self deception, rational and ethical thought
- Core motivation for rationality is to come into as deep contact with reality as possible through those means that are as reliable as possible. Going back to all the examples he has given of how people would rather know that they're being deceived, then live happy, carefree lives. Reminds me of reading about the matrix, and how that was not actually based directly on Plato's Allegory of the Cave, but of maybe Deleuze or some other theorists who added significantly to that allegory, which would be interesting to look into
- What does it mean to know something? To be able to describe it accurately, or be able to build it? If someone can build a chair, we think they understand the essence of the chair better. Because they have the structural logical conception in their mind, the eye does. So they they have this imprint this form in their mind, not the matter, but this form and they can help the wood actualize its potential as a chair. Somehow. I'm thinking about type theory in Haskell and how I think for example, integers can be part of different type families, because there is one was it monad or monoid, for addition and one for multiplication. So the wood can have the potential to become a chair, but also a table. Not sure if that's really a good connection. So to know something, and its original meaning is to be similar to it, to share something with it. So is this a connection to the knowing someone in the biblical way participatory knowing but you're not really participating with the chair
- **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis**, episode 3 and 4 (Pythagoras and Socrates) on **February 22nd, 2020**
- in many cultures heart and soul are the same concept. So, in after the axial revolution people begin reflecting on their own ability to do bad things. But before the axial revolution people there was a radical continuity between nature, culture and the gods. So, gods were just more powerful and more shiny, glorious, both the Egyptian gods King, Jesus and Old Testament and it was not strange for people if animals could talk or everything felt There was more continuity
- Time goes in cycles. And people want to fit into those cycles. And there's a nostalgia, the rituals are attempting to tap into the power of the original creation. So they are enacting the creation myths and they want to better fit into these rhythms, these long cycles.
- So, in the pre axial world, wisdom is tapping into the world and the creation myth and the power. Wisdom is getting access to power. It's kind of like being Prudential and securing your offspring. And in the post axial world, there's this view of Two Worlds. So the everyday world is full of conflict and confusion and suffering. And it's kind of an illusion. And so the goal is transcendence. Wisdom is understanding how to see the real world which is beyond which is calm and doesn't have all these conflicts and suffering and so shamanic flight to get overview is exapted to really fly above this messy world.
- And so meaning and self, and wisdom, all these terms change during this revolution
- So these myths are ways of capturing patterns of meaning in a way that makes it easier for, to transmitted. And myths. So he talks about the axial revolution as the dis embedding, because we're kind of splitting into this worldview of two different worlds where you can do self transcendence and it becomes meaningful to talk about personal growth. And now, with the scientific worldview, there's a re embedding, where we're saying actually we are not very much different from the monkeys. And the mind is just atoms. And so it's leveling everything and we are no longer able to live the myths. We can talk about them, but myths need to be lived. So. So we're in risk of losing the great tools that the axial revolution gave us, like transcendence. And, and especially because we're losing the historical context under which we gained these. So it's very difficult to imagine yourself being pre literate. You think of that as simply a part of you, but it was invented by a specific culture and under specific conditions. also we need to understand where all of the These elements of our personalities and our culture's come from and then somehow find another way then myths or maybe different kinds of myths to continue to distribute this understanding. And I'm wondering if the science that is now like cognitive neuroscience and so on can partially served that purpose. I'm also wondering what the end goal in practicality is around this because obviously, ancient people, you know, had this naturally without having to go to school. And right now it feels like you need a PhD and do A 50 hour video course is just the beginning because I want to in every single video, there are three or four books that I would like to dig into, which probably represent the entire literature's by themselves. And so I think that's very exciting. But it's not realistic to think that the whole world is going to invest this. So is there a way in which we make these new ideas, assuming that they're powerful, much more readily available, or even an intrinsic part of our culture? And how does that shift happen? I guess he'll get to that but I'm very curious.
- So he's talking about accepting the storytelling that is prevalent in so many cultures to tell a story about cosmic time. And so, traditionally, you had this circular worldview, these and so it was never ending and cyclic. And there was nothing you could do about it. And they perceived it as onerous, to be reborn and so on. Because there was no purpose. In stories. There is a narrative arc, there's a beginning and middle and an end. And there is some kind of a moral narrative. And so suddenly, we change to this story of progress and of consequences and participatory knowing that if you are part of this creation with God, that your life has a meaning. And there's something to look forward to there's some kind of resolution towards the end. And so it's talking about the grammar of an apparently Nietszche talked about the grammar and the stories so we will not be able to kill God unless we get rid of the grammar and so even though we're not really even though we don't say that we're religious, we, you know, these stories are in every single Hollywood movie and it's it's a foundational part of how we're thinking and so, if we're not studying the Bible, even though we are not religious, we are losing access to crucial insight about Our way of, of thinking. And so, one of the foundational stories in the Bible in the Old Testament is God taking the Jews from Egypt which is pre axial, and leading them through the desert and so on. So before that gods were place bound, you know, the God of textile weaving or even the Greek gods which were not at all moral creatures. And now you get a God that is not bound by time or place.
- Another linguistic insight. And I'm really curious as to whether these are represent real deep insight or kind of superficial tricks. But he talks about, of course, and being on course, a change, of course, taking a course in university that these, and apparently when God initially had no name because he was not definite, and when Moses challenged him, he said something like I am who I am, or basically he's of the future. He's being created and you can be part of that creation if you join him because there's a course but it can get off course, by wrong I guess, unethical actions.
- So he talks about a lot about participatory knowing. And in the knowing someone in the biblical sense is having sex with them. Because you are your participant, you're participating, you are resonating, you are changing and other person is changing with you and there's a climax and
- So and so we talked about Kairos. This idea of wheels turning and turning points and knowing when to turn. And faith in ancient times didn't mean believing in silly stories for which there is no evidence, but to be part of this unfolding process, to be in sync with it, and sin, so it talks a lot about you know, we are growing, we're evolving in a relationship we ask ourselves, is this going the right way? Is it progressing? Who am I becoming who are we becoming, and you want to be on course, but you can also make a mistake so you can think you're on course, but you might be completely wrong, of course. And there was A word for that but also, the word sin apparently means that originally and also some relationship with shooting a bow and arrow and not aiming but sensing where you need to shoot
- So the idea is that the Old Testament is encoding the information that we have about how people in this this embedded world should reach transcendence, the real world by encoding it in myths and in historical stories. And so you have this progression, but people get off course they sin. And so you have this prophetic tradition where so a prophet is not someone who foretells the future, but who wakes you up in the in the moment and says, look, makes you realize that you're off course. And you get this increasing focus on ethical personal behavior
- So it's this increasing focus on moral responsibility, helping yourself and helping others and for to reach their potential to be ethical to flourish as a culture. And this is a very foundational part of our thinking that we still have this idea of, are you reaching your full potential. And then, in the New Testament, there's the introduction of a specific person who. So it's a radical personification of this myth, which we'll get back to.
- So the Greeks add vowels to the alphabetic system, which makes it more accessible. And there's this concept of cognitive fluency. That if something is easier to comprehend, even down to font choice or contrast, the brain perceives it as more true or more in touch with it.
- And if you have a lot of fluency it leads to the flow state
- They also standardize the reading from left to right. And they, so it's a warring city states it's not a unified society. It's interesting that they still, I assume, have the same language in the same alphabet. And I'm curious how that spread. I have no sense at all very much actually about the the Greek society, but especially, what were they writing? How was it distributed? How easy could people travel and so on? Athens, which was one of the hotbeds of axial revolution, and they had democracy, very particular form of democracy, but there was a premium on debate and argumentation. Now, again, why, who has their democracy there? I don't think I've ever explored that question was it because they were particularly argumentative in the beginning, or, as he says the fact that you could gain power through words propelled this development of argumentation which we obviously see in some of the famous philosophers from that era. Interesting
- So Pythagoras 600 BC, was just coming out of the axial revolution was part of a group called the divine men and seems to have had shamanic training, isolating himself in a cave, going through some kind of stone ceremony and talking about shamanic flight, dressing like a god. And he, you know, before they had had math, simple math that they invented geometry and algebra, and abstract symbol systems, and he discovered the octave. So I guess is the idea of musical notes being separated by certain regularity. And the idea that that reason, and math can help us gain insight into the natural world.
- So Pythagoras is of the axial revolution. And he wants to use these psycho technologies and the insights shamanic insights, to help people transcend. And so by using music and aesthetics, and revealing the true forums underlying to help people get this self transcendence. So that reminds me of all this discussion about the platonic forms which I studied in high school, but I never had any context to why that might be important other than kind of an ontological argument. And apparently, he came up with the word cosmos, which is different from universe and cosmos is also the word cosmetics. It's about revealing the true beauty of something
- When people have awakening experience they suddenly experience the world as a Cosmos as radically beautiful
- So, Pythagoras had an impact on Plato and Socrates as well. And he has the Socratic revolution named after him. And so, Plato took these two, the Socratic and platonic worldviews, and they have a profound impact on our cognition on our grammar on our worldview today, but we don't live in their worlds anymore. And he asks, do we actually experience the world as a Cosmos? side note, this episode felt a lot less dense than the two previous episodes, although super interesting. I'm not sure if I'm getting used to the flow or if there is more familiar information and we'll see how it goes going forward.
- Socrates was a very complex figure. And there's lots of different stories about him and even people at the time had different ideas about how to interpret him. Greek society, used Oracle's to communicate with the gods. And they had this Oracle in Delphi. And if you haven't been there, it's there's some kind of configuration of the landscape that is transformative. And you would have some woman sitting at a cave. And so there's this connection to shamanism, and caves and there was always art in caves. I mean, I just assumed that's where they were living. But he's making an argument for some kind of deeper connection there. And I'm thinking about some of the Greek myths related to caves. Anyway,
- pivotal moment was when the Friends of Socrates went to the Oracle of Delphi and asked if Socrates was the wisest man in the world. And Oracle's. So this woman was sitting on a pedestal, doing some kind of drug or you know, some toxic fumes of being in a trance, and giving these kind of answers that would be interpreted by the men around her, and so very shamanic. And, of course, the answers were usually very vague. They might trigger some kind of insight for the person hearing it. And in this case, she said, Yes, he is the most wise man alive. And for Socrates, he was trying to transform the Greek gods into moral exemplars. And so, for him, it was very important that truth and morality was divine. And so there was no way that the gods could lie. And yet he had profound in self insight, and he knew that he was not that wise. So he had to somehow resolve those two contradictions. And he mentions Leo Ferrari, and who talks about how, in today's society we are so focused on self condemnation. And we're, we all have a bias, thinking that we're above average, and that we're special snowflakes in the sense of we are unique, and our biography matters, and we collect treasures and so on, and know thyself. is not about this. It's more of an owner's manual of your own. The ways your psyche and condition works and the limitations it has
- So the quest that Socrates started was to question people who are known to be wise, using the Socratic method. And he had a Greek name for it. And there were two groups of people that he talked to there were the philosophers and the Sophists. So the philosophers This was word was invented by Pythagoras, I think, and the surface where the natural philosophers, and they were before Socrates, and we don't have much from them. But there's one guy, the first one who thought that everything
- has made a water, which is kind of logical for someone living in Greece. So it's not factually driven. It's rational.
- So, he talked about water. He talked about the Lodestone having suka which means that the magnet has a soul because suka then becomes psyche, but the originally means can be moved and is moved by. And so the psyche is what is most influence, which we're all movement starts there and it can be influenced. And so he thinks that because we because humans have a soul or a psyche, magnets have it too which is not true, but it's rational and
- - Thoughts about **focus**, **awareness** between **Meditation** and listening to **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis** (from **February 22nd, 2020**):
- I just lost about half a second half a minute or a minute of discussion. And I didn't realize it until I stopped to take notes. And thinking back, I realized that I got distracted by thinking about something else.
- He talked about ontology. And I started thinking about ex-phil, and my own study of philosophy and how it always seemed so dry even though I had an interest in it from early on.
- It's quite similar to the way your mind wanders when you're meditating. And I wonder if I'm already better at paying attention to this because I've been meditating, and of course how that will radically improve as I get better at meditating.
- But it's also interesting how the process of stopping and taking notes regularly acts as kind of a check, which is a bit similar to this regular introspection, check that **The Mind Illuminated** recommends, that you take stock of yourself and you can notice kind of dullness or distractions coming and you're able to cut them off before they take you.
- But there's an interesting difference because with meditation at least so far, you're trying to calm the mind and focus on a single object.
- And yet while I'm listening to this podcast, I want to keep focused on his thoughts and ideas and the facts. But at the same time, it's crucial that I connect all of this knowledge, both to the previous ideas that he has made, and to all of the pre-existing knowledge structures in my mind, which is perhaps already to some extent distracting.
- But also, I really seek these kind of radical jumps or connections between very diverse material, such as the connection I just made between what happened to me and a book about meditation.
- So how do you at the same time train your focus and be able to concentrate on very dense material for an extended periods of time, and yet keep the ability to effectively integrate those ideas into your knowledge structure, and stay open, or ideally even more open to those lateral connections and metaphors and insights.
- There might be something around the difference between focus and awareness from **The Mind Illuminated**, how we want to not only gain the ability to focus very clearly, but also strengthen the awareness
- His third statement that there's God's in everything he thinks is this kind of dr. this ontological analysis of the world and seeing into the true nature of everything which gives him awe
- There was a philosopher, sophist, called Anaxagoras. Who impressed Socrates And he said things like, the sun is not a god, it's a hot rock. I'm really wondering how he could have figured that out. But and Socrates was impressed by the natural philosophers and their use of reason. But in a way, similar to today, with the scientists and the philosophers. The scientists are trying to figure out how things are, but they cannot give you a transcendence. They cannot tell you about wisdom or how to be a better version, better person, or ethics. I'm curious about whether There was any influence between ancient Israel and ancient Greece. If the Old Testament was around at the time that these philosophers were active, was there any kind of interchange with all
- So with direct democracy, the Sophists invent rhetoric. And but the problem is - so Socrates' interaction with them is quite antagonistic. Because he, because of this lack of values, so they would go to one aristocrat, and to help them craft an argument about x and another aristocrat and helps them craft an argument for the opposite, because they don't care who uses it. And so there's this concept of a psycho technology that, you know, is, is just taught for its own sake and not as part of a moral framework. And there's this link between speech and cognition, that when we need to listen to this again, When we are communicating, we are driven by what we find salient and convincing, not just what we believe to be true.
- So the modern equivalent is beer commercial with sexy people drinking beer. And he goes back to Harry Frankfurt and bullshit theory that's 20 years old and he distinguishes between a liar and a bullshit artist.
- So this salient so the simpson ad with these aliens saying ridiculous things but evoking concepts like freedom and youth and twirling and baseball. And so you get a rush you get caught up in them. And this is obviously all highly relevant for what I talked about in terms of fact checking and argumentation mapping.
- This was in the podcast as well. You can't lie to yourself but you can bullshit yourself. Because belief cannot be controlled consciously. You cannot make yourself believe something that you know to be true, but you can make it less salient. You can distract yourself from it.
- There's a feedback cycle between attention and salience. And you eventually your attention gets attached to something that becomes super salient. And that's how you deceive yourself. And that's why Socrates was so critical of the Sophists because he felt that it was the opposite of the axial revolution. They were deceiving themselves and they were deceiving others and ultimately you begin deceiving yourself.
- There's a feedback cycle between attention and salience. And you eventually your attention gets attached to something that becomes super salient. And that's how you deceive yourself. And that's why Socrates was so critical of the Sophists because he felt that it was the opposite of the axial revolution. They were deceiving themselves and they were deceiving others and ultimately you begin deceiving yourself.
- So Socrates is questioning people kind of the original five whys and keeps asking digging deeper and deeper until people realize they don't know the answers and they fall into a aporia, some kind of trance or they just can't deal with it. And one interpretation is that Socrates is just trying to prove that nobody has any wisdom, except for the gods, but probably something different is going on. He's trying to show how we're bullshitting ourselves the whole time. Because we go after salience so we want happiness. We don't quite then we don't yet know what it means but we go after it. And maybe some people some of the people he question actually realized this need for transcendence and deeper insight
- He's put on trial. And apparently he utters the unexamined life is not worth living. Just I've heard that phrase but I didn't know where it came from.
- Socrates is also had some semantic roots he could fight battles from the winter without shoes and meditate standing for 24/48 hours.
- **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis**, episode 5 (Plato and the cave) on **March 8th, 2020**
- Plato was at Socrates' death, very affected by by his trial, very affected by his death, and hundreds of books written every year about him, you can revisit them at different times of your life and people have revisited him throughout different stages of society and you constantly find new things. And this is his definition of sacred is things that we can there are inexhaustible sources of inspiration. And this new platonism is kind of bedrock of Western spirituality
- Plato. So Socrates conflict was between the gods and the truth. And Plato's conflict was between his beloved Athens and his beloved Socrates, how could Athens kill Socrates and I tried to resolve that he started kind of cognitive science and psychology and this idea of conflicting values or talks about weight or procrastination, and how long term and short term and this concept of multiple centers in our mind have different divisions.
- So we have the man. And it was a very sexist society. And Plato was mostly able to rise above that in a impressive fashion. But he still talks about the man who cares about truth and scope and long term actions, and can think about abstract concepts like health, and says, I want to lose weight, it's gonna take four months. It's true that I will feel better if I lose weight. Then there's the monster which lives in your stomach and your loins. It's the appetite. And it doesn't care about truth. It cares about pleasure and pain. It wants something right now. It's very superficial. It wants something because it looks good. And it's not a bad thing because we would not be alive without appetite. In a life or death situation, very superficial and quick judgment can be all we need. And so where Socrates was practicing, getting people to question themselves to see how what they focused on, was not what was true because they often didn't know what they valued, but was what was salient. So what why we are prone to bullshit and deceptive self deception. Plato is giving a psychological account for why that is, so
- One way of losing weight is to join a group. And so we are not just rational creatures, and biological creatures, but we are cultural creatures. And our culture has been handed down through several species. So he distinguishes between shame and guilt. Guilt is when you fail to live up to your own goals or ideals. Shame is when you fail the community and you don't have the capacity to feel pride. So ideas of pride and shame are very powerful. And communities work on kind of intermediate, longer term than the pain pleasure, but it's less abstract and shorter terms and the rational man and so we have a profound desire to share things like You think something that tastes horrible we say, Oh, this tastes horrible. Do you want to try
- Plato puts rational man in the head and appetites in the stomach, and the social, cultural in the chest, because that's where we have a sense of pride. And he used the Greek word that's hard to translate, but it's something like spirit thymos. There's a lot of potential for conflict between these different motivations and we want them to align. And when they don't align, we have self deception, inner conflict, and we feel threatened and it's easy to become egocentric or egotistical. Because of the threat signal, that's kind of evolutionary mechanism and to talk about it from a cognitive science perspective,
- The key is temporal discounting. So we pay less attention to things or in the future. We are. They're less salient to us. And he thinks that's because that's adaptive. And it happens across all animal species or a lot of animal species. Because it's kind of probability. So if I take a slice of cake right now, I know I will get pleasure, but I not sure what will happen. And part of the problem is too high specificity. So there's all these possible outcomes that have a low level of probability. But the general concept of me getting unhealthy or fat or dying, has a high level of probability, but we're not able to see that because it's abstract. And that's why we need the rational man to To see this and override that activity, but there has to be a balance because if you override completely, then we're overwhelmed by choices. And we get anxiety, general anxiety, and we cannot deal with it. So a general theme of this course is how we, the reason we're so good at self deception is because of our adaptivity. And that's where we need wisdom. And these three divisions by Plato, we keep rediscovering them again, and again. He mentioned Freud or Jung and the ID and the super ego and stuff like that, but also, neuroscience and the reptilian brain. In the neocortex
- So the, the idea of Plato is that the man can learn and he can represent knowledge using abstract symbols. The lion, which represents courage and shame and the social intermediary, can be trained. And the man, the man and the lion can tame not kill but tame the monster. And this goes back to the Socratic dialogue and taking the discourse into the marketplace and using the social sphere to promote reason and motivate people.
- This reminds me of the metaphor of the elephant from **The Mind Illuminated**. I'm also curious about the relationship to the **System 1/2** to thinking and focus and awareness
- So people want to reduce in their conflict. And the goal for Plato is to have these three aligned and optimization where none of them are endangering the other. And this sounds like uniting or **unifying the mind**, from **The Mind Illuminated**. And this is a powerful drive because in addition to having everything they have right now, people would like to have it without inner conflict. And so we can tap into this drive dramatically. But when you reduce inner conflict, you also reduce self deception, and you've become close more aligned with reality and you reduce egocentrism. So is that also similar to how in Buddhism, you have this concept of **selflessness**?
- There's a reinforcing cycle between getting closer to reality. And then using those tools to get a deeper understanding of yourself and being able to train the man to better to be more effective because he has to know who you are, and then reducing inner conflict and then being able to see reality more closely, etc. And he talks a lot about how people want to be. So there's two meta drives, one is for reducing inner conflict. The other one is for being close to reality, like how people would want to know if their partner cheats on them.
- The Allegory of the Cave, where you have these people looking at the shadows of the light, and the flickering fire and someone gets loose, and they're able to turn around and see the fire. But then through the gains under understanding, they start looking for where they came from, or where the light is coming from. And they start walking out of the cave, and they have to stop because they get blinded by the light at every stage. So it's a very slow process. And it's kind of participatory knowing. Because your mind knows the world. And through getting a deeper understanding of the world, it changes itself and it knows itself deeper and then you can know the world deeper. So it's not a this embodied truth, justifiable belief kind of knowing. And finally they come out and they see the sun Which is the source of the light and source of life, they can't look at it directly, they can glimpse it and it fills them with awe. And so they go back into the cave and they want to share with others and they stumble around because they're their eyes are not adapted to light to darkness anymore. And they're not able to explain and the people down there don't want to hear and they might even want to kill you, which is a reference to Socrates. So this is a Western story of enlightenment. And there's a Greek word on that anagoge, which means something like arising. So this is Plato's anagogical side
- I wonder what the best way to learn after or while I'm listening to this course series is of course part of it should be developing my mental activities, spiritual meditation, yoga, maybe even aesthetics like drawing music looking into metamodel meta modernism is it then reading some of the classics like Plato or Socrates or modern research on neuroscience it seems a bit overwhelming.
- So, Plato uses a word called eidos, which has been translated as form. And we think shapes or idea and we think concepts, but it's more like paradigms that we used to see the world.
- If you asked someone with a bird, this, they might give you a list of features. And there's been a lot of research on how people understand concepts. But that's not actually how we know it. Because if you create the table with feathers and throw it in the air, it's not a bird. But so we have an intuition. And it's the functional structural composition or something like that, of how all these parts become greater than the parts. And we have an intuition of that, but we can't explain it and this is logos, or the German Gestalt. And when you know something, deeply it becomes a part of yourself because we have in ourselves the functional structural conception that enables us to recognize the functional structural conception in a bird
- **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis**, episode 7 (Aristotle, Siddharta, being mode and having mode), **March 28th, 2020**
- Aristotle's way of knowing is **contact-knowing**, is to conform to something and by knowing something, it changes you
- This **conformity theory** has had a resurgence and in current cognitive science we see that this describes to a larger extent than we thought how we are knowing, and it's also a theory of being and he will come back to it in the future.
- He has extremely kind words for **Aristotles** as the universal genius who wrote the book on everything. Does that mean that everything we know is true? No. But if we go through the Socratic dialogue and investigation if we make sense of things, then our sense and reality coheres
- three tasks, sensory organ performing optimally, environment optimal, not reducing or distorting, inter-subjective perception to other people who receive it as well. He gave an example of a party with Susan
- Aristotle, for a millennium was synonymous with science. And yeah, the geocentric view, because it made sense to him. And he felt that everything was made up of elements, and that they all wanted to come back to where so so for example, Earth wants to go down, water to float, fire to rise and so on. Which explains a lot of phenomenon that he could observe.
- So it's not that the earth elements are attracted to earth or being pushed by the universe, but they move with intention towards the earth. And so everything in cosmos is intentional, and so are we were moving towards our ideal states. And there were people at the time who believed that the Earth was rotating, but without concepts like universal gravity and Inertial motion. That concept didn't make sense, based on all the things that you could observe
- So he's talking about Aristotle's worldview, you have a view of the world. And then you have an idea of how you can view the world. And these two mutually support each other in a very strong way. And so the knowing being, or conformative theory works very well with the theory of the geocentric concept of cosmos. So that is Aristotle's worldview.
- This worldview makes the external world and the arena a space that is structured or configured in such a way that you know how to act in it. This is a term that John Vervaeke and others came up with
- To be an agent is to be able to pursue your goals, to be able to organize your cognition and your actions to fit your goals, fit the situation, fit the environment.
- So the agent and the arena are intrinsically linked. And they co-identify. So the football player is assuming the agency of a football player in an arena of football, but the arena of Football gets its identity from the agents. And we do this all the time, like a lecture.
- That is an existential mode
- This idea comes from Clifford Geertz. anthropologist and he used it to talk about religion
- These existential modes are meta meaning relationships, they form your worldview, this agent arena co-identification
- It's a meta meaning system because this mode makes possible your entire system of meaning. If you put a tennis player in a football arena, it's absurd, which is a key word. And so without this coherent worldview, all of your actions are meaning projects or meaning less
- So the mutual unfolding of co-identification of worldviews is called worldview attunement by Clifford Geertz
- So this is an aspect of the meaning crisis is people who feel like their actions and their life is absurd, because they don't fit in with the worldview. And so Aristotle has given us a way of making connection and giving us a language to connect between the intellectual pursuit of understanding the world and reality and our own existential project of having a meaningful life.
- So this is our problem because we now have a scientific worldview. And that's how we understand the world. But a common complaint is that it gives us no guidance as to how we should live our life. If you reduce it down, we're just atoms swirling around or we're just ones and zeros. And it leads to nihilism, and nothing seems to matter. This was added by me
- Switching to India, Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama, and the psycho technologies of mindfulness as so Socrates being the embodiment of the axial age in Greece, and Siddhartha Gautama being the embodiment in India. And he talks about the book by Karen Anderson. The Great Transformation, trying to tease out why did this psycho technology become so important in the context of India
- He's not going to separate between the myth of Siddhartha and the actual life because the myth is what has had an impact on the west, but it's also something more profound than just an old story. It's a way of representing a universal pattern.
- It was prophesied that Siddhartha would either become a great religious scholar or a great king, and his father, the king wanted him to become a king.
- The king is pre axial and religious scholar is post axial, or axial.
- And so he wanted Siddharta to be surrounded by all kinds of beautiful objects and never want for every anything. So in this myth, the palace is trying to trigger within us a certain kind of meaning system.
- Marcus Aurelius said, you can be happy even in a palace. So axial people had a very negative understanding of palace.
- And then he goes into from talking about having mode and being mode (Erich Fromm), so you need to have water. There's also I-it relationship. So, it's categorical. It's objectifying. He didn't use that word. So you need cups, but if one cup breaks, you can get another cup you control cups. you manipulate cups to get water because your body needs water.
- But being need is a developmental need. You need to grow up or you need to become virtuous. And the only way to satisfy this need is to change yourself. And so it's a meaning related need.
- So there's a relationship to love and agoge when you are in love with someone as opposed to just wanting physical relationship. You want to become someone and you want the person you love to become someone and you want this relationship of growth and development and
- So differentiating between an I-it and I thou relationship.
- In the first case you are trying to solve problems you're trying to get rid of your problems like thirst in the second. You are trying to make meaning
- The problem comes when you mix the modes when you have modal confusion when you try to satisfy being needs with having mode. I need to grow up here's a car. Notice how we talk about making love but having sex
- So being in the palace is this myth of modal confusion or trying to live your entire life in the having mode
- **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis**, episode 8 (Siddharta, mindfulness, **feature schema**, focus and concentration), **March 28th, 2020**
- Can there ever be reverse modal confusion? Trying to meet your having needs in the being mode? Is this people who become were able to suppress their bodily needs because of their meditation or is it a meaningless concept #q
- So Siddharta leaves the castle. And he sees a sick person on the old person, a dead person. And then he sees a beggar that has found inner peace. And he's in an existential crisis. And disillusionment. It's not just despair. There's also the loss of illusion. And it's a very axial age concept. So he abandons his family and the castle, which is an immoral thing to do. But moral sits on top of a meaning system. And if you don't have a meaning system, then you cannot have morality.
- So he goes into the forest and has various teachers, but he practices extreme self denial. And so he's still in the having mode. And we often experienced this swing from extreme self indulgence to extreme self denial. And he's still he's still clinging on to the self and he's trying to deny and control himself still to having mode.
- He hears a musician talk to his apprentice about the string. They shouldn't be too tight or too loose. And this is the middle away, or the golden mean, which doesn't mean just average. But it's actually a transcendence. It's not indulgence and it's not the negation of indulgence. It's a transcendence and it's related to optimization and flow. You're not trying to maximize that. You're trying to optimize
- He's rescued from a river by a little girl and has its rice pudding and he needs to rediscover this lost mode of being and rediscover is this word Sati means rediscover remember, this lost mode of being
- So it's about remembering what it's like to be in the being mode to restructure your being to rediscover a lost way of being
- He compares it to going back to a place and remembering. That's how it was like to be me and in this place. It's a modal memory.
- So that's interesting because I often think about now that I'm here in Lausanne, it feels so natural to be here. And Norway, or Toronto, feel so unreal and so far away. And I can remember them as images as descriptions, but it feels very distant. And yet, the moment I land in Norway, it feels so obvious. And Lausanne feels like a far dream. I don't know if that's there's anything profound in that, but it's an interesting connection.
- All right now, I'm at the lake in Sauvabelin, and there's a little group of people having a party, and they're the animals. So instead I'm going in the other direction. And somehow it's incredibly beautiful. Because there is a quarter moon or something that's very clear. A little bit of clouds, a few stars, I can see the reflection of the moon in the little lake. And I can see the outlines of the trees on the other side and how they mirror in the lake. And although there is this pop music from the group, it just feels like a magical place. And also inspires me to really want to try to capture this kind of atmosphere as art.
- And I find it really interesting how people are so drawn to certain places or landscapes and also obsessed about capturing these landscapes. And it reminds me of the podcast I was listening to about what age children appreciate landscapes and whether primitive people can appreciate landscapes. So whether it's something that we got from the Romantic period and seeing all these paintings and teaching us to, to see in a certain way
- So this remembering the being mode, which is expressed as Sati is mindfulness, is how mindfulness is expressed in our culture yet that's not how we think about it. Although there's a beautiful book by **Steven Bachelor** called **Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism** that he highly recommends.
- And I'm wondering where – So he goes on about remembering the being mode, but where is this memory coming from? Is it something like discovering the true forms that Plato talked about? Or – why is it remembering as opposed to discovering #q
- When we wake up, which is one metaphor for enlightenment, awakening, we remember, we become, we enter into the world that we left the day before. So Siddhartha wants to use some of the psycho technologies they learnt. But to use them for a different purpose, and it's a __set__ of psycho technologies.
- Because John Vervaeke both researches mindfulness and teaches it, he makes a distinction between the language used when you are trying to be pedagogical and get students to a certain place, and the language that we need to use to examine something scientifically. And he gives an example of a **memory palaces**, which works well for memory. But if we think that memories organized spatially, we would be very mistaken.
- Describing mindfulness sounds like a feature list. And it's missing this idea of the structural functional organization that brings it together. And of course, it's using all these extremely loose terms like the here-and-now. Oh, now I'm paying attention, which might be evocative enough to bring students to the place that they need to go, but it's not useful for us to actually talk about it scientifically.
- Taking the feature list and making distinctions like actions and states. So being present is something we can do. And being insightful is a state that we can gain. And what's the causal relationship – does being present cause insightfulness? And we can lean on all of the different psychological research here. But there's also part-whole relationships and constitutive relationships part. So, is this a part of this? Or are they completely different?
- Turning a feature list into a feature schema
- Buddha talks about right concentration and wrong concentration. And a woman who was one of the first to write about mindfulness in the West, she talked about soft vigilance. So if I scream at you "concentrate on my finger concentrates, concentrates concentrates, it's going to be very difficult to kind of whipping your mind". But if I say, look at my finger, notice how the nail is shaped a little bit like this, and it's spread throughout the base, and then it's soft vigilance. And this seems very similar to the way in which **The Mind Illuminated** asks us to focus on ever more minute to minute details of our breath, when we're concentrating on the breath, rather than trying to just force ourselves
- What you're trying to do is to constantly renew your interest to constantly explore and open it up.
- Attention is not about the spotlight. It's a very sophisticated optimization process. It's about tuning
- Why do we like the spotlight metaphor better for attention? Because it captures one attribute of attention very well. When we shine a light on something, we make it stand out. We make it very salient. So attention makes something salient. And I guess, but he didn't say This also makes other things fade into the background in comparison
- mentioning some research on attention. That's very complex. So when I say walk, then you can walk. But if I say practice tennis, you're not playing tennis and optimizing the way in which you play tennis, and the same thing for practicing driving a car. And so attention isn't a thing by itself. It is optimizing another process.
- You can pay attention by optimizing your seeing into looking or optimizing your hearing into listening
- Cognitive unison. We're trying to optimize multiple different processes, so that they're sharing the same goal and working in unison.
- **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis**, episode 9 (insight, focus), **March 31st, 2020**
- **looking-at vs looking-through**
- describes an experiment where you hold, close your eyes and you tap on it trying to figure out what it is like a blind person, not shift your attention to the tapping sensation. Shift your attention to the fingers doing the tapping. Rotation back to the mental image of the object and most people find this quite easy. This is related to work by **Michael Polanyi** on **the structure of attention**
- The actual experiment was tapping on a cup using a pen as a probe. And so you shift your attention from the cup to the pen to your fingers and back. And so when you're focusing on the cup, you're not seeing the sensing through it because you're not sensing it. So it talks about something becoming opaque or transparent. like seeing through your glasses or looking at your glasses.
- attention from-to through **subsidiary awareness** to **focal awareness**.
- metaphor is moving in and out, maybe because vision is so crucial plus, and this also applies to these psycho technologies like literacy. We become so used to literacy that we don't see it. We just see through it.
- showing an example of something written where it says cat, but the H in the and A in cat are the same letters. So we're still able to read it because it fits either. So the letters are the components. And the word is the structural functional composition. But we can only tell what the letters are by understanding the work. But we can only understand the work by knowing the letters so it's impossible to read. But in fact, what our potential is doing is it's going simultaneously down to the components and up to the ideas.
- So this is how we interpret something as a chair, because it has four legs, but we interpret them as legs because they're on a chair - interesting.
- Note, I'm wondering if this also applies to more abstract concepts like theories or models, and how memory plays a role in this. Of course, with a chair, there's not very many pieces, and it's all readily apparent, but when we're trying to grasp something much more complex, where we cannot perceive all of it at once, I'm wondering how that changes our processing, and whether there's even a relationship to **distributed cognition** or **external cognition**.
- Nothing is inherently a feature or **Gestalt**. The letters are a feature of the word, the word is a feature of the sentence. The lines or pixels are a feature of the letter. So obviously interesting correlations to machine learning and **neural networks**. And perhaps there's connections here to note taking and how we zoom in and zoom out even things like **E: Convergence and divergence**.
- He says this is not a **Cartesian graph**.
- I'm not sure what that means. I think I have a mental image of the graph where it's four axis and on the y axis you can move in or out zoom in or out through the, the sensory organs or the I know what you would call it actually. And on the other axis, you zoom down into the components or up into the Gestalt. I'm hoping I understand this correctly.
- I think it just means it's not proportional, it's a schematic display of relationships
- 
- He just made the point that these two are interrelated in dynamic fashion, and use examples from science like force and mass and acceleration, that we see it as a pattern and we use that pattern to look deeper into the world.
- So often when we, for example, look at our, when we move towards opacity, we also move into components. So when we look at our hands, we're also breaking down from a hand to individual fingers, tapping, etc. So scaling down or scaling up of attention, and obviously very clear parallels to the way we do meditation and focus on the breath and so on.
- distinguishing between meditation practices – **Meditation** meaning moving towards the center, so observing your own inner processes and contemplated practices, which I'm guessing is more observing everything around you in a kind of disinterested fashion, and how the West has kind of bundled these into mindfulness. And I guess this matches up to **Culadasa**, this distinction between calming the mind and I forgot exactly what he called it so well training, focus and training, awareness or is it more calming the mind and keeping it awake? should look back at my notes
- **Contemplation** actually, temple is something high on the on the sky. Contemplate means look up towards the divine
- **Theory** comes from theory area which means seeing deeper into reality.
- Ancient Greece: it came to refer to contemplative or speculative understandings of natural things, such as those of natural philosophers, as opposed to more practical ways of knowing things, like that of skilled orators or artisans
- So contemplation is scaling up and meditation is scaling down attention
- He says that he was taught three things. Meditation, **Vipassana** insight. **Metta**, which is a scaling up a social scaling up. I think it's a kindness practice, and **Tai Ji Quan**, which is a movement practice, so integrating with the body. And it makes me interested in reading more about his background and by whom was he taught all these three and how much has he pieced together by himself and to what extent does he does he have great teachers? So, but it's a system of psycho technologies that work in unison
- Why do these psycho technologies lead to insight? Because I need to do two things. To solve **the nine dot problem**, I need to break up the frame that I'm used to seeing things in. So I need to break up the Gestalt, and I need to do to deautomatize my thinking process and instead of doing it intuitively, I have to look at the actual practice which maps on to what he was just saying, around his students zooming down or in or scaling down
- **chunk decomposition** and And **constraint relaxation** can help people solve these tricky problems. So I'm trying to see the connection with the **Shamans** because I can see the breaking of the frame. But I'm not sure how it makes your thought processes less automatic. And the same thing with **flow** state. With flow states i don't even see how it's breaking the frame. But I guess we'll find out
- So breaking up the frame is not enough, we need to create a new frame. And so we need to connect more deeply see more broadly, and make relevant and salient things that were at the edge of our awareness before. And so we need to be able to also zoom up. And there's certain practices, there's certain people who can do these kind of leaps that are better at this kind of problem solving.
- And so obviously, very clear connection to, I think, **E: Convergence and divergence**.
- I'm curious about the connection to **expertise**, all of the studies that **Marlene Scardamalia** did about how experts see differently and there's a kind of **pattern recognition**.
- Also, again, the connection to experience and knowledge Knowing more things, having experienced more things, perhaps also experienced them more fully than just book learning. Theoretically, I think would be helpful.
- Interesting to try to connect this to the Minerva curriculum, and how we're engaging, engaging them around the world. And whether this is actually leading them to be able to do these kinds of things.
- And I'm wondering if there are any kind of testable hypotheses here, like actual tests that we can run. And there might even be a possible collaboration with John Vervaeke's lab at in Toronto.
- But both of these mechanisms can also be negative. So it can help you break a frame, but you can also choke like giving your boxing partner a compliment. And now he focuses on his hand and he gets out of the flow, and he's not effective anymore. Or if you just uncritically create new frames, you might create bad frames.
- So, basically you need to have **the golden mean** that he was talking about earlier, not just the average between these two, but this kind of **dynamic system** where you get very good at flowing between them and choosing the optimal balance at any one point. And that's why **the Eightfold Path**, for example, teaches you all kinds of different things. Not just for example, meditation.
- **Meditation** is basically training, the flexibility of our cognitive processes so that we can notice when we are at the point of insight and take control over our processes and be more kind of limber.
- And this is a bit similar to what people have said about, for example, being better at interpersonal relationships or conflicts or regulating emotions because you're able to see them coming and actually regulate them.
- I wonder if there's also something about speed how, when you're learning how to juggle it seems impossibly fast. And yet when you're good at juggling three balls you feel like you have all the time in the world between thrower one ball and another ball and
- And this might be similar to how **The Mind Illuminated** says that after a while you can get incredibly detailed in how you perceive your breathing, for example,
- I'm also really curious about John Vervaeke's own experience as an academic, is presumably a master of these techniques and how he is using it on a daily basis in his academic work when he's working on different kinds of skills. I'm curious what kind of note taking he's doing knowledge management for Vervaeke
- So the two extreme states are both physical are both kind of mystical states.
- If you zoom down all the way, you look at your brain thinking and then you look at the process of looking at your brain thinking and then you go further and further behind and then you get to this **pure consciousness event**. Where there you're not looking through anything. You're just looking and there is nothing. You're not don't even have a self. You're just a consciousness. and he has had this experience.
- And on the other hand if you just zoom out out out, in the end you create this Gestalt, which is encompassing the whole world and you feel this incredible at oneness with the whole world. Which is, of course, the Buddhist idea. And he also mentioned how, as you zoom in, things become less representational and abstract and more concrete. I guess.
- I wonder if there is some connection also to **art** here. Because I've always been fascinated by how much symbols people can put into paintings or music and how you can learn about art and appreciate art because you see all these different things that represent – whether it's a color or – we humans seem extremely interested in playing with symbols and representation and even **memes**, I guess, these days. And whether that's actually a way of training yourself as well. through art.
- And even **drawing**, I guess, is an interesting thing, not in terms of the symbol but in terms of so there's the left and the right brain paths, and how one is more logical and linguistic and the other is more symbolic and intuitional. #**brain hemisphere model**
- And I'm not sure exactly how true this is, but that seems like a really interesting thing to investigate. Because what you are doing when you're drawing is really to decompose a house into lines and shades and hues and so on. That's really cool. And he mentioned that scaling up all the way to encompass the world is kind of like this gigantic **flow** state.
- So imagine that you're doing Vipassana on every out-breath, and doing metta on every in-breath. And you might have to do this for years. And you could come to a third state which goes from the the bottoms of consciousness to the global state. It's all integrated. It's the non duality. It's insight, **enlightenment**, I guess. And you are able to get these incredibly important insights.
- Because so your, he goes back to the **agent arena relationship**, you're pushing into the agent. And so I guess the agent is zooming in and out to the arena and you're able to kind of operate on the machinery so I guess this goes back to his discussion on **worldview**
- So, if you get this, so **Buddha** was probably one of the first to really combine these two techniques. And when he reached enlightenment, it's like this super super flow state.
- His whole demeanor changed his kind of charisma, elegance, Grace, and people who met him, asked him if he was a god or if he was a man. And he said, I am awake. So, instead of describing himself as a thing, he describes himself as a state
- So when people have certain kinds of experiences of altered states, it's kind of like a mini **axial revolution**. Usually when we awaken from sleep or from some drugs, we say that was not real, even though we thought it was real when we were inside it. But when they're awake from other kinds of experiences, they say that was real, that was more real than this. And we talked about higher states of consciousness, which is exactly this axial view of the two worlds and transcendence.
- So, after these experiences, people want to change themselves, change their practices to get closer to this reality, **sati** – to remember the being mode to come back into contact. And I guess this is related to this deep meta-drive for reality, even though it might be more pleasant to be in a dream state, and of course there's a connection to **Plato's cave**.
- So they change their whole life. The **agent arena relationship** is completely reconfigured. And this is called the **quantum change theory**, which is a bad name, but it actually happens and I guess this might also be related to how people with **PTSD** can use **psychedelic drugs** to get better and, and stuff like that because it radically kind of changes your framing, but now he's going much deeper and says it's not just about changing one frame for another, but it's actually seeing some deeper reality that you you seek towards and completely reinterpret your role in the world agent arena figuration
- 30 to 40% have gone through these kinds of mystical experiences through surveys, and they report that they have a huge increase in meaning in life. And this is across all groups and, and cultures and all religions have these kind of mystical traditions.
- So these people, apparently, it's the most significant event in their life, it has significantly increased their meaning in life and their capacity for insight and stuff like that. And yet, I don't see these people making huge contributions other than maybe going deeper into certain religions or practices. I'm not sure if the solutions to the climate crisis or socio economic problems are going to come from these people and maybe places like the **Monastic Academy** is trying to change that but I'm really curious if this is true, if you know was Einstein – Were all of the great thinkers... – I mean, they might have been very good at making leaps and thinking outside of frames and stuff, but I don't think they reached Buddhist enlightenment. And the people who reached for this enlightenment. Are there examples of them doing this kind of incredible work or is the work that they're doing maybe? Does it change the perception of importance so that the work that we think is very important does not seem important to them. #q
- And that seems crucially connected to this whole concept of a meaning crisis. Because if becoming enlightened, makes you think that nothing matters because we're all just at them and we're all blissful in whatever misery, physical misery, we might find ourselves. That's not really going to address those big crises. So, it will be interesting to see how he pulls that all together.
- By the way, I'm noticing that the stars are incredibly bright tonight. And and it's beautiful. Not sure why I think it's beautiful. Maybe it's related to this zooming out and seeing yourself as a whole cosmos. But I'm curious if it's just coincidence or if it has anything to do with less pollution and less flights because of the corona crisis. #meta
- [[**Awakening From the Meaning Crisis**, episode 10]]
- **Awakening From the Meaning Crisis, episode 11**
- [[**Awakening From the Meaning Crisis**, episode 14]]
- So the disciple of **Plato** was **Aristotles**, and the disciple of Aristotle was **Alexander the Great**, only lived 33 years died in **Babylon**,
- contrasting the city state and the **polis**.
- Where you knew the people, you knew their histories, you knew all the ancestors, and the politics and the culture was so enmeshed in your identity, that being ostracized from a city state was to some people worse than death.
- Alexander pushed the Greek boundaries,
- far outwards, even into India, meeting Buddhism, **Bactria**, and Asia and so on. And suddenly, you had dummy side, the death of a home, you lived far away from power, Empire shifted. You maybe didn't live somewhere for very long, there was a sense of disconnect. The Alexander's project is almost going back to the pre axial age, he's becoming almost a godlike figure, because of his strength. Physically, Greece splintered through lots of wars, and then was taken over by Macedonia, where Alexander came from. And so you had this age of anxiety, this meaning crisis, the Hellenistic age. And there was a lot of syncretism in religion, where they were trying to merge different religious traditions focus on mother goddesses to replace the feeling of home and safety and a new
- goal of philosophy, the previous
- goal, the project of Plato and Aristotle, was to overcome stupidity and ignorance. And now, Epicurus talked about alleviating suffering as a so there is a therapeutic aspect
- to philosophy.
- I really need to lay out some timelines. And I'm curious how this interferes, how this interfaces with Buddhism, which obviously, to me, had this therapeutic aspect. And whether there is some connection to the geopolitics of that age, which he didn't seem to talk very much about.
- **Paul Tillich** - **The Courage to Be📒**, masterpeice about stoics.
- So the **epicureans** diagnosis is that our main problem is fear. He makes a distinction between anxiety and fear.
- Fear is something concrete where you know what to do, even though you might not be able to do it.
- And anxiety is something unspecific and negative.
- Although the epicureans have been translated as talking about fear, he thinks it's more appropriate to talk about anxiety.
- They believe the main source of anxiety was fear of death.
- You can aim for immortality, like many religions have suggested,
- **Epicurius** offers a second route which is radical acceptance of your mortality.
- And then they have a lot of philosophical arguments around. What exactly are you afraid of? If you're afraid of dying? Is it your lack of existence? Is it your lack of freedom? And it comes down to and is your life meaningless if you're going to die, and they come down to the fact that the meaning of life is pleasure, but pleasure means good friendships and the pursuit of filozofia of wisdom. So they had these communities that also include women and his followers tried to enact Epicurus, writing things on the wall, and so on.
- And many they were not concerned with the gods. And they came up with some of the arguments that current atheists use. But Vicki thinks their answer is good, but it's not sufficient. Because
- he didn't doesn't think the main source of anxiety is fear of death, because people have always been mortal. So what is it about that current zite guys, that makes this so present. And to understand that we will talk about stoics.
- Plato was one disciple of Socrates. And he created the dialogues to teach people to think like Socrates, another disciple and ticinese.
- internalized
- what Socrates did, and he was
- more focused on the
- provocation, or the confrontation than the debate, because what Socrates does, he confronts you with something. And then he convinces you through debate and Socratic questioning.
- And
- they are Dr. Janice was a disciple maybe of antecedentes. And he was doing some kind of radical performance art, like looking everywhere in the market, with a lamp until people asked him what he was looking for. And he said, honest man, or masturbating in public, or living as a dog, in a in a barrel. And Alexander the Great, came to see him and he asked him to move to get the sun. So that's really interesting how these storylines are meeting for me. And so the stoics believed that we attach ourselves to things that the wrong things, things that will change, and then we get disappointed. And so political systems, cultural systems, all of these things will change. The things that won't change are the laws of nature, and the natural world. So that's why he was trying to live like a dog, but also moral codes. And they distinguish between purity codes, like walking naked, which are socially conditioned, and served to uphold the current power structures or social norms, and moral codes, which are more they believed universal. There's also a connection between stoicism and modern psychotherapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy, emotion, behavioral theory, therapy, etc, which is really interesting for me to explore further.
- So this again, sounds like it connects to Buddhism, with this
- idea that life is suffering and the way
- out of suffering is to
- not be attached to things.
- And of course, even in modern day, there seems to be some overlap between stoics and modern Western Buddhists. I guess the use of meditation as a psycho technology is one thing that distinguishes the two.
- So later, disciple of
- diagenesis, see now teaching in the stoer wanted to unify the cynics and
- the rational,
- Irish Aristotelian because he thought that the cynics focus too much on the product, the specific culture, or the specific political system might change. But humans are social creatures. And we need to be in a social context. So it's not so much what you set your heart on as how you set your heart. And this is also the case in modern rationality research, that it's very important to focus on the process and not just
- the outcome.
- And
- then he mentioned agent arena relationship and co identification, but and apparently it will be unpacked in the next episode.
- General questions:
- **John Vervaeke** talks about how there is often a cognitive leap after a period of crisis. How does this interract with [[The Body Keeps the Score]], and the idea of trauma? Personal? Societal? (Point made by Diedie)