In the space. All right, what's up everybody. We've got our good
buddy, David Patrick Carey, Church of the Eternal Logos, joins me tonight
to do this sponsored stream. Shout out to our bro AC for this collab
sponsored stream. We're going to be getting into the philosophy and the thought of
Professor John Vervake, and a lot of this is very new to me,
so I've been diving into it this week. I have had a chance to
get pretty deep into his podcasts, and David sent me one of his papers
that he's recently written about non being and neoplatonism. So we're going to talk
about some of that. We're also going to talk about how it relates to
transhumanism. And before we get all the tell all that though, I want
David to give us kind of his background story about how he thinks all of
this became really popular in the last five, six, seven years, because
I think his his track of the events and how they occurred as a really
good summation of how we got to this point of what Verveiki calls the meaning
crisis, and how key figures like you know, Trump and Jordan Peterson,
you know, played a big role in that, So thank you for coming
on, David, and tell us how you think this came to be so
popular. This is tied with the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, which is really inescapable.
When you start getting into these conversations about meaning and even masculinity, we
see the rise of the manosphere. That was the last one we did,
was talking about the manosphere stuff. And so in twenty sixteen especially, we
can see this massive transformation and what exactly is the counterculture with the Donald Trump
phenomenon. So twenty fifteen he goes down the escalator. He's now running for
president and right around the time Jordan Peterson resists, was at bill C sixteen
in Canada. That was demanding people talk about pronouns and recognizing people's pronouns.
This was, you know, going all over social media. And then I
think a few months later he's brought on Joe Rogan and that's when Jordan Peterson
emerges as Jordan Peterson. Meanwhile, he had been posting videos for years up
to that point, and he had had multiple conversations with Jean Verbaki, both
of which are professors at Toronto, the University of Toronto. And so this
meaning crisis or this Jordan Peterson phenomenon post twenty sixteen, seventeen eighteen nineteen.
It's this huge phenomenon of people now looking at symbolic understandings, dealing with meaning,
recognizing this nihilism in the Western world. And I think that's why Jordan
Peterson was so appealing for young men, is that one he's justifying much of
the problems and concerns they have with the contemporary world. But he's also then
talking about meaning and what it means to be a man and putting your life
together, finding purpose, and so John Vervaki and him have had multiple conversations.
I was always more knowledgeable of the Peterson phenomenon, but through AC in
the last like six months have got me watching and reading more of Vervaiki,
and it's really interesting to see how their projects overlap. Verveak, I think
his is much more explicit in regarding the building of a religion of tomorrow,
which he literally is explicit about in some of his dreams. Jordan Peterson,
unlike Verveake, is much more focused on this utilization of Christian symbolism, the
Bible and this type of thing, and that's what I think gave young men
a new perspective on Western culture, Christian heritage, Christian values, and allowed
young men to sort of have a new identity and in recognition to this meaningst
crisis, where what exactly are you standing up for as a Western man per
se. So I think that that generally lays out how this phenomenon emerged.
We see Pagio really blew up through Peterson, and then the manosphere has always
existed and they've been blogging for you know, the last like fifteen years,
but I would say the manosphere has dramatically increased again due to the Jordan Peterson
phenomenon. Yeah, it seems like the Peterson kind of prepped the way for
Manosphere and then it kind of took on a life of its own because like
there's old Canadian TV access like that. You can find interviews of Peterson where
he's saying stuff, you know, kind of men's rights, migtile even ish
type stuff way back a long time ago, maybe even fifteen fifteen, sixteen
years ago. So I'm not saying that necessarily it was intentional. I'm just
saying that Peterson, you know, sort of blows up and then what was
there was already a manosphere, but it kind of like allowed the manosphere to
speak even louder and kind of go off into its own directions of in cell
migtel, red pill, you know, all of those different variations and schisms
that it went into. But yeah, and so so Verveki as an academic
then appears to kind of bring the bridge maybe to Eastern philosophy into a lot
of I mean, I don't know that he's I'm not accusing him of being
a new Ager, but as I listened to the podcast, it's obviously very
you know, Buddhist centric, it's very focused on a lot of far Eastern
philosophy. So maybe that's the bridge to you know, Oriental philosophy perhaps through
Vervaki. Right well, and at a philosophical level, Verveki clearly his number
one spiritual foundation right now is neo Platonism, right, and he uses that
to have one foot into the Christian world. Talks a lot about Christian neil
Platonists, but I think that appeals to that that monism of neil Platonism appeals
to the Eastern mystical mind. And so whether he's talking about Proclus or whatever,
Neil Platonic thinker He's very much interested in sort of the apaphatic nature of
God and tying this into this no thingness or this nothingness within Eastern mysticism and
trying to highlight well, these are different understandings, are sort of saying the
same thing. But the West isn't equipped with facing the nothingness. And so
this is where he would give credit to Nietzsche for recognizing the neihilism that was
approaching of Western society. But then he refers back to this sort of Buddhist
scholar Nishanti about that the West doesn't have the philosophical tools to face the nothingness,
and this is what his project is trying to do is prepare people to
face and confront this and this is sort of a phenomenological, psychological, spiritual
development of oneself and how they can move into this new future state where you've
confronted the nihilism of the world, but now you're finding deeper meaning. And
this is basically his response to this meaning crisis. Well, before that's before
we get to that, because I do have a lot I want to say
on that topic, because I'm noticing us in going through his podcast that that
I think what's going on here is that he sees himself as a kind of
shaman that will be the person or could be a person or one of the
key figures that functions as one of these turning point figures. He uses his
term quite a bit in I think the third or fourth episode of the Christis
Meaning podcast where he talks about the turning points. He was a lot of
emphasis, for example, on the transition of the ancient world into the period
when writing developed and this was a turning point. And then then we get
the period of like you know, the end of the Paleolithic era, when
we get you know, weapons and tools and things being invented, and these
are turning points. And then he talks about how we got to get into
some of the terminology that he uses because it's really important axaptation, and this
is an idea from biology where he sees the evolutionary model basically taking on a
new tool and then that member of the species adapts that tool, and typically
it's something biological, like a mutation, but he's saying no, it can
also be a mental thing where we adapt something, we take on this new
tool set, and this can then allow a new phase of reality, a
new phase of civilization, or whatever. One of those adaptations or one of
these tools that he talks about is writing and abstract thinking. So he does
a lot of it, has a lot of discussion of that. But just
on the on the account of his his approach to the ancient world, I
immediately noticed a lot of crawl young. He admits this too, because he
says, look the ancient world. He says, why do you think of
You know, when you think about the ancient world, you only think of
like Greeks or the Egyptians. Maybe, he says, you don't think back
to beyond that, and you don't think too like Babylon. You don't think
to that. Why is that? And he says, because you're kind of
conditioned to think of certain cultures in the ancient world as the ones that you're
supposed to look to. But maybe even older cultures had this remnant notion of
the golden age of the gods, or the primeval world or the you know,
the Elysian fields, this super perfect state that we want to try to
get back into because the gods have that more powerful status, that's where they're
coming out of. We've gotten into some lower state of consciousness, and so
we want to try to engage in projects, or he even calls them psychotechnologies,
and he thinks of the shaman as kind of like the essential psycho technician,
right, which is able to get back into that's primal state, but
in the here and the now. So do you have any comments on that?
No, I think that's exactly part of his project. And the shaman
is perfect because he's again this whole project is both abstract but then imminent.
And so the utilization of these psychedelics allows the shaman to go into these spiritual
realms to find deeper meaning in the lived experience of reality. It's communal,
he acts within a community, and so all these things are working with his
general project. So yeah, I totally see the exact same things. And
the shaman, generally speaking we've seen in these alternative forms of spirituality, is
an idealized figure. You actually read some of Eliod's stuff on shamanism and the
archaic techniques of ecstasy. You know, shaman's practice a wide variety of different
belief systems, and some of them are from a Christian perspective objectively demonic and
evil and what they're doing. You know, people go down to Peru they
do their ayahuasca session and the shaman gets everybody loaded and then he starts trying
to rape the women or something like This isn't totally unheard of, but the
WES has developed these really idealized frameworks for the shaman as being this prototypical tribal
man that heals that's there for the collective and then he can go into these
altered states of consciousness and find deeper meanings of patterns and understandings and art and
beauty and bring that back to the people. And this has been reiterated,
whether it be McKenna Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, as something of an ideal
figure for the twenty first century. This is the spiritual seeker in the twenty
first century. This is what we should aspire to. Yeah. I don't
mean this in a rude way, but it just my first thought, honestly
when I hear a lot of this stuff is like, this is what you
know. This is like the Boomer type of you know, counterculture idea.
This is what a Boomer thinks is deep because in the nineteen sixties they were
inundated with LSD, you know, experimentation with hallucigens. The beatles, transital
meditation and all this sort of you know, grateful dead type stuff. And
so it's a lot of verbiage and things that people think is extremely super deep,
but when you actually start digging into it, it's it's not that deep.
And I'm not saying that Vervaiki isn't an academic I'm just saying that.
Let me give you one example, the idea that the shaman somehow has a
special insight into the next dimension or spiritual reality, which could be the case,
but the fact that this occurs throughout the ancient world in different cultures,
that therefore that's something we should emulate. And it's like, but why,
I mean, why should we There's a lot of things that were kind of
universal in the ancient world, but we don't think of them as things that
we should necessarily emulate. Now. I know he thinks he has arguments that
well, but the shaman perceives, you know, and he sees things in
a way that no one else does and allows him to have these new technologies.
But I'm just calling into question the idea that spirituality is a technology.
I would take issue with that, or the hallucinogens are a technology. He
argues that he is already a cyborg in that if you're if you're engaging with
technology, that is the extension of man, and that is then the that
is for him, the definition of a cyborg. And so he would argue
the book is a technology, writing is a technology, language is a technology.
Are ways in which we're already cyborgs. And this is then for a
later conversation, this is why you shouldn't fear artificial intelligence and some of the
stuff where technology is going, because we're already part of it. Yeah,
I mean, as we hear that's a refrain in a lot of the transhumanists.
I mean, Kurtzwahl argues that I know you've all Harari makes this argument
and again, I mean a lot of what I'm hearing in Vervakian. This
is not to be rude or overly critical, but it's sort of like a
lot of things that kind of on the surface seem good, sound and solid,
actually aren't that sound and solid. Let me give you one example.
He makes a big to do about being and if you know philosophy, if
you know the history of philosophy, being is one of the most generic and
debated terms in the history of philosophy. I'm not saying that it's not useful
and that we can't speak of being, but the problem is that you need
some kind of metaphysics to do that, to have being. And I know
that he's, you know, as you said, gotten into neoplatonism. So
I'm not trying to knock everything that he's talking about. But it's like in
these lectures, as I'm hearing him, you know, talk about being,
and when he gets into the Buddha, he talks about that the Buddha was
looking for the being mode versus the having mode, and it's like, okay,
modes and modalities. I mean, this is medieval scholastic philosophy. I
mean, yet exists in Greek philosophy too, But it's like when you start
using modalities and all this kind of stuff and tying it into I mean,
that's not it's just not the right usage. I don't think of the terminology
for like, being attached to possessions is having mode having mode, I mean
versus being mode, which is being at peace and not wanting possessions. Okay,
that's not what being in the history of philosophy is referring to. So
the terminology is not precise, and I think there's a lot of you can
get away with a lot more if you're not precise in your terminologies. That
makes sense, Yeah, and he would. The way he sneaks it in
is that I would give him total credit that he's very, very well read.
I've seen just into his stuff in preparation. He's referenced books that I've
read that were totally unrelated to topics he was talking about. So the guy
is an avid reader, no doubt, incredibly intelligent, very smart. But
one of the problems with the language he uses, and that's what if you
read him like the article I sent you, and I've said he's ad obscurantist,
it means like he uses words, but it doesn't feel like they're useful
in a way that they're gaining more clarity. It's just more abundance, and
he uses them in different ways that takes them out of the context. So
he'll use things like Christian understandings of theosis and relate this to some Buddhist concept
of nothingness, which are totally if you're really going to get detailed, or
totally different. So when you're talking about mode and modality for him, then
he'll use that in a contemporary psychological way, but then he's also using it
philosophically. And so he uses all these words that if you're not familiar with
academia and some of these stuff, it just sounds like you're being bombarded with
all this knowledge. And certainly they're real references, but there seems to me
listening to it's like, well, he's making jumps that don't seem adequate based
on the words he's using because he's taken it out of the context in which
the people that would use those words and where they come from would mean them
to be. So it's like absolutely, yeah, I mean, I'm going
to cut you off if you have more. Well, that's that's I mean.
And it's over and over that I see that happen in his work,
and well, as we move through we'll find this in multiple different ways,
how he uses different words that mean different things again metanoia, uh, theological
specific theological terms of orthodoxy and why orthodoxy because it appeals to his platonic sentiments.
And then and so he's explicit He's had Bishop Maximus on who I had
a conversation with. He's part of the old Calendar Church, but he is
a philosopher, and he has been talking to Vervaiki about participatory versus these propositional
frames of understanding, and how even though he's looking for participation, his neoplatonic
framework is still all propositional exactly, and that's because it's not relational like Orthodoxy.
And so he's then, especially since those conversations, been really focused on
this sort of relational understanding and using Christian terminology in Christian theology to describe his
own project, which is totally divorced from anything Orthodox. Absolutely, I'm glad
you brought that up, because almost forgot that point, which is that there
is a section in the lecture or the courses that he's doing on the christ
of meaning when he gets to the point where he's talking about ancient Israel and
Hebrew philosophy and theology, and he says, one of the interesting things that
the Hebrews did was bring in this notion of God as personal, and I
completely agree with that. Of course, from his vantage point, he says,
I don't believe in the supernatural. I'm only a cognitive scientist, so
I'm only interested in kind of understanding this project of you know, the history
of religions from this abstracted viewpoint. But he made a good point there,
which is that if ultimate reality is impersonal and you're absolute, your concrete absolute
or whatever is this abstract force, then the universe no longer has purpose,
It loses teleology, it becomes disteleological, as we say, so you need
a being with intentionality, that is, you know, the creator, the
providential governor, and the end, the alpha and omega of the created order.
That's what we have in orthodox philosophy and metaphysics and none of these other
systems. Even Neoplatonism, it has a lot of you know, it kind
of aims at some of those things, but it still doesn't ever get to
that. And you know, there's a lot of problems in neoplatonic thought that
we can go into. But I'm glad you said that because there's a specific
point when he says that the introduction of God as personal is such a huge
movement, you know, in the history of religion and in civilization, and
it's sort of like, yeah, you're missing that very thing that you pointed
out right about that if you don't have the ultimate principle and your metaphysics or
in your worldview as personal that has disastrous effects for the rest of you of
your worldview if God is personal. And by the way, I know you're
not saying this, but just to be clear, to say God is personal
is not just to say that he's a relation. So a person is a
subject, it's an agent. And if you read there's a really good essay
that Father Fluorowsky wrote on Christianity and and Divine Revelation, and he says that
one of the things that Christianity brought that was new to the ancient world was
this notion of personhood and person as distinct from nature. I mean, persons
a stantiate nature. But persons are more than just an instance of nature.
Persons are subjects that in a way stand up above or transcend nature itself.
And that's what makes me the person, Jay, it's what makes you the
person, David, even though we share common human nature, where we are
particularized by the idiomata of personhood. So I think that's a really important point.
And if he understood that, I mean, there's a really good book
by there's a Romanian guy that wrote a book on personhood in the Cappadocians and
his names escaping at the moment. But I read that a couple of years
ago, and he's a philosopher, Orthodox thinker. I think he's Orthodox,
And the thesis of the book is basically that you kind of have some close
parallel of personhood with Aristotle's notion of agent agent or an individuated subject, but
it's still not what you get in Christian philosophy and revelation of personhood, because
human personhood just grounded in divine person in Orthodox theology. Ayway, Florofsky's essay
is really good on that. But yeah, so, yeah, what do
you think of that? Yo? That was my first I have a handful
of direct criticisms at his entire project and worldview, and the very first one
was the incredibly ambiguous reference to God. So and he talks about this,
that God for him is not personal, and so he may talk about the
Jews and the Israelites and how this was a novel development and why it's useful
in our cognitive understanding of self and a relationship to transcendence and all this stuff,
But for him, this really what he calls the fundamental religious ground of
being or the ineffable, or I've seen him refer to it as the spirit
and as sort of Hegelian understanding of geist or just pure transcendence. This is
God for him, but it's totally ambiguous, and at times it seems like
he's talking about consciousness, which is still as undefinable as other times he's talking
about some like underlying reality, or at times he's talking about nothingness. And
that's where he's pulling together all these different things apathetic philosophy from neo Platonism,
nothingness in Eastern mysticism of the void and emptiness shuniata, and then he's using
constant Orthodox concepts of theosis and how we are becoming divinied by the confrontation of
this nothingness. It's just this amalgamation of all these different things, and that's
why he has to keep God abstract because another my third criticism is that it's
inherently a perennialistic project. It is partialism. That's exactly what I thought reading
the neoplatonism essay that he sent, because he begins by talking about comparisons between
Porphyry's idea of non being versus what you know, Kyoto school philosophers think about
non being or to nothingness or something like that, and basically, all that
verbia is means that there's a neoplatonic idea of non being that has nothing to
do with like an internal existential moral collapse of a person or a society.
It's a metaphysical concept. But then for the individual, nothingness and nihilism is
this personal kind of existential collapse that you might go through when you have trauma
or something like that. Now the ideas might be connected, but basically the
idea is that we need to reorient ourselves to being prepared to will will ourselves
towards non being, to will non being and to will our non our non
existence or something like this, that when we confront the nihilism, then we're
reborn. And this is actually I think a lot of the a lot of
Nietzschean philosophers basically just make this point that you know, there's a guy that's
gone on a bunch of podcasts. His name escapes me right now, but
he's a Nietzschean philosopher, and he he basically makes the argument that look,
Nietsche is not your enemy, and nihilism is actually a philosophy of hope because
the project of nihilism is hey, when you realize the end of yourself,
then you can truly be and all the systems, then you can truly be
reborn to create your own meaning. Right, Yeah and yes, And this
will get into the meaning crisis in his project because nihilism is this recognition of
the meaninglessness and he ties in these personal narratives. So he talks about how
narrative is limiting, and this would probably be maybe a slight criticism he would
have towards Jordan Peterson. The focus on symbolism and narrative is that he believes
that, well, the narratives is actually entrapping because you have this narrative about
your life and your story and where you're going and this is all self created.
And what you need to do is again the meaning crisis then is using
these what he calls transformational modalities spiritual techniques to begin to root oneself in the
the reality of being. And this is then you're confronting of nilism and recognizing
the no thingness there. And this is then this this advancement in oneself is
now now you're sort of advanced and you're moved forward and now you're more in
power of the narrative and also the grounding of reality. Well, let me
ask you about this, because this is an area that you're an expert in.
And you know, as I'm listening to his to his early talks kind
of laying out his framework of the past, he sees the the art.
He sees the shaman as like this. I mean to me, this is
an undue reverence for the figure of the shaman. I mean, I understand
the shamanic tradition is important to ancient primal cultures, and and I know they
have an important role in telling the myths and giving the myth forms as he
calls them to the societies. And but there's this again, this undue adilation
of like the sh as this this archite. He even says it is he
thinks it's one of the archetypes. So the shaman is one of the archetypes.
So and what we've lost in society is the shaman. You know,
if we can have this, this meaning maker come back and uh if I
mean, just at a really basic level, I'm just thinking, like,
you know, this is your area of expertise. Is this really accurate?
I mean, is the shaman really I understand he's important to ancient cultures,
but on what basis. Are we supposed to assume that that is this you
know, archetypal thing that we got to bring back today, and that that
some sort of shamanic practice is somehow going to To me, this just sounds
like the sixties counterculture engineered you know, archaic revival, you know, primitivism
stuff. And I but why is that better? Yeah, I agree with
you. That is his perspective, and I'll tell you why he goes there
first. It is an overstatement of what the shaman does. Yes, the
shaman primary is oriented towards healing of the tribe, and he goes into these
altered states of consciousness. Could be soberly in regards to doing a sun dance
in the sun for six hours and spinning in circles. Maybe that's one way
he gets into altered conscious Some of them, many of them use in debraating
substances in a ritualistic form to get into altered states in which they can contact
the spirit world and then gain and garner information and knowledge that then they can
repackage and songs or poems or mythology and this type of thing. And so
from that perspective, the shaman scene as this sort of cultural generator. But
why he's so focused on the shaman is because in his Meaning Crisis, he's
explicit that traditional religions and myths have fallen short for people in twenty first century.
And so why then he would overvalorize the shaman is that then we can
now create new meaning. In the meaning crisis, you can become your own
shaman, or at least maybe he himself is seeing himself in his own project.
That's a sort of shamanism where he's going into the altered state and then
bringing these ideas back so that then he can give them back to the tribe
so that you can find more meaning and depth in your own life. He's
doing that because he's already explicitly rejected all traditional forms of religion as already have
run their course. They're done, there's no reason to turn back to them.
Therefore, we need to reconstruct something new. And that's why the shaman
being brought into the sort of twenty first century pagan worldview is how then you're
going to regenerate that sort of cultural the cultural creator in the shamanic role.
That makes sense. I had a professor send me a critique that he wrote
a paper he wrote critiquing Peterson's project, and his argument was that Peterson's project
is what he calls an archaeology of ideas, and the idea is that we
can go back through the ancient societies, ancient cultures, let's do a lot
of archaeological digging, kind of a crawl youngish project, and the purpose of
that is that we'll create a new kind of community and society that can give
this meaning, perhaps in the near future. Right, So the idea is
that there might be some projected new I don't know what they would a quasi
church, I don't even know what we would call it, or or some
sort of intentional community or something like this. Whether that's where they want to
go, I'm not sure. I'm going to ask you about that here in
a little bit. But I noticed as he was doing his Ancient Religion's course,
he didn't explicitly say this, but he kind of hinted that he thinks
that the use of hallucinogens or the shamanic you know, experience, was one
of these key turning points. It almost sounded like stone ape theory, like
like like that this that that oh once the shaman was really you know,
like really tripping balls. Then we got weapons and we got language. Dog
so like we can like you know, blow some stuff up, we can
write some letters, we get do some cuneiform thanks to tripping balls. But
I don't actually think that this is the case. I don't doubt that the
ancient world utilized rugs. We know that they did. This is your area
of expertise. But what I mean, and again he didn't explicitly say stone
dapate theory, but he kind of he kind of hinted at it and talked
kind of tucked around the edges of it. What are some critiques that you
would have or maybe maybe you think that they did operate this way in the
ancient world. But to me, it just seems like an assumption that,
oh, yeah, there was like, you know, a caveman did he
ate some uh, you know, trip tripping shroom droppings one day and he
developed the frontal cortex. And then fast forward a few million years and like
one day a shaman was tripping balls. Then he figured out how to do
you know, hieroglyphics or something right, and that's that's essentially the theory is
that for those who aren't familiar with the stone date theory that Jay's referring to
is a theory put together by Terrence and Dennis McKenna back in the seventies due
to their psychedelic journey and the Amazonian jungle that they came to the realization that
human have a li was actually tied to the ingestion of they believe to be
psilocybin mushrooms traferia cubensus with which is a dunge growing mushroom. So they claim,
well, you know there is there is a drying of the sahara,
and what happened is that the the arboreal apes that were in the canopies came
down onto the grasslands, and therefore we're rummaging and searching for food. And
by taking in these mushrooms at small levels, it would increase visual acuity.
At at higher levels it would increase because psychedelics trigger a sort of neuralsystem systematic
response where you can become aroused, you gain energy, nobody takes LSD and
becomes tired that there's a real response there that oh well, now they'd copulate
more, making it more evolutionary advantageous, and then at higher levels full blown
trips. Now we get language like you said, the full development of the
neo frontal cortex and all this stuff. The problem with that theory is one
no evolutionary theorist again, and I have my own problems with mac revolution,
but no evolutionary theorist has actually bought on and argued that this to be the
case. It's basically become a myth of the psychedelic spiritual world is that psychedelics
are sort of the key that unlocks all mysteries. Oh, we have a
mystery about how the neofrontal cortex emerged. Well, therefore psychedelics are responsible for
it. And so even the idea that at small dose of psilocybin increases visual
acuity, you got people can go back and look at I forget which the
experiment was that Terrence was referring to. But it's in the early nineteen sixties,
and in fact, it does not insinuate that your visual acuity has increased.
It was that these people noticed when one these two lines became unparallel,
that people who took psilocybin first noticed it. That Okay, then now it's
no longer parallel. It was parallel, now it's not. But this does
not insinuate that the visual acuity. So the entire premise is in a way
been debunked and totally overgeneralized. And I wouldn't be surprised if a raaki hat
buys into that, because his whole thing is about these sort of I mean,
he's a cognitive scientist. It's all about these neural models, models,
models, models, everything's about models. And so then for him it would
make sense that if you take high dose psychedelics, now new cognitive models can
occur. Now, new patterns in society and behavior can emerge. Yeah.
He thinks that the ritual process the disruptive practices of the shaman, and that
could include just astic practices like sleep deprivation or fasting, or the use of
the hallucinogens. Any of these disruptive activities can cause the altered state of consciousness,
which he thinks allows the person to then develop the new pattern recognition abilities.
Basically is how this works. And so he sees ritual as playing a
key role in this as well. And the other thing I wanted to mention
is that you made a great point there that you've got to understand that,
as he says, he is seeking to create a scientific account of enlightenment so
he actually thinks that, like through cognitive science you can study and learn and
like maybe even create the enlightenment that occurs in religious situations. Now what is
it that? And I'm not accusing him of doing this, I'm just saying
that this reminds me of a lot of the people that we've read over here
in my sphere, the MK ultra doctors, for example, you and Cameron
Gordon Wasson, you know, jose Dolgado, a lot of the other doctor
Sidney Gottlieb, doctor Jollian West. I mean, a lot of these guys
were pioneering very similar ideas that we could study the effects of the entheogens and
even the synthetic versions with Hoffmann's you know, synthesized LSD, study those effects
and then figure out could we perhaps tool an engineer a new religion. And
we're gonna be covering some of the papers related to this, White papers,
particularly the most famous white paper, Changing Image as a Man, which has
a lot of these Stanford research people that were involved in it, including Joseph
Campbell was even involved in this in the Changing Images of Van Paper. It's
not all about LSD, but it is about the establishment studying transformative turning point
periods in cultures. And if you agree with the thesis that the sixties counterculture
was largely a top down Stanford research Tavistock style thing, which I believe,
then it actually makes sense that a lot of what I'm hearing in Rivaiki mirrors
a lot of what I read in Huxley. Huxley says a lot of the
same stuff, right, Yeah, And I would say he's part of the
same agenda. He's part of the same overall generational project. Whether he's conscious
of that or not, it's part of it. But he's also then recognizing,
and this is why I think it's so appealing. He's recognizing the postmodern
turn, why this is terrible nominalism, why this is a detriment for Western
culture. And so he's accurately criticizing the problems with academia, with contemporary philosophy,
with the sort of post modern, post truth worlds that we live in.
But then what he's replacing that with is saying, well, how we're
going to course correct is really just this perennialistic finding new methods and new transformative
modalities so that you can recognize meaning in yourself and become a sort of agent
in the world. And so we can get into some of the details there,
but it's tied to and this is he's explicit is that his project is
what he calls transcendent naturalism. And this is the if you had to say,
the philosophical core of what he calls the Religion of Tomorrow. So it's
transcendent, but it's only transcendent due to investigations through naturalistic methods. And so
this is where you know, we perform the tag argument and stuff like this
due to apologetics, and he would say, well, you know, I
don't need to presuppose all that stuff. It's just it's sort of self given.
And by naturalistic inquiry we can get to the point where, yeah,
clearly there's a transcendent reality and that meaning is sprouting from this metaphysical source.
And so it doesn't really matter the culture, tradition, or religion, and
we don't need to get into specifics of theology, but it's just about meaning
and empowerment and dealing with, like you said, the nihilism of the contemporary
period. So Religion of Tomorrow is built on what he's called transcendent naturalism,
transcendent naturalism, he expressively says, is the bridging between science and spirituality through
the through the erection of new narratives. And these new narratives are giving a
mythos to sciences lacks of mythos because it's so analytically driven, and therefore he
wants to provide a new normative understanding of the good, the true, and
the beautiful and provide science with a mythos in which it's housed in. So
science is now an arm of the religion, and so you don't have to
get Yeah, there's another well known fat witchy woman who proposed this one hundred
plus years ago. Do you know who I'm talking about? He felt,
Yeah, the felt that science could be a religion itself with theosophy. So
he's not the first to come up with this idea. But yeah, so
as I'm listening to him, this ties perfectly into your points right there.
He makes this statement that in the studies that he's done of people that have
had mystical experiences and particularly psychedelic experiences, transformative experiences, he said they have
many many of them have felt the need to completely reverse their course of life
and action and to never go back, and that their lives have become inexplicably
better, and he says that this is a recognizable pattern, maybe not in
everybody, but in many of the people, that their lives are much better.
So can we basically figure out the mechanics of this and create recreate this
because we want to make lives better, better, better, And so I
keep hearing better and I'm some like, but what does that mean? How
do we know what's the standard of the value judgments for the betters in these
cases? Here? Well, and this is where he's explicit too, that
the religion of Tomorrow and I have this written down is inherently a rejection of
the naturalistic fallacy. For those listening, the naturalistic fallacy begins with Hume really
talking about the isat distinction and that you can say what is, but you
can't say what you ought to do about or what we ought to do.
And he's part of this school in philosophy, and this where he has multiple
philosophers on his channel talking about this is that this is basically antiquated Enlightenment thinking.
They would point to Kant and they would say, yeah, this is
ot distinction, first with Hume, and then Kant grows upon it with his
analytic and synthetic distinction in that then we're going to we need to do away
with this basically is that this is ot that science has run its course.
You can look at the collapse of logical positivism, and therefore science can't do
science or at least move into this postmodern world without a new mythos, without
a new like ritualistic practice, without a new way in which science can still
be a sort of the pursuit of epistemic knowledge and how we come to know
the world. But now we need other things because without those things it's insufficient.
Yes, transcendent naturalism, that's interest because again, I mean I understand
the project of seeing the difficulty of what Kannt posits with the phenomenon immin distinction
in never being able to answer these problems with the skepticism that human con basically
set up. But I don't think these are adequate answers or solutions to those
dilemmas. Right. So a lot of what trans and arugumentation that we do
actually is is attempting to address that through arguing for an entire metaphysic or an
entire paradigm that's orthodox Christian paradigm. But I will give him a point there
for at least seeing there that like, yeah, like, if we're going
to have science and meaning, we've got to like go back and figure out
how to answer human con So he gets a point for trying to Yeah,
that's right. I think we both would agree with him there. But then
the way he goes about it is that we need again new narratives specifically about
science. And this is why the AI, this is why what he calls
silicon sages, this is why this is so important because these are going to
be now the new religious figures, because now we can build a spiritual ethos
around the practice of the scientific methods. Well, that's what I was going
to say. Yeah, I want to ask about that because you know,
you and I and Father Deacon and ani As for example, we oftentimes critique
these approaches. So when people in philosophy understand big problems, like when people
are studied enough their philosophers enough to know that, okay, we got to
answer human con right, if we're going to do this kind of stuff again,
we've got to really deal with the challenge of human skepticism, you know,
the tossing out of metaphysics and all that, and so the the answer
that they always go for, which is just what they're necessarily going to do
because of their autonomous approach to epistemology, is system building. They think,
I'm going to be the guy that builds the new system. Let me do
an archaeology of ideas, let me dig through all the ancient world religions and
read a bunch of Carl Young, I'll build a new system. And they've
overlooked the fact that maybe there's already a revealed system. Right, maybe revelational
epistemology is the answer to the system building project that you're trying to do with
your finite human mind, right exactly, Well, he's going to reject any
sort of revelation, sure, and he's gonna move into this. This is
why he's so focused on what he calls DialogOS or the diological emphasis of the
philosophical dialectic, and that he believes that the nature of cognition is dialogical,
meaning cognition is about dialogue with somebody else of an opposite opinion or a contrary
perspective, and then you sort of hash things out, and this dialogue moves
you towards a closer and closer understanding, and it's tied to Hegel and so
he firmly believes that he's going to erect the new system. Right a Lah
Hegel Hegel thought the same thing, and so he's ironically he's a Heidegarian.
In many ways, he's Hegelian. This is why the focus on dialectic and
DialogOS so much. He says this over and over and over because he takes
a phenomenological understanding of how then we should do philosophy and sort of meaning making
and understand that it's all progress. And so if we're in a Hegelian system
where we are learning about self and non self, and this is creating a
synthesis in the world's the spirit again, this religious ground that's underlying all of
reality that's metaphysical is becoming, is coming into fuller and fuller and uh fruition,
which he believes the digital is. He firmly believes that the digital realm
is the UH is the pinnacle of media, and that this is a sort
of the endpoint of media. And we can we can talk about this in
a bit, but it's all Hegelian. It's about a sort of relational ontology.
That's Hegelian. That leads into a sort of he doesn't want to be
explicitly utopian, but he's on a progressive project and this is why, this
is again why he he literally argues that the Silicon sages that are coming are
going to be more virtuous. He calls them, can can we can we
program AI to be virtuous? Well, one that questions what is virtue and
how we engage in virtue? But he thinks that you absolutely can program virtue
and that these sages are going to be He's to a Christian. He says,
Oh, it's going to be more virtuous than even Jesus Christ, and
it's what are you talking about? But well, yeah, go ahead.
I just want to make one point on that, which is that that makes
if you believe in a system building project, the logical extension of that,
the ultimate system would be the AI. Right, So we'll build the AI
that will be the ultimate system building put and a living system, and you
just redefine what it means to be alive and to be conscious and to be
living to say that it's just enough algorithms and binary connections. There's alive and
you and now you've got into why the transcendental naturalism and the narrative about science
moves straight into AI because now we can see how science is lifting us out
of our historic malaise and it's moving us into higher and higher realms. Now
you can build a myth those around science that is literally mystical. It's mystical
because it's literally bringing you closer to Heaven due to the erection of these technologies.
And so I don't know if you have anything to say about that.
Well, I did one thing to say, which one thing about that is
that it ties into the recent discussion that I did about dialectical materialism, and
and just for the sake of those that might be listening and curious, I'm
not trying to toot my horn, but I did study Hussarle, more so
Hussarle than Heideger. But I did take, you know, significant classes on
phenomenology in both undergrad and grad school. And I also had quite a bit
on Hegel and process philosophy and all that. And we have to understand the
importance for Hegel for this situation, just as much as we understood it for
those of you in the audience for the Marxism talk that we did, because
Hegel is the ultimate imminentizer, right, So Hegel thinks that God is basically
the world process. History is God in process, and all of those things
are basically the same thing. The totality of the world historical is God and
is moving in a process to a kind of an ultimate Omega point or Tilos,
where all dialectics are transcended and basically everything becomes self consciousness. So one
of the reasons Hegel does that, and why he thinks that, is that
he's grappling with the older problems from Presocratics, Plato and Aristotle. One of
those problems is Plato's fixation on the transcendent and stasis and a lack of a
good account for the process and becoming of this world. Aristotle offers the four
causes as a way to try to solve Plato's problem of identity over time,
and then Hegel basically sees himself as picking up that project, picking up the
neo platon project, and fixing it with smushing the trinity into the historical and
then making all of reality a diosex Masian whereby God is all of reality coming
to God consciousness, and you can see then everybody in the audience why that
would fit very well with transhumanism exactly, and for Bacon's project. That's why
if you are familiar with philosophy, once you get a grasp on what the
heck he's talking about, you can see the Hegelianism built into the package.
If you're not familiar with it, you can be sort of swept away because
there's so much that he says when you do watch him, there's so much
going on that if you're not familiar with that stuff, you may catch Oh,
he's just building on a framework that's already existent within philosophy, but he
wants to do away with some of the Enlightenment presuppositions in favor of a new
twenty first century understanding of this sort of process theology, if you will,
so the meaning crisis, then, as he disposially says, that traditional religions
have fallen short. They're no longer providing their adequate meaning in the contemporary period,
and therefore the progress of science and technology can fill the void. And
he says that digital media, and this is one of the recent conversations that
Ac sent me of his digital media is the embodiment of the platonic form of
all media. It's the final stage. So now we can already see a
te los He talked about an attractor. So this ambiguous god is now pulling
things from the future. There's a te lose there, and that the digital
breaks down the dialectics for Verveaki, he says that it breaks down the dialectic
of Plato and Aristotle because digital media and the internet takes the ideal forms and
now it's embodied, so now it's Aristotelian and Platonic. He says. It
breaks down the distinction between writing and speaking, It breaks down the distinction between
public and private, and it breaks down the distinction between intelligence and medium.
And so now you can see it. Well, you're breaking down the difference
between intelli leigence and medium. You can see while and how they divide intelligence
as as pattern recognition. Yeah, why he's going to then begin to think
that we can begin to worship ais as silicons ages. Yeah, so no
account of individual agency and personhood. Right, Any philosophies that don't have an
account of the personhood and are going to have some sort of reductionistic model or
account for what consciousness is or what the self is, or they won't have
any account at all. But one of the advantages of the model of reductionistic
views of consciousness or emergent property consciousness, whatever, is that they can also
then turn around and say that all but you see, computers are no different.
Computers are also therefore primitive conscious beings or beings that are evolving to be
more sophisticated than us, and so they will actually count, as you know,
more real or more virtuous because we can just put in the right moral
calculus from the utilitarianism or something like that. But yeah, I want to
say that's perfect, because what you just highlighted is the basis of what is
called four E cognitive science or embodied cognition, which is the basis of his
entire project. And how this is coming from the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy is that
whereas traditional cognitive science is also encompasses these disciplines neuroscience, psychology, philosophy,
linguistics, robotics, all this stuff, it finds common purpose and a conception
of a mind wedded to computationalism mental processes, or is our computational processes.
The brain qua computer is the seed of cognition. So he already views That's
where one of my other things was we have different anthropologies. The criticism of
Vervaiki is his anthropology, like all the transhumanism, is that you're just a
mind, and so you are just your ability, your brain's ability to compute
things. Intelligence is the recognition of patterns. If that's what the base of
intelligence is, then we can build algorithms that would recognize patterns way better than
we can recognize patterns. Therefore, they're going to become syentient and they're become
self aware. But that's all built on a presupposition of the emergent properties of
mind. Yeah, so now personhood has collapsed into a faculty, which is
mind. And that's actually the old apollinarian move. By the way, that's
William lane Craig's view. Openly, William Lane Craig is a pollinarian. And
so you might say, well, what does an ancient hersy have to do
with johnber Because it's exact same thing. It's exact same move. Because the
West discarded the notion of the news and ultimately ended up collapsing person into nature
in the anthropological realm, you're going to see that reflected in any of these
philosophies or any of these world views that lack the sort of nuanced, layered
metaphysics that orthodoxy has. Orthodoxy has the toolkit to make these nuanced distinctions that
these other positions and world religions and philosophies don't have and don't possess. And
you can't have a one to one mapping on this is what a lot of
people do. They miss, they make this mistake, and I'm I see
it. I haven't read a lot of his stuff. I've just read this
paper and listened to these podcasts, but I'm seeing another pattern of word concept
fallacy, where there's this assumption that, like you said, uh oh,
you know, when the the liturgical texts talk about accepting our own death so
that we might get past death, that must mean the same thing as as
accepting nihilism in Nietzsche. And it's like, no, the Amazon and tripping
in the Amazon when that when the shaman is put back together after his ritual
dismemberment, that's like theosis and baptism, And it's like, no, that's
those different things. Those are the same theosis in right, So let me
another great example, right, so when he talks about I don't know if
he uses the term apatheticism, but he's he's using the Neoplatonic terminology of the
beyond being, which is aproone beyond being. An aparone in Plato is not
exactly the same thing as what we in Orthodox are talking about. That,
so we talk about the divine essence as aparomee beyond being, but it is
not. It is not a non existence. It is an existence beyond existence.
Right, It's a being beyond being. So it's not saying that God
doesn't exist or that God is non being. That's ridiculous, right, That's
not what we're saying. It's saying that God's essence is in itself unknowable to
creatures and it is beyond being, not that it equates to non being.
And that's a big that's an important thing that when I see a lot of
these, you know, perennialist type essays, which is what that neoplatonic essay
seems to speak to to me, I see a lot of equating of ideas
between Oh well, when the you know, it's the same thing that we
see with like traditional Catholics when they use the or Roman coloics, when they
use the term logos. Logos must mean the same thing in Aristotle as it
does in uh, you know, John One, as it means in you
know, the stoics, right right, And and well logos is a perfect
one. Because I watched the stream with him with another philosopher or psychologist.
I think maybe he's clinical. I'm not sure, Greg Henriquez, and he
was talking about how their tripart tight structure, which him and another philosopher and
Verveaki all agreed on. Oh yeah, this is great. Logos just equals
a pistemology. So when they mean when they so when their conversations trying to
explain their words, well, logos logos for us that that's just epistemology.
Pathos is embodied experience, and mythos is your narrative towards transcendence. And this
is and this is their sort of their tripartite framework. But again you see
they're taking words, redefining them out of their context. Another one I watched
a video where he was he was asked whether he believed in evil or not,
and he said, well, it depends on what you mean. And
he said, uh, you know, evil the way that he just Grider
wrote it down is a black hole in being, but no thingness is the
positive side of it. The black hole in metaphysics and being is what he
considers evil. And he says, yeah, I'm just like Augustine because he
said evil's a privation and I'm thinking, no, dude, like Christian privation
of evil, meaning that evil has a negative ontological existence, is not the
same thing that you just described as from a black Ye know, Peterson makes
the same mistake in his lectures where he equates evil as privation with evil as
a moral act against the good or against the divine law. He collapses these
two because I mean, in the case of Peterson, if you get deep
into the lectures, you realize that he wants to do a lot of what
metaphysics is doing without metaphysics. So he wants to talk about these things in
a psychological way that avoids any question their metaphysical ontological status because they don't want
to take an affirmative position. Well because and what would undo the whole project,
uh for So basically they're saying that don't listen to the theologians, listen
to the psychologists, because we're the real theologians, is what. That's what
this project in the case, they're the real theologi. Theology traditional religions is
psycho but this is psychologizing. Is exactly what Hume and Kant introduced into this
whole affair. Yeah, exactly. And that's and and that's why they believe
that that's one why his project is for e cognitive science. Project is all
about phenomenology, neo platonism, Eastern mysticism, and and then collapsing his rejection
of the naturalistic fallacy, which is essential so that he doesn't have to say
why something ought to happen. He claims, well, you know, the
belief, the belief that we believe truth is even good, is already a
value judgment. Therefore at the fundamental basis of reality. But both analytic or
ontological facts and normative understandings, these are all emerging from the same religio ground
of being. Therefore he doesn't need to justify him because now they're just part
of his framework. And that's where he's cognitizant that he has to build a
paradigm. So he's very aware that what he's trying to do with this religion
is provide explanations paradigmatically to form this sort of religio paradigm. He's saying,
basically, well, just like people who believe in God, they first presuppose
God, I'm just going to first presuppose this divine ground of being, and
now I can just say, well, this stuff emerges from here. This
is how this works, is how it's united. And he's very aware,
he's explicit in that. Yeah, And in fact, a lot of the
more philosophically adept people that we've had in discord chats, people come on the
live streams and disagree, you'll often hear them make a very similar argument to
me, which is, well, couldn't I just be some kind of a
neoplatonist and say that, you know, these transcendal categories of the presupposition that
you have that ground your metaphysics and your epistemology and your ethics, it's just
this you know, transcendent realm. It's just this magical transcendent realm that's out
there. And it's like, well, that's really to misunderstand what it means
to give justification. It's not just saying that there's this realm. It actually
has to do the work. It's not just positing it. It's not just
asserting that there's this thing, right, he actually have to you actually have
to make sense of how these different things are unified. How are you going
to unify these things without a divine mind? And see, this is the
problem for his system, which if he starts moving into saying that there is
a divine mind or that there is what we would say is a form of
divine conceptualism, that would immediately cancel out a lot of his project because that's
now beginning to give delineators and limitations and boundaries to the thing that he can't
allow to have limitation and boundaries. And this is a great point that you're
always making which applies to theology to which is that a lot of the project
of a lot of these people is to remove all boundaries. Neoplatonism ultimately can
do that. It's a project which can attempt to remove all boundaries because the
end goal in the neoplatonic process is the return to the one, getting away
from multiplicity and returning to pure unity. And to me it sounds like if
he was consistent, I mean, is that the project here is like ultimately
we're all going to move back towards uh pure unity. Sometimes it hops out,
so yeah, just I'll let you back right back on. So gotcha,
you're back on now. So does that make sense what I'm saying about,
Like a lot of these projects are basically removing all boundaries. But as
soon as he were if he were to say something like God is personal or
God has uh, there's a divine mind which houses the divine ideas or something
like that, now we're moving away from the Eastern philosophy. And it's pragmatic
usefulness for him with all the ambiguities and the accepting of contradictions right once,
because no Eastern person with oh God has a mind, there are divine ideas.
God is no thing, God is no mind, right, So you
can't have these delineators in theology for that kind of a philosophy. But at
the same time he needs them to say ground of being. That's a God
is being, God is grounded being. That's another delineator, that's a boundary.
Yep, exactly. Yeah. And that's why I think he enjoys neo
Platonism so much, is because, like you said, it provides this endpoint
of pure unity with monism, which is the pure dissolution of boundaries. It
provides him a foot into the Western philosophical tradition to utilize and build upon.
So he's always talking about Christian neil Platonists and highlighting really heretics within the Christian
tradition, but then he would elevate them as incredi credible thinkers ahead of their
time. And then it allows him, because of the lack of a personalized
God, to incorporate all this Eastern mysticism into it as well about no thingness,
and so neo Platonism then allows him to maintain all the propositional stuff,
so it's much more thought out worldview than most like New Agers or something like
that. But then it allows him to also be totally beyond any categories and
beyond any conceptualization of stuff and not have to make a real solid stance on
what God is or who God is, or how he even came to know
God well, or is this even a being that can be known? Is
it an even a knowable thing? Right? I mean, he would argue,
you only know it in your being, And that's where I would think
that's where hegel comes in when you're talking about the divine mind. I think
he would be very comfortable with like a divine spirit a guyst a consciousness that's
like working through us that somehow maybe we're a piece of or not. There
it's we're not the full summation of this divine transit. Well but yeah,
but at that point it's just what we're just pantheists or we're just processed philosophy.
Right, So that's exactly what is is pantheistic process philosophy, uh,
mixed with science and the promotion of AI and really transhumanist ideals. He'll give
rhetoric as you know, you all know, a Harari about the warnings of
the future, of the transhumanist future, of what's going to happen, and
yet then in the next sentence talk about why this is necessary and why this
is what we're getting ready to do. And so I see, I see
much of their projects the same thing. And this is why he wants to
build virtuous AI or what he calls mentoring the machine, and that we're going
to become they're going to become more virtuous than humans could ever be. And
he so then he gives recognition to a historical Jesus, but Jesus was human
guys, Therefore, the the AI sages are what he calls the silicon sages.
They're going to be more virtuous than even Jesus could be because it's it's
so, is virtue just equated with like knowing data? So yes, So
just tally up the amount of data and out of them that you can process
and that's virtue. I mean, that was one of my other criticisms.
So we talked about the ambiguity of God. We talked about the rejection of
the naturalistic fallacy, which I don't think you can do unless you actually had
a real defined God of some sort, and then it's inherently parenthalistic. The
next thing is, what was the last thing you just said? I lost
my train of thought. Well I did too, because I was looking up
this book, by the way, for those that those that were curious in
the chat, it's the book on Personhood in Gregora nissav I lucian Chescu.
I read that book a couple of years ago, and I couldn't think of
the name of the author, but there's the book, and he argues in
there that you know, the Kappa Docians are really pioneering a biblical idea of
personhood via the triad that you don't really see in the philosophers, so you
don't get personhood in Aristotle. The ariosol comes the closest with his notion of
an agent. But but yeah, I think, uh, I think we
can see the usefulness of neoplatonism for the project of the one world is right.
I mean, this is why in the Orthodox sphere, uh, you
know, a lot of the global elites, you know, the the universities,
the fortums, these schools really push Originism because Originism is pseudo Christian neoplatonism,
and so it's very useful for saying, oh, yeah, Christianity has
got a lot of truth in it. Maybe it's even maybe it's even at
the the you know, top of the pyramid of the true truth religions.
But all the religions are really expressions of the same truth and the same reality,
because you see neoplatonism, and neoplatonism teaches that everything that exists is an
expression of the divine mind. And you see, so ultimately everything is just
kind of an expression of the one And so it's very useful not just or
the acumenist project, but also for the one world or project right. It
harmonizes very well. Again. Huxley has a book called The perennial philosophy.
I understand that perennialists would not accept Huxley as a legitimate perennialist. I think
that's all a bunch of nonsense anyway. Who decides who the true perennialist is,
right, Oh, Freedofshan, No, it's renegan On. No,
it's this other weirdo. I mean, it's like, there's no, there's
no authentic like, it's just a bunch of like really spurgy people who are
taking Sufism in different traditions and saying that there's this super skeletal religion that all
the other religions are kind of masks or costumes of. But it doesn't matter
whose. Ultimately, it's just kind of neoplatonism anyway. So exactly, that's
why it's very useful for this. I remember the point I was gonna make,
which is again one of the criticisms, was what is virtue? So
it begs the question that he wants to build these silicon sages and that they
he believes you can program them with virtue and that they'll be more virtuous than
humans could be. What the hell is virtue? How can you even define
the programming of virtue, How like, what is it? Well, if
virtue is the ability to store up data, then whenever there are supercomputers,
I mean, wouldn't that just mean that we're not even virtuous? Right?
I mean, if we have a computer that stores up infinitely more data than
the human mind does theoretically, then we're no longer virtuous, right, I
mean, we don't even compare to that thing. So now virtue is just
is equated with quantity. I mean, this is ridiculous. Well, and
he thinks that it's wisdom, it's caring, it's love, it's all these
things. And somehow the machine's going to be able to do this better than
humans, which begs the question, what machine have you seen do this?
Yeah, but he says at the beginning of lecture, he even makes the
distinction between just pure knowledge and wisdom. He says, knowledge is, you
know, knowing a lot of facts data. Wisdom is the right application of
that. Well, how is knowing a lot of facts ever going to tell
you the right application? Right? Exactly? And it begs the question again,
And so this idea that he can program virtue is ridiculous, and and
one beg you, like, it's how does this relate to God, I
mean, is virtue just? And this where he actually really loves Orthodoxy because
Bishop Maximus talked about theosis and the uncreate energies. He laid out the energy
essence distinction for him and why this is different than than neo Platonism. He's
like, oh, I love that. I love this idea that you you
energetically engage with God. Yes, yes, yes, because this is fort
of his embodied cognitive cognitive science that well, yeah, virtue is something that
we participate in and it's participating in God. Well, for him, he
never roots virtue in anything. He just describes it in the generic terms and
says that these these machines are going to be able to do it more because
somehow, by by programming them correctly and building them, the spirit, the
process, the progress that's happening is going to infuse this thing. Well,
that sounds like supernatural to me, Like, I mean, that's what he
wants to do. He wants to bring in the supernatural. He's very but
he wants it to be couched and and he talks about the mystical and mysticism
and that the modern world doesn't have mystery and that's why we have to re
enliven the transcendent or the ineffable. This is how we re rediscover what mystery
means. But how does that relate to a sentient AI figure. It makes
no sense. I don't under That's where I just don't get the connection there,
because I read a lot about AI and transhumanism and all this stuff for
my work, which I'm not there. You go, I'm not too well.
I mean, isn't he basically saying what Harari says that it's going to
be a new religion. AI will be a kind of new source of a
new religion because it will write a better Bible than your old, dusty,
old human written Bible right right, Whereas you've all known or Harari is very
antagonistic if you're coming from a traditional perspective, Verveaki is trying to appeal to
you. He's trying to see that you can be grafted into this new project.
You know, you just got to send money into the Verveaki Foundation of
in which he's building this new structure again, the Religion of Tomorrow, creating
new mythic narratives of science and tech rooted in the belief of the transcendent ineffable
mystery. This is what he believes he's doing. So well, my question
there would be like, how is he different? Or maybe he's not different,
He's just carrying on the project of say, anybody from the Esslon Institute,
like, how is this really any different than you know, predecessors like
a Leery before him, or a Huxley or a Deepak Chopra, or do
you think he would see himself as kind of the successor to these people.
I think he would see himself as as similarly part of the same project.
I think he would see himself as different in the sense of h the scientific
and academic scrutiny that he's putting on this topic, that he he's going to
take it to a new level. I mean, he's so Huxley's a literary
person. You know, he's not a scientist. He's not a scientist.
Bravaiki is a scientist. So what he's going to do, He's going to
map analytically and scientifically the the spirituality that undergirds all of reality and that and
that sounds like wow, would anybody be that hubris to say that that's their
project? Well, that's his project, and he's very explicit about it.
I'm gonna find I'm going to go to cern and find the God particle.
Dude, right, I'm gonna put the God particle in a test tube and
like bring it home and like, yeah, it's it's just this this uh
weird projects of which are grounded I think, in grandiosity and not really grasping
kind of like, I mean, God is not that, you know what
I mean. God is a God's not a technology. And this was my
next critique that I had in my notes, which was that the parallel I
see here with Jordan Peterson Tate and now with Verveki getting into his ideas,
is that God here once again, is a psychotechnology. God is an abstracted
thing that maybe in Verveak grounds being or something. But for you as an
individual, when the terminology of participating in God or theaosis is used, it's
not what we mean as Orthodox. What's meant is there's this sort of abstracted
thing that you sort of project your ideals onto and that helps you sort of
move forward in your you know, self help process basically. And I don't
want to accuse these people of being I'm not trying to go too far with
this but if you know the thought of Anton LaVey, I'm serious. I
mean Anton LaVey says that what you're doing in his religious practice, which again
he kind of invented, he called it self transformative psychodrama. And what he
means by that is that as a nontheistic Satanist, he doesn't actually believe that,
you know, doing the rituals or whatever, that you're invoking this metaphysical
being. He thinks that you're actually mastering the mind power to train yourself to
think and become what you're trying to become. So, in other words,
for Levy, let's say, yeah, let's say you want to be a
vampire. LaVey doesn't believe that there's an actual, you know, five hundred
year old vampire living in a castle in Transylvania, but he thinks there is
this archetype that is a kind of a real thing that you could tap into
in the sense that you could take on the properties and like, if you
go and live in the dark and sleep in a coffin, that you're kind
of becoming that that image, right, you can kind of become that in
the same way, I think that the commonality and I'm not saying that Peterson
and Tate and Vervek are intentionally Satanist. I'm just saying that I see the
pattern of God is this thing that works for you. Baby, We're gonna
make God. We're gonna make God work for you. Baby. You're gonna
be a sta. You want to be a sta. Think about God as
a star. You're gonna be that God sta baby. Right. It's like
the I'm serious, it's like the like the Hollywood casting couch guys, like,
we're gonna make you a STA baby, right right. No, And
in that embodiment of the archetype, I think Verveke would love that idea that
you're talking about with Anton Levey, and that you sort of act out who
it is that you are. This is even tied to performative gender theory.
You could say this is another you just act it out and now you are
the thing you become. Yeah and Yeah. In regards to than the Ai,
he says, we are morally obligated in the twenty first century to create
these machines, and we're morally obligated to embody virtue because it's going to take
us to a new pinnacle of humanity. So that was well, what is
the I mean? This is again teleologies here what I mean? So I
think he's seeing all personally. When you ask what is the teleology, He's
never explicit other than his project is all about personal enlightenment. And so I
assume the teleology is that everybody becomes enlightened. Well, I think I don't
remember if it was being You or maybe it was Jim Bob, somebody was
basically making the point that in the Petersonian system, basically at the end of
the day, that what's offered to you is you becoming a better you.
And it's like, yeah, okay, but what does it actually mean to
be a better mean? The irony is that this is the meaning crisis.
Guy, It's all about the meaning crist Okay, we can admit there's a
meaning crisis, but to say that the project here via Peterson, for example,
is you becoming a better you? Right? Or Tate even had this
phrase, or he said something like, you know, God is what I
think I want to be. God is like my thought of what I want
to be. Right, It's like my thought of what I want to be
in the future is like what God is working for me? Seriously, right,
And it's like so and in here God is this sort of unknown,
amorphous all encompassing something grounded being. But to say God is grounded being but
it's a contentless thing is really to say nothing. Right. I know you're
wanting to go to AI. I keep critiquing the metaphysics. It's just such
a metaphysically dense He's so metaphysically dense with all the verbiage to then kind of
be sort of there's there's no there there, there's no there. There,
there's not there. They they're that, they're they they're faki right. And
somebody made a point in regarding his intention in the chat, and I just
want to say I I don't take him as like, you know, ill
intent. Maybe he is. I have no idea. He seems to be
sincere and what he believes he's doing in his belief and he's sure his hell
puts a lot of effort into what he's doing. Uh so I assume that
he's he's a sincere individual. I don't mean to cast aspersions on his intentions,
like he's trying to lead everybody straight. Because I made a comment about
the Vervekee Foundation, which he's explicit about to donate to the Verveake Foundation so
he can continue building this project. Also, I'm not saying that they're all
Satanists. That was not what I meant, and I'm not saying that they're
all part of in culture. I'm just saying that I can see commonalities and
patterns in the research going on by you know, nefarious entities, and a
lot of the conclusions of what these people are coming to. I do not
mean to say that they have bad motives or intentions. I can't judge or
know people's motives or intentions. I'm just looking at what's being presented and critiquing
the positions themselves right exactly. And so just like you're talking about, there's
no there there. He talks about all this virtue, but then his anthropology
seems to just be an emergent property of mind that is due to brain connectivity
and personal experience and memories. But then he I was watching a lecture or
podcast he had with a couple other thinkers on self, soul, and spirit,
in which they began to redefine these things scientifically, and so the self,
they started using all these cognitive scientific models and psychological models to then map
well the soul is really just the piece of you that is part of eternity
in affinity, and it's like and they're like shaking their head, Yeah,
exactly where did you get this? How did you How did you get the
concept of a soul? And they use this with all the scientific garbage to
insinuate that there's the self, the eye, then there's a piece of you
that is transcendent, it's part of the transcendent mystical realm. And then there's
the spirit, which would be tied more to geist. And so they're trying
to then use scientific jargon to wrap all this stuff together. The sense of
the cognitive sense of self, the idea that there's more to you than who
you really are, this is tied to somehow this transcendent reality and that this
divine religio undergirding of the fundamental reality is then bringing all this stuff and moving
through progress and process into the future. And this is then how they're going
to scientifically redefine what they call the self, the soul, and spirit.
Well, I mean that's just again neoplatonic stuff dressed up again. You know,
if we're going to do one of these mining projects right where we're going
to mine ancient ideas and we're going to mind fullilosophers and create a new system.
Like on what basis do we know we're mining in the right way,
Like we're going to go to Porphyry, We're going to go to Platinus,
We're gonna go to Iamblicus. We're going to mine through them and find cool
stuff. We wait a minute. Between Platinus and Iamblicus, they have radically
different ideas as to what is the process by which I achieve henosis? Right,
for Iamblicus it's ritual magic, and for Platinus it's ecstatic union. It's
not involving a bunch of rituals. It's almost a cognitive contemplation or something.
Right. Yeah, Buddhism, Yeah is like you being It's like the light
bulb goes off its enlightenment. So so so how are we knowing that we're
mining the right toolkit out of these guys, especially when but in other words,
there's not just this, Oh, I go to the neoplatonists and that's
what my tradition. There's not a tradition of neoplatonists. There's people commenting on
Plato and Aristotle. Uh, Middle Playton is late play right, So,
and they're not. It's not just one school and they disagree on very fundamental
things. That's what people assume that there's like this one mystical tradition that you
can go to, and then you find out that that didn't actually really exist.
There's a bunch of different thinkers. It's kind of like when people say,
are you are you into Cabbalism? Well, did you know that there's
a whole bunch of contradictory, ridiculous systems known as Cabbalism? Right? And
there's not. I mean, there are some commonalities, but it's like the
commonalities are so general that to think that there's like one Cabbalistic thing, it's
kind of naive and silly. It's the same with Neil Platonism. Uh you
know, it was like it'd be like if somebody says, I'm into her
meticism. Ooh, right, Like what does that mean? Really? So
point being is from the outset of this project, right, we can ask
all kinds of questions, like how do we know we're mining and digging up
the right ideas in our toolkit? Yeah? Great question. I'd love to
hear him explain that because that's that perennialistic really the consumeristic tendency to just like
pull and pick and choose and bring and amalgamate all these things together. That
is clearly a post Enlightenment sentiment that he's practicing this perennialistic project. How do
you justify what exactly you're pulling other than it suits the goal in which he
ultimately is trying to put together, which is this weird amalgamation and mixture of
things. So he doesn't need to justify it, he just needs to show
at some surface level how it coheres or it connects. Well. This is
interesting because between him and Peterson, there would be a discrepancy right here,
because Peterson thinks of post Enlightenment, post Newtonian factual knowledge, science knowledge.
Peterson calls that dead matter knowledge of dead matter and basically abstraction, right,
And and Peterson's argumentation the personality courses that oh, we got to get away
from that and get back to like direct shamanic experience of the totality of our
you know, culture, right, And that that's a more authentic approach to
knowing things and figuring out the world than the the dead matter approach of abstract
Newtonian science and physics. So okay, but wait a minute. So now,
but we're going to use the scientific project now here with Vervaik. In
other words, I'm just saying I could theoretically play the role of Peterson and
say, well, why should I follow scientific cognitive science as the way to
get to you know, the the science of enlightenment, right because it already
presupposes the anthropology exactly. It already presupposes that you're just your mind, You're
just this abstraction of consciousness. So does he have an account for mind?
I mean, I mean, I didn't find any definite. That's where I
was ten intent to say that he's fully an emergentist, but it seems like
but he's clearly wrapped up in Darwinian understandings of evolution. I don't know how
else he could account for what mind is. And I mean, yeah,
I assume he is an emergentist, that mind is just an emergent property due
to synapse connections that you fire enough and now you have sydians, because that's
the only thing that makes sense on why he's so adamant about AI becoming sentient
that he's he fully believes that's going to happen, and the only would whether
you look at Gavalnor Harari or Max Moore, not Natasha Vita Moore, all
the transhumanists, they all believe that sentience is really the multiplicity of cognitive connections,
and so if you can just create something that is so interconnectedly dense,
it will become self aware if it's recognizing patterns. And so that's the basis
then of their anthropology, because if that's what makes a human sentient, that's
what's going to make a machine sentient. That totally reduces So that's why then
the project of redefining and re understanding self, soul and spirit it seems like
he's doing he's using these terms to redefine them in a context which jive with
his worldview. Yet what exactly is your soul he talks about, Oh,
well, it's the piece of you that is part of the of eternity and
transcendence. But your whole worldview is that there's a Big Bang theory and that
you know, man evolved from apes and now we're conscious. I don't what.
It doesn't make any sense because he's I've never heard him explicitly believe in
a creationist framework, whether it was a Big Bang or not, that there
was some type of deity and that it was an intentional creation of the world.
I've never heard him say that, so it seems like he totally buys
into the secular cosmology. Yet then he's trying to infuse all these spiritual terms
into a sort of secular, modern transhumanist understanding of man. Well, this
is another oddity when it comes to the notion of science. I mean,
I think we would all agree that audity and verveakia. I mean, science
does deal with the domain of the empirical right. I mean, science is
uh, you know, a tool for understanding and mastering the natural world.
It's a it's a means by which we you know, propose theories and then
test them. And that's the scientific method. So you know, science is
bound up with I wouldn't say it's totally reduced to empirical knowledge and sense data,
because science uses logic, it uses mathematics for you know, engineering and
stuff like that. Sure, but it's still within the domain of studying the
natural world with you you know, with using empirical sense data and so forth.
So if that's what we're doing in this process, we're tied to the
empirical How are we getting all of this metaphysical baggage as a cognitive scientist.
That's what I don't understand. Because everybody in the domain of science, right
who's going to be probably a materialist, right, they're gonna be They're gonna
say, wait a minute, where under the microscope is being? I don't
see being under the microscope? Right, right? And so if so,
we're back to the Hume problem here, right. So it's it's fine to
say I want to deal with humans challenges and problems, but to then say,
and here's how I deal with it. There's I just have all this
metaphysics as the ground of being, But how does that do the work of
being the ground of being? Just because you're saying you have all these It
reminds me of the Matt Dill Honey debate where he's like, uh, well,
I don't have to give an account for transcenital categories. I need them,
they just are right. Well, that's that's essentially what he's doing though,
right, because he rejects revelation, which is the point of the tag
argument. Yet he's exactly to adopt a TAG framework exactly reject revelation and build
a tag framework naturalistically. That's why he calls it transcendent naturalism. That's why
he named it that. So he's like, Okay, Mott Delahune, you
make a good point. Now here's my I'm going to give you this system,
right, the grand system building project that is a naturalistic because that would
be my number one question for him is how do you know that this religio
transcendent, ineffable godlike you hear me, you're back, How do you know
this transcendent god being? Yeah, how do you know that there's this transcendent
metaphor? Because what he's doing is he's just he's realizing his shortcoming. And
then he's just like, Okay, well then I'll just pose it this metaphysical
godlike ambiguous transcendent entity, place that as this fundamental thing that is again in
a alien censusist process theology. Allah whitehead a lah hegel. And now I
don't have to account for it. I don't need revelation. I can say
that this is just evident based on again deeper phenomenological experiences. So psychedelics,
transcendental meditation, yoga, these are ways in which Now, but why should
we believe that your inner experience of you know, a psychedelic trip is somehow
an insight into metaphysical reality as a whole. Exactly. I don't think he'd
be able to answer these because nobody questions it because everybody he has on his
show is in favor of his project, and they're either working with him or
they're adjacent to the project in one way or another. He can't. That's
his get out of jail free card is that he just claims that this is
what Again, he doesn't like to use God, but divinity is, and
now he has a basis for it, and then he just uses a Hegelian
concept. That's why DialogOS is, like I said earlier, is so important
to his framework because oh, well, you don't know who you are without
the other person. And so this is where he begins to use rhetoric about
collapsing dialectics and stuff. Yet his whole project is about pure unity and monism.
Yeah, And that's the problem is that there's always going to be metaphysical
dialectical problems in these kinds of projects and worldviews because if you do not have
the triad, if you do not have the essenceinary distinction. If you do
not have the creator creature distinction, and if you do not have you know,
human beings made the image of God He have the ability to act and
to reason and to to you know, exercise free will and their own created
energies in the world, then you're not going to have an explanation for these
overarching principles that you want to try to use to explain your system. They're
going to fall over into either monism, dualism, or some form of maya
or something that cancels out the monis dualist dialectic. And so that's what we
see in Eastern plosophies is just contradicting and flip flopping back and forth between these
these overriding metaphysical positions, and that ends up canceling out the possibility of knowledge
at all. So what you end up with is a dead end project and
a human here's the irony of it. It's what Ventil said a long time
ago. He said that within the non believing paradigm, there's always this intense
opposition between reality and their mind being hyper rational. In other words, everything
is categoric, categorizable, and coherent, and I can build a system as
a human being, but at the same time, I'm an emergent piece of
muck from the primordial stew and everything is chaos and irrational. So ultimate reality
is rational and irrational, and never can the Twain mix within the unbelieving paradigm.
And that's a devastating critique of Ventil gave I think right, and he
would he in one of the streams, he would he would probably agree with
that and say what he's doing is he's making room for both. And so
like you were talking about his basis of man or whatnot, or why we're
unique, because he believes in this macroevolution stuff. So therefore, what exactly
you can't say man is not an animal? I mean, this is where
you've all know. Harari is explicit like it's all one continuum, there is
no essence there. How can you define? He's against basically the whole animal
kingdom in regards that there is there's distinct essences between things. And yet he
wants to talk about we have moral obligations to create these ais, that man
is unique, that we get to participate in divinity. How so, well,
I guess he's just arguing we're irrational creatures, which is part of the
post Enlightenment project that he says he's trying to undermine, because if your basis
of humanity is that your rational, you're back into the nineteenth century. I
mean, in the eighteenth century. It's like what Yeah, well, and
I would say too that. Well, wait a minute, So, like
you said it a few minutes ago, or at the beginning of that comment,
you said to Vervaki might actually accept that ultimate reality is irrational and ultimate
reality is ultimately rational. Well, that's a contradiction. Those are mutually exclusive
claims. And so if we're going to get to the point where at the
very most basic ground of our worldview we're affirming outright contradictions, then we don't
have a coherent worldview. Because if you can affirm ground level contradictions, if
I were to contrast my worldview with you, then I can do the same
thing and see this worldview then has no answer and has no way to say,
Hey, this paradigm's true, that paradigm's false. If contradictions are allowable,
then no paradigms are true and no paradigms are false. Yeah, and
I think he would agree with that, and then he'd say well, ultimate
reality is this divine ground underneath it, and using the neoplatonic appo epathatic terminology,
would say, well, it is irrational. It's beyond rationality. You
see, the ground of being is sort of beyond rationality. But then our
engagement with it is all about irrational apprehension. Is that and that's why his
project that is bringing God back into the mix so that we can get a
totalized worldview. It's ridiculous, it makes no sense, it's incoherent, It
fundamentally contradicts itself. And yet he references the entire litany of like philosophy from
Descartes forward, so he uses everybody. He's referencing everybody in his work,
you know, all across different fields and traditions and time periods. But ultimately,
when you do a paradigmatic criticism of it, it collapses, It falls
apart. There's no there there, it's not standing on anything. He's just
pulled out of his ass that there's a fundamental divine ground of being and therefore
you want to get in touch of that. Well, we do science during
the day, and then we do tai chi and yoga in transital meditation at
night. Now, you're a whole person. Now you can solve the meaning
crisis. Yeah, it does any of that give a justification for any ethic
right. I mean, let's we've talked, we've talked to all kinds of
metaphysics and epistemology, but let's make it really basic and simple. Does this
worldview tell me whether it's wrong to murder? Does it tell me in what
way or with what justification it's wrong for me to cheat on my wife or
whatever? Right? I mean, we have the Ten Commandments in divine revelation
and that works very well for a function of society. Can your worldview at
least give me something like the ten Commandments? And don't, by the way,
just copy and paste it, because I want another justification for why in
your worldview I should follow the ten Commandments. And he would say that again
the rejecting the natural fallacy, that the naturalistic fallacy, that he can naturalistically
define objective morality. And I totally reject that he can do that. But
he's explicit he thinks he can. He thinks he can, he thinks he
can naturalistically define objective I mean, Sam Harris was on a project. I
would say, Harris, say something like that. Yeah, he's trying to
do the same thing. Vervaiki is a little bit more in debt and nuanced
than I would say Sam Harris was, but it's the same thing. He
thinks that, Well, if really then the ground of being is divine,
you shouldn't kill somebody because you'd be harming being. You know, I don't
know if that's exactly what he would say, but he'd have to go into
that terminology to naturalistically to define. He made the explicit claim that he can't
objectively he can have objective morality through naturalistic inquiry, uh and and define it.
I reject that he can do that. I think it's totally incomprehensible and
that there's no way that he can come with. But that's why he That's
why again it's so important to reject the naturalistic fallacy because if you don't,
if you don't, then he's stuck. And exactly what you just said.
You can't tell me why I shouldn't rape or why I shouldn't kill somebody because
they have something I want. Well, if you reject the naturalistic fallacy,
now you can. You can say, well, yeah I can because of
some you know, Rigamarole answer that you give. Yeah, but again I
mean just to say, well, God is, or there is a generic
thing I call God that is the ground of being, that's not actually solving
the Isa dilemma. So I mean you were saying something like he thinks that
he thinks as a result, because if you talk about being that you're necessarily
involved in like the good, which is again that's that's just neoplatonism, but
exactly. But the point is that like, but that doesn't mean that that
I should follow that because I'm because I'm doing that right. So in other
words, if you read the russ Manion critique, he has a really good
point about you know, let's say that let's say that it is true that
the system that you have is coherent, but it doesn't follow that because the
system is coherent, or I have this schema in my head of you know,
how all this stuff works, that it maps onto the external world.
So maybe it does, but how do I know that it maps onto the
external world? All this all this schema and all this all these ideas and
metaphysics in my head, right, how do I know that that actually maps
onto the world, or that all that all of this necessary connection where I
think is necessary in my head, actually is the case in the external world.
How do I know that? Right? That's a that's a great critique
that Manion has. Two people who might say something like, well, you
know it is. It just has to be this way. I can't conceive
of it being any other way. Right, This is a common response people
say. But actually, just the fact that you can't conceive of it being
another way actually doesn't grant you epistemic justification for that belief, right All that
all that says is that you can't conceive of it another way. It doesn't
mean that it's therefore true. Maybe it is, but that's not enough for
justification. And that's why it's ironic that he's at the same time he's critical
of the postmodern turn and this immense relativism. I mean, for me,
looking at it as an Orthodoctrician, I would lay many of the same criticisms
at his project, even though he sees it as responding against it. I
mean, my gosh, wasn't the immense perennialism is relativistic, the arbitrary grabbing
of divinity being the fundamental ground of being, or just adopting Hangele that seems
to be arbitrary. And then you're bringing together the rejection of the natural.
It seems like you're moving into relativism. And so it's like rejecting postmodernism and
sort of bringing in a sort of scientific postmodern state where we listen to science
and now we can just create these new things without a full coherent metaphysical frame.
Yeah, I mean this is why you can't get rid of metaphysics and
nuance in this Like if you think about we'll go to the super chests in
a second, if you if you need to you need to get out of
here, or if you've got more time. Yeah, you know, we
were talking to doctor Branson and he was getting into last or a couple of
nights ago, a couple of the points about why you have to kind of
make a lot of these distinctions with word and reference. And you know,
when it comes to trinitarian theology, for example, a lot of times Unitarians
or Arians or Muslims will make these arguments about how well, when you say
there's one God, you know, how do you posit three persons, because
that would be three gods. Because God has to refer to the divine nature,
or to the Father alone. Right, But the word God or divinity
or so, let's say, the word divine being, I mean that could
pick out let's say in the Biblical tradition, I mean that picks out different
things. Let's say divinity. Divinity could pick out you know, when Jesus
says to his followers, you are God's right, it could be those use
the word the word god. So it could be created beings. It could
be the gods of the nations are demons, Paul says and David says,
so it could pick out devils, the elohem. The angels are called gods,
they're called elohem, they're called divine beings. So it could pick out
angels. God could also pick out a divine person. It could pick out
the divine nature, and it could pick out divine energies or attributes. You
could say, you know, God's love is God. Yes, you could
say that, right. So, the word God doesn't have a simple one
to one reference. It's going to depend upon context and intentionality for their author
or the writer or the argument or the paragraph or whatever. So when when
I hear things like, oh, well, I believe in a transcendent deity,
oh, like, is it just a thought? Is it a demon?
Is it an angel? Is? I mean, the the word deity
or divinity is not a specific term. It depends on the reference and the
intentionality in the context. Well, and that's a huge part of his project,
as we begin with even talking about the verbosity of his it's so verbose
how he describes and writes and does all this stuff that it's just he's taking
so many generic terms and then putting them in their own new context, and
then he just moves on to the next point. It's just there's so much
going on. He never fully explains how this in its particular context relates to
what he's talking about right now. And like you said, this generic concepts
of God, generic concepts of self. I mean, he's always talking about
the better, the better, the good, the good, virtue, virtue,
what is it? How do you even know what it is? I
still do not know how he comes up with what exactly the good, the
better and virtue is in his worldview that would be coherent and justified. I
don't see how he can. Yet another question, maybe back to the psychedelic
stuff, because I know you've done a lot of research in that area.
You and I both have in our earlier times younger days, done multiple hallucinogens
and whatnot. There's an assumption that hallucinogens somehow give a person automatically like this
perception into reality. I don't think it necessarily does. I think that you
could have an experience on a hallucingen that's not necessarily bad, that might cause
you to think in a certain way. It might give you a creative insight
that these things are possible. But the over romanticization of hallucinogens as if they
are this sort of like sacrament, the way that a lot of these people
view it. Do you have what would you say to that, like to
somebody who said, is it really this way or is that an exaggeration?
Yeah, I totally agree with you. Is that how First of all,
if anybody's done those substances, you know how radical the experiences and the insights
and your perspective can be on certain things. I mean, you can sit
in a room and all of a sudden, you know, something looks like
it's melting, or some shadow looks like it's talking to you. So you're
into this really altered state of consciousness, and yet you might have insight into,
meaning you may have a hope into things that maybe you were depressed about
or doubtful about. I don't doubt that at all. But when people think
that psychedelics themselves give them a deeper insight into the nature of being, I
don't see how they can make that case given the varieties of experiences. I
mean, the Mayans are a cult, or the Aztecs rather are a culture
oriented around ritual mushroom use, typically around the sacrifice of people, which they
would do hundreds at a time, and they would, you know, take
out live beating hearts. Is that somehow insightful to the psychedelics' spirituality? I
mean, I don't understand the berserkers in Scandinavia. They would get high on
mushrooms before they went to war because it made them less cautious and fearful.
So the people who believe that they take these high dose psychedelics and somehow enter
into a state of pure understanding and knowing, oftentimes they can't even remember what
they tripped about once they get down, because once you're out of the high,
it becomes convoluted. You're not sure what you experienced. The emotional euphoric
experiences gone so people kind of lose what it is they thought they were gaining
in the first place. I don't doubt that people have had positive experiences,
I'm sure, but in regards to psychedelics as a explicit technology or practice that
takes you into deeper understanding, I believe that at one point, and it
was me having my own experiences where I came out of a trip thinking that
something was true or that something was about to happen in my life, and
then it didn't happen. And that happened a few times, to the point
where I like, damn, this stuff is not you know, whatever happens
to me in these altered states, it's not gospel. It's not going to
happen. Multiple times, the opposite actually occurred, and that really got me
questioning this whole thing that somehow psychedelics are the answer to everything, and that
they are they allow you to sort of escape the matrix, get your mind
outside the matrix. Well, in many ways, your mind goes deeper into
the matrix exactly. That's a great point. And let's also not ignore the
negative effects that many people have on these substances. Now you could argue that,
well, it's not actually the substance. It's that person already having psychological
problems, trauma or whatever that's coming out. But regardless, like remember the
the who's the fitness YouTube dude that like descended into madness through constantly doing drugs.
Oh, Connor Murphy exactly right, So wait a minute, So was
he getting a deeper insight into reality by basically going into madness? I mean,
in other words, there's this this this assumption, this this romanticization of
madness, right, and we think of, oh, the artist is the
genius who's insane. Yes, sometimes there is a fine line between kind of
an insanity and genius. But also in a lot of drug culture, in
a lot of counterculture, there's again this over romanticization of the idea that just
being a degenera and but just being basically schizophrenic makes you this sort of artistic
genius, which is nonsense. Right. Well, I think it's we're seeing
a culture sort of veneration of chaos and it's really the rejection of God.
Well, remember Peterson says that the chaos is the necessary correlation to order,
because he believes that because he's collapsed non being into the opposite of being right,
and so he has a dualistic framework, and so he thinks that non
being his opposite of being, and good is upsote of evil, and chaos
is the upside of order. And he thinks that by chaos that basically means
anything that brings about challenges in your life. The chaos is necessary. Evil
is chaos, and so evil is necessary if you were consistent in that worldview.
Right well, And that's also what people who are theistic Satanists worship because
they say, well, God couldn't exist without Satan, so who's really powerful?
Right well, Again, any traditional Christian worldview, I your order,
Dox, you wouldn't think that at all, because chaos is just the privation
of God's order. So order is something to be aspired towards. Always talking
about dered in grammatology where he goes into the foul logo centrism as this thing
that they have to undermine. Well, that's what I see culture generally speaking.
It's antifoul logo centric, and so it's not interested in the center.
It's not interested in a logos oriented worldview, and it's definitely not interested in
a mask of proval. Not that men are better than we in but there's
a privileged understanding of the role of men in society. Well, now it
hits on everything we just talked about with Peterson and Andrew Tate. You can
see this void then for people to give voice to foul logo centrumrism. According
to Dereta, you can't take it away from Christianity. It is the central
pillar of Christianity. So then now we're seeing all these people give rhetoric to
foul logo centrism, but Christianity is not there to actually be. Yeah,
it's basically, let me have all the metaphysics and the tool kit without the
without Jesus, without the Trinity, and the irony I would say, as
we come here, maybe to the end before we go to the super chats,
the irony is that the meaning crisis, the meaning that he's looking for
there. Guess what, it's logos. The answer to the meaning crisis is
in John one as the logos, who is the explainer, the reason,
the meaning of the fathers. The Son is the logos, the wisdom,
the mind, the explanation, the exegesus of the Father. In fact,
in John one it says, it actually says in the Greek he because he
is the Exegete of he Exegetes explains the Father to us. So our ultimate
source is God the Father, and the way that we come to God the
Father is through that logos reason of the Son. And that's the very thing
that he's grasping for in this system. And that's why he's redefined logos as
epistemology. Right, So thing of everything you just said that Christ is and
he wants all that, he wants to use all that rhetoric he wants to
borrow from Orthodox He especially theosis and energy understanding of the uncreated energies and stuff
like this. But then logos is just again it gets abstracted. It's not
Jesus Christ, it's not the incarnation of God, it's not the history.
Well, it's just my own reasoning. It's a pistemology. Yeah, it's
how it's Well, logos is objectively real because two plus two equals four.
Okay, yeah, I agree with that, But what is the logo is
way more than all that, Like, he won't go further because that would
necessity necessitate him to recognize the Christian paradigm, which his whole project is to
not do exactly any closing thoughts on Verveki before we head on over to the
super chats. Has been a great discussion and I think you you definitely brought
the you know, intellectual weight here to give I think a sufficient critique.
Again, not that we you know, dislike him on a personal level or
anything like that, just just just interacting with the ideas and how we would
critique it. Any final thoughts before we go to superchats. Yeah, I
just like to say that I, like I said, I don't know the
intentions of Erveaki, and our conversation day was not to disparage him or say
anything negative about him as a person. We're just analyzing his ideas and when
you look at what his project is, it's really about constructing what he calls
the Religion of Tomorrow. The Religion of Tomorrow is a religious discourse and rhetoric
built upon what he calls transcendent naturalism, which is the idea that he can
basically build an entire spiritual paradigm through naturalistic endeavors. And and he does that
by rejecting the naturalistic fallacy, which is essential to his project. And he
has all these scholars because I guess this is a move in philosophy which I
was not familiar with until there's him talk because he starts pulling out all these
books, these modern new books that have been written about why we have to
reject the naturalistic fallacy. And so to me, this is all part and
parcel of all these post turns, so that we're in a posthumanism. Transhumanism
is explicit about being post humanism. Post secularism. Post secularism is also a
new stage that philosophy describes where discourse between or religious and secular discourse collapses,
that there now is no distinction. All discourse is religious, all discourse secular.
This is part of the post secular term. So his project is in
the middle of all these different things. And that's why he's responding to the
meaning crisis, all these series on awakening from the meaning crisis. You awaken
from the meaning crisis by realizing that there is this fundamental ground of spirituality or
God or divinity and that you then can experience that in your self through tai
chi, martial arts, yoga, transcendental meditation. And so he's saying,
well, we use science. Science is true, science is good. Therefore
the new religion of the future, what the religion of tomorrow is a new
mythic interpretation of science and technology, and where that can take us in regards
to the advancing us towards a utopian concept like heaven. And that's really what
his project is. What is heaven? What is the endpoint of all this
stuff? He believes that being, or what he calls the fundamental religion ground,
is pulling all this stuff from the future. What does that eschaton look
like? He never really describes. He uses a lot of religious language,
but I would say this is essentially his project. He utilizes his four E
cognitive science, a lot of Heidegger, a lot of Hegel, a lot
of phenomenology. Neo Platonism is essential to his work. It allows him to
incorporate all his Eastern mysticism and also then bring in a sort of oh well,
I'm part of the history of the philosophical tradition in the West, and
this is where all these thinkers are and where all these ideas are. And
so therefore, by confronting the nilism of the contemporary period, then we can
enter into a new state of being, of the no thingness, and somehow
this is equal to enlightenment. And so his project then is to enlighten people
around the world, create this new religion of tomorrow, and use science as
the new mythic narrative of the future. That's why he's in favor of all
these silicon sages. Excellent. Yeah, I didn't even I didn't before you
had talked about it tonight. I wasn't aware of the whole transhumanist uh sort
of side of that. It's a huge part of his project. What exactly
is a silicon sage is that just like an A, a super AI.
What does the guy mean like walking around with let's like neural link in their
head or something. Well, did you ever see the uh the AI Jesus
on Twitch? Mm hmmm, so Twitch. I think it's still up.
These programmers out of Germany, I believe made a Jesus where it's a continual
Twitch live stream and he's just an AI sitting there and you can type in
questions and then he he's like has the data bank of like GPT four or
something, and then he can pull up and reference all these questions and this
is Jesus. And then the way it expresses itself is like this very pious
and soft, nurturing way. Okay, and so he then got into the
conversation. Yeah, exactly exactly. So he then got into this conversation that
he believed and this is the two recent books he just uh published with another
gentleman that are called Mentoring the Machine, where he believes that what we can
do is basically program artificial intelligence. It's going to become synient in his worldview
most likely, and we can program it to be virtuous and these will be
the teachers of tomorrow, both scientifically but also spiritually. And so that's why
he calls them saying, we're going to get wisdom in the future from AI
rather be a physical bot or some computer program. That this is the way
that we're going. This is essential to us again, the religion of tomorrow.
This is your priest. This is who you're going to engage with you
Have you seen Have you seen THHX one one, three eight, the classic
dystopian movie, No, I have not. Okay, this is George Lucas's
like it's his first film, right, It's not a perfect film. It's
kind of slow, and it is kind of just a mix of Brave New
World in nineteen eighty four. However, there's this really amazingly perceptive scene in
the movie where Robert Devall is the protagonist and he's sort of the Winston who's
trying to wake up to the dystopia matrix that he's in, right, and
he goes to an AI confessional. Yeah, I'm serious, it's a famous
scene. I'll send it to you right after this, and he sits in
the AI confessional and he confesses that he's doubting the system that they live in,
and you know, basically the AI Jesus talks to him there and it's
basically ups his meds that he's supposed to take, right, and then it
has this weird blessing it's really ominous dystopian blessing at the end. This is
the seventies movie, right, so this is like late seventies THHX one,
one, three, eight, And the AI goes Blessings of the State,
blessings of the masses. So it's not blessings of the Fathers and Holy Spirit.
It's Blessings of the State, blessings of the masses. And it's just
it's just crazy because what you just described to me is literally what's in that
movie. So wow, I need to watch that because that sounds like something
right up my alley. I haven't. I haven't seen that. It's a
very receptive film, but that's really what his project is. That's why The
Silicon Sages is nothing to scoff at, because what he believes he's doing working
with the people. He says, well, I don't have a financial investment
into AI artificial intelligence, but here's what I want to do. And so
then his Vervaki Foundation and his larger project is oriented around programming virtue into AI
so that we can then learn from and be guided by the Silicon Sages because
they can process information and no way more than you or I could. And
they can read all the ancient books, all the spiritual texts, everything that's
been written. They can they can know all that. So then you should
ask them about what you should do. You should ask them about your life.
You should ask them about, you know, how you should treat your
wife. I guess all this stuff. So I think that's a huge part
of his project that is really merging in with the WEF you know, the
Bilderberg group, whoever you want to call them, the globalist elites, where
he's a very appealing to people, young men going through this meaning crisis going
through these alternative media is looking at Peterson or even Andrew Tate or whoever it
is, the manosphere, but he's basically ultimately leading you into the thing that
we're always warning people about, which is the globalist, the global the new
global religion. Yeah, and that's what So it just it's like, that's
what it is. Yeah, that's excellent, all right, super Chatz DC
would working five dollars Jay. Do you think it's a coincidence that dispensational quote
theology gained popularity through the Schofield Study Bible around the same time as Balfour No.
In fact, I've talked about that on podcasts for many years, probably
going back about seven or eight years. But you have to keep in mind
too that a lot of people don't know that Schofield Study Bible was printed and
it's still printed by Oxford University, So Oxford Press. Yeah, Oxford Press
is who printed and pushed that in not just England but throughout the West.
And that was a top down project. I believe that was part of the
British imperial project to influence America into dispensationalism because of course Lord Ralph Child and
so forth, we're behind the Balfour declaration. Thank you for all that you
and DPHD. Do you have any plans to do a dispensationalist stream. I've
done two streams in the past critiquing dispensationalism. If you type in jade,
I are com a dispensationalism, they should come up. One of them was
a critique of Catholic and dispensational ideas, and then another one was just about
this stational stuff on a long Q and A. But I could do another
one. Help me understand three dollars? Well, Tina says that the one
is pure relation and understood is as this relation is love, which has ontological
existence and binds the intellect to it. If God the Father's love, could
we say that his love for the other persons has its own ontology. Well,
first of all, we do not accept the Plutonian Phillyoquay argument. There.
In fact, when Augustin in on the Trinity makes some of his Phillioquay
arguments, some of their actually some of them are actually copied from I think
A needed four or five, and we don't believe that. So we do
not believe that God is pure relation. First of all, for us,
the One is not an abstraction. It is the Father. Go back to
last night's or whenever it was the night before with doctor bo Branson, the
totality that whole discourse was about the monarchia of the Father. So orthodox theology
is not like perennialism, and it's not like Platonism. It doesn't start with
the One or the monad as an essence, as an abstraction, or as
pure nothingness or up. It rown begins with the person of the Father.
Secondly, love is an energy common to all three hypostases. It is not
the Father and the Son, as the logos is not. We wouldn't equate
that to intellects. In other words, the logos is a second person in
the Godhead. He manifests the reasoning of the Father. But mind or reasoning
is common to all three persons, just like Will. It's common to all
three persons. So God the Father is not an attribute. So long story
short, you can't collapse person and energy or attribute in trinitarian theology. Doctor
Chilling five dollars message to Davy bone cancer, how how dare you? I
don't know what that means, but thank you for the super chat. Bone
Man five thirty eight hundred dollars. Wow, thank you, infest. I
will be sharing these with Kotel, So thank you for the superchest. Thank
you for what you do. I think the shaman could be a very valuable
archetype. Well in a lot of senses. I mean, you could use
the shaman in the history of religion, you could use the shaman in literature.
And the way Verveiki described the shaman is kind of he says, the
prophet is the same thing, right, So an Old Testament prophet to him
is equivalent to a shaman. So he's just kind of taking like the religious
preacher figure and kind of encapsulating them all as the shaman. Looking at the
Hebrew word shah, it usually references sin or evil. Well, I mean,
I'm not a Hebrew scholar, but just because the phonetics of shah in
Hebrew is that it doesn't necessitate that a shaman, which I don't know,
I don't know what religion, what etymology. I believe it's Tiberian the word
the word for a shah, shaman comes from anglicization of like their they believed
that the shaman was like the man of the sun, so it had to
do with like Sunman. So it's not the Hebrew usage of the term.
No, it came from Siberia, Siberian Amanita, Mascaria tribes. Bone Man
says, the emphasis on the practice of aeviation seems similar to the original temptation
in the Garden of the fruit. I think you could make that argument.
What would you say to a parallel between say, the sacrament of you know,
well, actually Huxley calls them sacraments, like he thinks that LSD and
streams are sacraments, and could this be an analog to the fruit in the
garden. Well, Terence McKinnon was explicit that that's what he believed, and
that's why he promoted gnosticism, is that he's like, well, you see,
the Gnostics got it right because they venerate Eve, which again much of
this world view venerates goddesses and stuff like that, Eve to a to a
status of as a liberator that they take basically this idea that they would call
the Judeo Christian God, this is their words. I wouldn't frame it that
way, but that he is a dominator, he's egoic, he's egotistical.
And so what Eve did and the promise of the serpent to become godlike by
eating something. This is liberatory and this is what then we all need to
do, and this is what psychedelics do. So many people in the psychedelic
community would argue that, oh yeah, the myth of Adam and Eve eating
and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge, that's exactly what psychedelics are.
And that's where when you get into like I said, these these frescoes in
southern Europe, again there's the eminem a scurity mushroom. You can find these
depictions like right here, this is in plain Caralt, France. This is
a hospital, large church. Knights of the hospital ours they built this and
what was to say, Well, clearly it's a mushroom, and even Adam
are covering themselves with mushroom caps. Now I've done. This is what I've
written about is that I believe much of the the cathars and the hospital ares
these knights that went into the Holy Land during the Crusades. They encountered these
gnostic rituals and they brought them back. So when we look at these churches
that are all again contextually within the same historical period, they are reinterpreting what
the Eucharist is, how you commune with God, and what the original fall
is about from a Gnostic perspective, and they are psychedelics into that. So
I think I think it's it's very plausible from a Gnostic framework. Our framework
is Orthodox. The is the absolute inverse of that. Yeah, exactly.
I forgot that the McKenna says that because I've read that. Andy Huxley says
it as well. In fact, Huxley believed that at the end of Doors
of Perception. He says that he hopes that the religion that would really be
the future American religion would be the Native American Church because he thinks that they
would actually have peotia as a sacrament and that everybody could be initiated if they
joined, you know, the Native American Church eventually. I'll remind you guys
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awesome video. Thank you so much, BMX Tyler five dollars. Can you
point me to or do a slow boy explanation of Nick Land's concept of hyperstition,
zeno demons and cybernetics. What in tarnation? So I'll let Cotel answer
if he has anything on Nick And I don't know about Nick Land. I've
only listened to our buddies over at Syop Cinema do some discussions about Nick Land.
And I think our buddy over the British British podcaster guy that we we've
done podcasts with. I just went blank. He just had Nick Land on,
so that would probably be a good He's gonna hope he doesn't. I
hope it don't. Don't be pissed off. I just went blank on our
buddy, our buddies podcast, Scott uh Manyon, Scott Manyon's podcast. He
just had Nick Land on, So go check out Scott Manyon. Let me
put that link in the chat. Yeah, that's pulled it up. I'll
check it out. I know of Nick Land, but I've never listened to
him talk or anything. I really don't know much of his ideas other than
he's a promoter of transhumanism, isn't I'm not actually sure. I started this
podcast. I'm about five minutes into it and I had to go, so
I didn't actually finish it. So for those in the chat, here is
the Nick Land interview with our buddy Scott Manion, so you guys can check
that out over there. Let's see double o Honeybee ten dollars. Thank you
so much, Honeybee, longtime regular super chatter. We appreciate that as well
as our good buddy bone Man five thirty eight twenty bucks. I think that
they get us to presuppose anthropology so that we our we are our minds,
and then we mind them while they mind us out of our genuine person So
he's basically saying that we get reduced to just being mines and they mine usne
out of a having genuine person. I think that's absolutely correct. Yeah,
agreed, Agreed, because the ultimately spiritual war and giving up the I always
talked about giving up the image of God, your true personhood. That's the
name of the game. Whether it be you know, cutting off your testicles,
are blending with a machine, it's the same thing exactly snapping like you
fabo one dollar, what chain are you rocking? Jay? What's your watch?
So this is just a pukashell necklace that we bought as a joke because
I'm in Florida and I thought that it's I felt like the nineties because they
used to have a pukashell necklace in the nineties, and people are like,
whatn't you wear the cross because the necklace that I had, I had an
issue with it, and I have not gotten a new gold necklace yet,
and so I don't have a chain that fits my cross. So the watch
is Mavado that I got a couple of years ago. So Temple hagro ten
dollars perennialist. The perennialism in Peterson is revealed in his interview with Joe Rogan,
where the discuss the use of psilocybin, mushrooms and Kundalini yoga to achieve
attachment to a spiritual world. You should give it a listen. I've not
actually heard this, have you. I know people are into that well,
even Connor Murphy. That was part of the when he first got into the
psychedelics. He would get these new age girls. They would take drugs and
then they would sit with their let's just say, with their legs open,
very very close towards each other, holding each other, and then stereog eat
each other's eyes, and they believe this was part of the rising of the
Kundalini energy. They would practice Kundelini yoga, all types of stuff. So,
uh, it's fairly common. I know Aubrey Marcus is somebody who's interested
in this type of stuff. So getting you know, getting an altered states
and doing Kundelini yoga activating your chakra systems very common in the New Age.
Uh. And I would point people towards probably Aubrey Marcus as the biggest promoter
of this stuff. Yeah, I just temple hat girl. I know Jordan
Peterson has been on Joe Rogan many men, many times. So if you
would just you know, dm me that one or something, because I would
be interested in specifically the discussion of the perennialist elements in that talk. Five
sends five dollars. What is your explanation to an army that says, how
come God doesn't just destroy Satan there would be no suffering. A lot of
people seem to think that God and Satan are equals. Well, God doesn't
tell us all of the reasons why he permits things to occur. If you
read the Book of Job it's really geared towards you as an ancient wisdom text
giving you the level of explanation that humans can have. So basically, the
point of the Book of Job is that because we're finite, we can't really
even conceive of all the potentialities and possibilities of what God could and couldn't allow
and why and how He's allowed evil. So basically the answer is that in
our finite state we can't grasp it. So I think that, to me
is a good enough explanation, because if the expectation is that any worldview is
going to give an exhaustive explanation for good and evil, no worldview can do
that, So that's actually an impossible expectation. But the best that we can
hope for is that within our world view, we do have a basis for
good and evil, and that's good enough. And it's not there's no God's
not bound by any rule or law that he has to tell us as creatures
why ultimately he permits it. It's good enough that we know that there is
good and there is evil. So most world religions can't even give you an
account for good and evil, So I'd say we're one up already, and
no, Satan is not equal to God. He is a created angelic being,
so it's not at all equal. Big big seven foot, five dollars.
All right, I'm not going to read that one. That was a
little much, but thank you for that big seven foot. I appreciate it.
Storm the Cat ten dollars, cool video, and I'm not trying to
be reade to you a big seven foot It's just I don't want to get
controversial and get anybody mad about those comments. But thank you for that.
I appreciate it. And Coteldph good buddy. Remind everybody about your channel,
where they can find you and what you got coming up. Yeah, you
guys can find me over at Church of the Eternal Logos or search David Patrick
Harry and now I've turned an old YouTube channel to a clips channel. You
can find me on Instagram at dp H A R R Y. And I
got a handful of streams coming up. I'll be doing an introduction into Zorastrianism
and comparing that with Orthodoxy, and yeah, handful of streams coming up.
We do open panels, so if anybody wants to hop on one day and
give your opinion on whatever topic. We just did one on stopping the American
war machine. Anybody is always welcome on whether you agree or not, as
long as it's a cordial and respectful conversation, so you can find me there.
Thanks again for having me on, Jay, I appreciate it absolutely.
I want to remind everybuddy too that we also have our sister podcast over here
at Rockfin which is Grand Theft World. Our good buddy Richard Grove is over
there killing it as you can see here in this example, they did a
seven and a half hour breakdown of all of the recent drama revolving around the
history of things going on in the Middle East. And if you head on
over to Rockfinn or Okafin, you can subscribe to Grand Theft World. Right
there at our buddies podcast, Richard Grove has a amazing resource. It goes
way back years of podcasting, all the way back into Tragy and Hope.
The breakdowns that he did very similar to the breakdowns that I've done over on
my channel. So there's Richard's link right there. Be sure and subscribe to
Grand Theft World, and also remember to head on over to the link that
we have right here where Richard is still offering his new course over at University
of Reason on becoming sufficient, self sufficient as an entrepreneur as a business owner.
How to go about that? What are the steps that you want to
kind of engage in to move into being independent and being your own boss?
And I really appreciate that Richard is one of the few people out there that
is still thinking about equipping young guys and women too in terms of becoming apart
from the system, basically having your own thing going. If you want to
be, for example, a homesteader, right, a lot of people in
our circles want to have a homestead that kind of a thing. Maybe you
want to run a business from your homestead. Richard can help you figure out
how to go about that process because Richard, of course himself is a successful
personal business owner. Storm of the Cat sins, excuse me, Ac,
since some more We got a couple more super chats here, Ac says,
and thank you. Ac of course is our sponsor for tonight's dream, he
says. Many are pushing for Vervaki to meet up with David Bentley hart Ough
Ikes, who has met with Ian Gilchrist Vervek's works. Verbake works with an
esoteric so called orthodox Peter Limberg who runs STOA. These acumenists are already using
these in DC Shindler terms like the left hemisphere. I don't know the STOA
guy. I think they invited me on there, and I didn't know about
it. I just got busy. I wasn't trying to ignore them, but
I didn't. I weren't aware that that he was an orthodox esotericist. But
yeah, I think David Bentley hardcourse is very bad news. He's now openly
basically you know, he had a blog post last year where he basically said
that he doesn't mind being just called a perennialist now, so he's kind of
he's kind of okay with no longer really identifying as traditionally actually orthodized, and
everybody knows that, you know. He basically adopts a universalist attitude, collapsing
nature into person. And because he does that, he then thinks that everybody
will be because everybody's resurrect that everybody's safe, all right, So thank you
guys. Uh, that's the lit