Speaker 1: And I think that's what's happened, right. People who are
maybe to use your words, scientistically inclined or skeptically inclined
in the pejorative sense of the term, who never would
have considered any argument for the necessity or elegance or
depth of a religious tradition, passed through the gate of
a series of scientific terms and found on the far
side of that gate something beautiful they had never thought
to consider real. And it was actually the scientific bridge
that made that possible for them, Rather than the science
alienating them, it actually became an invitation.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan.
Speaker 3: Preshel, Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone.
Speaker 4: Everybody watching this will know who these people are with
me today. Of course, John Raveaiki and Christopher mascro Pietro,
they have been working together for several years, have already
written a book together, and now they've taken the Awakening
from the Meaning Crisis content and put it into a book.
So really excited to see that. It's been such a
huge help for so many people to be able to
frame what's going on and to frame the concepts, to
find words to talk about the things that we all
have insight about. And so first of all, congratulations to
both of you on the publishing of this.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: And so I guess I do have a question about
to start off, is I would like to know a
little bit about how it is that you work together.
You know, because you guys been working together for years,
you have a great partnership, and I like to know
a little bit how that comes together.
Speaker 3: How do you work through.
Speaker 4: The ideas and put them on paper as a team.
Speaker 5: I guess I'll go first. So we have two ways
Chris and I of working. One is I'll create I
guess what you'd call the core theoretical argument, and it
usually is either you know, philosophical or cognitive, scientific, or
some combination thereof. And I'll either create that in like
an oral form or a written form, and then Chris
will take it, and he does a lot. He adds
a voice to it, he makes the material more accessible,
He often brings in insightful connections, he fleshes out the
argument in powerful ways. That's one way we work, and
that was what we basically did for Awakening from the
Mean Crisis because the series existed first.
Speaker 2: The YouTube series.
Speaker 5: In other contexts, like with the Zombie book, Chris and
I will get together, like literally in the same location
and write together and then get a rough manuscript and
pass it back and forth. So we have two different methods,
and it depends on how the project is originally birthed.
Was it originally something that was not textual and then
we're going to process it into text or is it
something we're writing de novo and then usually we write
it as you know, collaborative co authors.
Speaker 2: From the beginning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the second method there's a lot of pacing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pacing.
Speaker 1: The first one's much more straightforward. The second one might
be more fun, though I don't know. It depends, like
you said, it depends on what the project actually needs.
They're very very different experiences though.
Speaker 4: And so you know, the what's amazing that I've seen
happen in the last few years is much of the
language that you're using in Awakening from the meaning crisis,
even the term meaning crisis has become pretty ubiquitous. We
see it, we hear it everywhere. You see it in
places that surprise me. I'm like, oh, why they're using
John's terms, And I don't know if they even know
that they got it from him, or if it's just
already kind of fused into into culture. I think that's
pretty it's a pretty astounding feat to have created a
way of speaking about what's happening that has that has
already kind of taken over people's thinking and have you know,
has filled up those spaces. So first of all, I'll
say congratulations of that. And I don't know if you've
seen that. Have you even have you been surprised at
places where you've seen people use the language?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I have. It's interesting.
Speaker 5: I get the same feedback from my students at the
university that one of the primary things they get from
me is a new vocabulary, a new uh you know,
conceptual vocabulary, new theoretical grammar, and they say that's the
most valuable to them. And I take that very happily.
Providing people and a way to enhance their own philosophical
and psychological agency is what I'm ultimately after. Of course,
I am a scientist. I want my ideas taken up
and examined and put into the arena. But the fact
that that happens is very very meaningful to me now,
of course. And it was funny. I had my last lecture,
my last office hours on Monday, and the students from
my cognitive science religion course came in and they were
actually saying the same thing. And then they said, however,
and this is also frequent. You know, the terminology gets
to be a burdensome, it gets to be overwhelming. And
so one of the things that my dear friend Christopher
does is help me try to find the Aristotilian mean
between those two things. And I'm not I mean, I
listen and learn. I've tried to put a lot of
it into a practice. When I went to LA recently
promoting the book, I got some good feedback from the
people that were interviewing me. But this has been something
that I have been reliant upon Chris and Sarah too,
relying upon Chris for a lot and learning a lot
uh that way. But how do you get how do
you I mean, no matter what you do, you're gonna
you're gonna piss people off on the on the tail
ends of the curve. But you know, I'm gonna get
that that golden mean where we're enabling people but making it,
you know, another accessible enough that they're willing to take
up the challenge of taking on the vocabulary in the grammar.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that It's funny that you mentioned that, because that
was actually I was I was already preparing that that
was gonnave you my next question exactly. That's there was
because you know, I have to be totally honest with you,
like the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series kind of
watch it, watch it, watch it, and then if I
watched the later episodes, like towards the end.
Speaker 3: It's too much like there's there's so much.
Speaker 4: There are all these technical terms that you have to master,
and in some ways, I think it's also because of
the YouTube the casual because of the casual way that
we listen to YouTube videos or podcasts, it makes that harder.
Because if I was in your class, for example, you know,
I would have you would probably give assignments and say,
you know, like give me your definition of these, or
you would have me playing in my own work on
the on the term so that they kind of integrate.
But if I'm just you know, doing the dishes and
listening to John Bravaki on YouTube, by the time that
I get to, like, you know, the episode thirty, I'm like,
I don't know, I'm not even sure what being said.
And so for a book, Christopher tell us. What is
the key, Like, how do you find a way to
mitigate these extremes? You know, how do you get people
into the vocabulary because it's it's extremely useful, but don't
get them lost in a kind of technical jargon.
Speaker 1: You could say, Yeah, I'm still with the fact that
I think John just called me an Aristotilian before. We'll
have to talk about that later.
Speaker 3: To go through that.
Speaker 1: I wish I knew Jonathan, like, I don't know how
consciously I do it. I think I've just been sitting
with it for so long. And that's not to say
John doesn't make new obviously, He's always pushing and contriving
to overright himself and to create new theoretical to push
the horizon of the theory. So it's not as though
he stays in one place. He doesn't. But I've been
sitting with it and with him and with his way
of thinking and with his vocabulary for so long that
I've just metabolized it. And I think, I don't know,
I just feel intimate with it. And when you feel
intimate with something, as with someone, it becomes easy to
represent or recreate it in your own native tongue. I
also have an ambivalent relationship to a lot of the
technical vocabulary, because, like a lot of other people, I
think what people find about the vocabulary becomes like this
powerful tool that opens something. It opens into a conceptual
space that maybe they didn't have access to before, and
that can be a really helpful and powerful thing. I
had the same experience myself years ago.
Speaker 2: Though.
Speaker 1: The thing is, though, that sometimes that becomes John was
I think you were alluding to this before. John, It
becomes like if you start to rely on it as
your way of accessing the concept or the idea, then
it actually, I think, begins to have the opposite effect.
It then begins to close or resend your access to
this conceptual space if it becomes always your way of
moving through it. And so I think the ideal way
is to somehow give the vocabulary, have them hold it,
have them use it, open up whatever it needs to
be open, and then take it away again. Yea is
ultimately the most natural way of relating to the concept
or the idea is going to be through their own
native tongue, their own native language and way of thinking.
So I think it's a double edged story.
Speaker 4: When you're saying is so fascinating because in some ways
it's actually what John would the thing that you talk about,
which is the idea of something like optimal grip or
some or an idea that if you, if you like,
a technical term, would be exactly the right thing. What
it does is it opens up. But if you hold
on to it for too long you could say, or
for too tight, then it does the opposite of what
of what it's supposed to do.
Speaker 3: And so you have to have.
Speaker 4: This kind of this play between the two tendencies in
order to make it the most optimal you know, tool possible.
Speaker 3: And so I just find it fascinating.
Speaker 4: That, like, even in the way that you treat the
own terms that you're actually you know, implicating the concept
that John is working with. One of the things that
I found the most the most interesting, but also the
most difficult is because of some of the terms like
let's take it, terms like transjective for example, you know,
it forces people to think in ways that they do
not think.
Speaker 3: You really need.
Speaker 4: To create an almost change in worldview and the person
before they're able to be to enter into those these
types of these types of thoughts. And that's exactly the
problem that you said, Christopher is that if you have
a term that's technical and just becomes a definition that
you apply because a word like transjective forces you to
break your category to like open them up, then then
it might it might become it might go against against.
Speaker 3: Its own purpose, you know.
Speaker 4: And so you know the thing with you, John, and
this is what I'm curious how you do it in
the book, is that with you one of the things.
Speaker 3: You you do is that you do that you.
Speaker 4: Have an aspect of you is a bit of like
a zen Cohen master, where you you try to shatter
people's thinking, right, you try to you try to open
it up. And so it's easier to do that with
someone in front of you or when you're you know,
when you're playing with the with the language. So I'm
curious about what you think how you can do.
Speaker 3: That in a in a book for example.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's that's socratic task of drawing people in but
also opening them up, getting them to that uh, that
pivot point that Plato kept going on and on about
how do you get people to make that turn reliably?
And you're both right, the language can become idolatrist and
actually be something that they possess rather than going through
the actual maturation of their cognition.
Speaker 2: Totally.
Speaker 5: I get that it is easier to do in person
because you can interrogate the person and you can also
get a sense of their lived perspective because they're there
present to you. So with the book you have to
rely on And this goes back in fact to what
I had to do in the lecture series, because there
was nobody there in the room but the camera crew,
and they were professionals, and they would not give me
any feedback whatsoever, and so I had to engage. It
was one of the first places where I really started
thinking more concretely about the imaginal because I had to
imagine students. There in a way facilitated me getting into
that socratic mode. And I'm relying to a large degree
on Chris to carry that imaginal And that's why being
having this book done diologically is tremendously helpful, because Chris
can to in some stances, he can stand for the
other while also standing with me. He has this tremendous
capacity to be liminal in that way, and so we
have to, in the imaginal sense, try to imagine the
author and how we're going to get the place where
they recognize. I mean, this is what Vigotsky called the
zone approximal development. You have to take people beyond their
comfort zone, but you don't want to take them to
the horizon of horror. You've got to get that right
right where you just get them just right. And I
don't have an algorithm or a method for that. All
I can say is there seems to be a virtuosity
around getting into the zone approximal development by appropriately imagining
who your audience is going to be. But it's tremendously
helpful to do that diologically. And Chris and I were
also working with some other good people. We were working
with Madeline, and we were working with an editor there
named Leslie who was tremendously helpful at giving us that
kind of feedback.
Speaker 2: They what it was, They had.
Speaker 1: A Sam, Yeah, they both they both gave us a
significant leg up. Yes, Sam. There was an acronym standing
for the remember what it meant, standing for the reader
standing And it was an acronym that was something like,
how to imagine the optimal reader? Who are we speaking to?
To me? The thing that makes it easier? And I
don't know, I think this to me, this is intuitive
I don't know that it was conscious, but it's just
you're telling a story. It's an argument, but it's a narrative.
It's a narrative, especially this part, this first half of
the argument. It's a genealogy. It's you're telling a myth
and so and I you know, you know in this
the sense in which I'm using that word, and that
wasn't me. John already did that in the in the
lecture series, right, He's telling a story. And there's this
sense like it's a story that unfolds in episodes, and
each episode teases a little bit about what's to come,
and then the episode recaps a little bit about what
just happened before, and there's this sense of like momentum
and hopefully a propulsion and hopefully a tempo that makes
someone feel as though they're actually on a journey of
some kind. And to me, it's it's the telling of
the story in its widest frame that makes sense of
all the details in the terminology, because when the reader
gets a sense of like, oh, this is the kind
of story I'm being told, or listening to the lecture,
this is the kind of story I'm being told, then
the kind of story the sort of the score in
the background, right, if I can analogize it to the
musical score that when you're watching a movie, or like
the quality of the lighting, or all of the secondary
qualities that go into the telling of the story are
actually doing. And I don't mean just in the book.
I mean in the series too, are doing a lot
of the legwork in helping to put the vocabulary in perspective.
And I think it's there's a lot of things going
on in the background that I think are helping to
do the work, not just the actual literal explanations of
the terms and whatnot, Because I think when a person understands,
oh wait, this is the kind of story I'm being told,
it's like the context semantic context of a sentence, right,
you know what this word means because of the way
that it falls in the entire sentence. I think that's
a big.
Speaker 2: Part of it.
Speaker 5: That interweaving of narrative and argument, of course, was my
attempt to imitate as best I could Plato. Plato is
for me. So another aspect of answering your question is
there's a standard I was measuring myself against, and the
standard is what you see in the platonic dialogues where
narrative d i'm a character, development and argument are seamlessly
interwoven together.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that seems you know, it's interesting because as we
talk about in some ways a break through the Enlightenment,
as we kind of come out of the Enlightenment mode,
it seems like these types of this type of thinking
will inevitably return.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 4: David Bentley Heart's recent book is written in the form
of a time you know, rather esoteric as he is,
but you know, the idea that this is, this is
something that will be probably part of new thinking that
I've been thinking about it too, because you know, I'm
thinking about writing a book. Obviously, I've had several people
ask me if I if I would do it, and
I'm wondering what it should what it should look like,
you know, should there be even personal aspects in the book.
I kind of don't like that idea, but it seems
like when I read Dante, for example, I'm thinking, no,
that seems to be the best way to the most
fullest way to write is to have all the levels
connected together. Now, one of the reasons I think Jordan's
Twelve Rules Book did well is because of that is
that he has personal anecdotes, he has a theoretical frame,
but it's all very couched in kind of very everyday practical,
practical stuff. And to find that find that reach where
you kind of connect everything together. It seems also like
in a meta fashion, what it is we're trying to
get to in the in these questions of you know,
wakening out of the meeting crisis. So yeah, definitely something
to think about. I have looked through, I've read the
book quickly, but I can't wait to also go back
in and see how how you put all that together again.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, perhaps this is a good point to
mention the book is not just a transcription, it's not
just a companion. This book helps me correct one of
the mistakes of the video series, which is it was
presented monologically, which has put me into some thing of
a performative contradiction that became more apparent to me. Uh,
somebody advocating for the importance of the diological self and
diological reason over monologue. I mean, I don't want to.
I don't want to play it the other way too strong.
I mean, you know, in some ways this is still
my core argument. But there was genuine. It was genuine
dialogue and even at times DialogOS around the production of
the book that wasn't in the production of the series.
Speaker 2: The series was very much in my head.
Speaker 5: The book was very much between Chris and I and
the people at the publishing company. And that wasn't always
a pleasant affair, but it was. It was. It was
a very effective, uh, very effective diological rationality has all
the difficulties associated and you get this in Plato too,
all the difficulties with human beings and their foibles and
their flaws, but it also has a tremendous power for
self correction, that model logical thought thinking just in talking
just to yourself, it doesn't have so Yeah, and I've
been trying to move more and more towards everything I
do is being done diologically.
Speaker 1: So it The clarification is that the Sons of the
book is written as a dialogue. No, No, I want
to get that perspective. It's you're talking about the process,
talk about the press of producing the book was a
diological process, not that the book's presentation is dilogical, which
is an important distinction.
Speaker 4: No, but you did, like you said, you did take
into account that you're presenting an argument in the narrative form,
in the sense that here's the progression of things that
have happened that have brought us to where we are,
and you kind of have to understand it.
Speaker 3: And it's a mix of argument and history in.
Speaker 4: Some ways, or you know, so that it I help
people understand why, why we are and where we are
right now.
Speaker 5: I think one of the things Chris did to my
year is he strengthened the presence of the narrative in
the book. As Chris said it, It's there in the series,
but it becomes much more present in a very helpful way.
I like the comparison to the atmospheric music in a
movie and how that gets you to participate in the
material of the movie in a much more profound fashion.
And Chris did that. He pronounced the narrative in that way.
And I think that Chris has a tremendous gift for
the lyrical, as anybody who's spent any time with him knows.
And the lyrical doesn't just mean flowery language. With the
lyrics of a song, there's an adding there's an added
dimension of meaning that is otherwise not available with that
kind of lyricism.
Speaker 7: Hello friends, this is Richard Rowland, and I am inviting
you to join me for my new Symbolic World course,
Tolkien and Universal History. In this course, we're going to
go over the deep mythological and universal history roots of
Tolkien's legend are you and see how Tolkien sort of
shows us a blueprint for reclaiming a legendary mythical Christian
framework for storytelling, and in fact, we're going to even
do some storytelling of our own. This is a five
week course. It starts on March the third.
Speaker 2: We had to.
Speaker 7: Postpont it a week, which means there's a little more
time for you to sign up, and I hope to
see you there.
Speaker 3: What what are some of the things you know?
Speaker 4: Because now the video series has been out for a
few years now and five five years, isn't that that's wild?
Speaker 3: That's wild?
Speaker 4: And so what are some of the surprising effects that
you've seen or people that have told you stories or
that have you know, I'm curious to see some of
the effects that you've seen it have things that you
didn't expect?
Speaker 5: Maybe so after I mean, I guess two one is
more interior and introvert. I've become a little less, I
don't wake up in the middle of the night with
an extense of exposure and apprehension anxiety, and I literally
used to do that on a regular basis. So and
you know, and again Chris has been a big help
in that. Chris and Sarah very big help in me
accommodating to this role and helping to properly tutor me
so that I can address my concerns about the vice
that is available, but also the virtuosity that could be cultivated.
So I'm tremendously grateful about that. I didn't foresee that
before doing this series, and I am grateful for this process.
But that was a surprise, more public facing. The amount
of actual professional academic work that has been generated by
awakening to the meaning crisis caught me totally by surprise.
It is like five, you know, at least five times
greater than before I did the series. The number of
bonafide you know, relevant ex you know, experts in the
academics who reach out to me and want to collaborate
with me and work with me, that has just gone
up in a way I did not foresee. Looking back retrospectively,
it makes sense to me. I think the legacy academic
pathway is undergoing the same kind of contraction that the
legacy media is, and the universities are not really getting
it yet. But it took me by It took me
completely by surprise, and so that is something for which
I'm just tremendously grateful the people I've met and the
people have entered into relationship with the work that has
been done. I am, even by you know, even by
sort of cold academic professional standards, this is my most
productive I've ever been.
Speaker 3: M Wow, yeah, you would think that. Can I say this?
Speaker 4: I know that some I've talked to some academics where
I've asked them to come on my YouTube channel or
to talk about this, and they're very nervous because they
want everything to be couched in the in academia, and
so they're they're worried that it will affect their credibility.
So this is to all of you watching, you know,
this is it's a new world. This is not that
this world is changing. And so I'm really happy to
hear that that it didn't diminish people's percific.
Speaker 3: Because like, oh, it's YouTube videos, you know.
Speaker 4: Rather saying okay, here is a new cojent way of
seeing that we hadn't thought about, and you know, people
listening to it in their spare time and realizing that
there's something going on.
Speaker 3: It's a it's a great testimony to the change.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and what's happened is h I mean, we've retired
it now for reasons that we made public, but when
I was doing voices with for Vaki, and what is
continuing on in the lectern is we have academic who
have come and come to see that this is a
proper place for them to articulate their ideas, like Charles
Stang or James Filler. So that has also been something
that I've been very pleased with. Initially when I did
for exactly the same prejudice you just said. When I
did this, I thought academics would never come on publicly
and talk with me. But that has also changed and
opened up. More and more academics want to engage in
more public presentation of their idea, and I think it's
reasonable to conclude that I've earned their trust that they
know that they're going to be able to do something
that is public facing. But nevertheless, you know, has academic
integrity and rigor to it.
Speaker 3: What do you think.
Speaker 1: I think there's also something else that it was a
new way. Like I kind of remember, you know, being
at the University of Toronto back in like maybe circa
twenty ten, eleven twelve, Like that period was the period
that I was there and first met John and Peterson.
Jordan Peterson was also there at the same time, and
at the time, they were really the only two people.
Not to say that there weren't other really good teachers
at the university. In fact, I had some other really
really good teachers at the university, people like Lloyd Grison
come to mind and whatnot. But there was something There
was not only the content, but there was form. The
form was it was impassioned with vocation, and having a
scholar being passioned with vocation is not something that a
lot of people are used to seeing. In fact, I
was surprised when I first entered the university to find
how segregated a person's a scholar's personal life was from
their academic life. I remember thinking, well, God, if you're
going into philosophy, you must be going into this because
you love it and couldn't possibly do anything else. Like
this is the kind of thing that orients you to
the horizon line. Why else would you go into philosophy.
But of course, as we know, that's not true for
a lot of people, and so you know, I think
a lot of people who probably watched that series, they
had the same reaction as the generations of students who
just did that first in the classroom when they saw
John or they saw Jordan, or they saw people like them,
which is to say, they met someone who was not
only presenting something novel in its content, in its ability
to integrate disciplines and revivify and intuitive love what the
philosophical project was in the first place, but they found
someone who cared so deeply about this that they seemed
to stake their life on it. And that does something
to people when they see that, right, It does something
from within. I think it makes it brings something back
to life when they see an example of someone who
is marrying those things together. I think that was probably
maybe the single most vital thing. Put aside all the
content specivics of the argument and whatnot, and all of
its value, it's the formal presentation of imbuing it with
a sense of greater purpose. I think that does a
lot of the work. And people caught into that intuitively
without ever having to explain it.
Speaker 4: One of the things you're saying, I think that you
mentioned that the rings a bell to me that I've
noticed and I think has been wonderful too, is I
remember I remember coming out of school and being interested
in medieval art, and you know, reading papers and reading
different studies on relieval art and realizing that there's medieval
art historians and there are Renaissance art historians, and those
historians do not speak to each other, no, and it's
like they're both art historians, but they actually do not
in any way. They don't go to each other's conferences,
they don't read each other's papers. They just completely ignore
each other. And I remember thinking how insane that was,
you know, back when I was like in my early twenties.
And one of the things that I've seen John in
your work that to me has been astounding is a complete,
a bold, cross disciplinary approach which is unapologetic about that,
you know, just crashes through psychology, through philosophy, through history
and doesn't seem to care that everything has segregated into
all these like little micro worlds that.
Speaker 3: Don't even speak to each other.
Speaker 4: And so I'm curious to see to hear about how
people are reacting to that, you know, in academia and
around that, like, are you getting pushed back for that
kind of approach because you know, we're all postmoderns.
Speaker 3: There's no grand narrative.
Speaker 4: You can't you can't you know, you can't join things together,
just everything has to separate.
Speaker 5: So this is a this is a very interesting thing,
and as you rightly divined, I've sort of been in
the thick of it, not by design, but so yeah,
the university there is the sort of postmodern you know,
no grand narrative, but there's also this tremendous recognition that
interdisciplinary study is really where the science needs to go.
And the fact that those two are in dramatic tension
is not I think registering at the level of the
university organization. I think there's a performative contradiction looming within
the university that it doesn't quite get. But that's part
of this longer performative contradiction about right, we're trying to
figure out how we can properly integrate together while we're
trying to also say there is nothing that could possibly
integrate us together, which is I think very problematic. My
training in cognitive science, and therefore I express deep gratitude
to all the people that taught me. Showed me that
if we don't do that integration, we're going to be
Our understanding of mind is going to be equivocal, fragmented,
and that's not going to just be something propositional that's
going to ramify back into our understanding of ourselves, understanding
of our world. You're not doing good science all of that,
and I've made those arguments repeatedly. So what has happened
is for the very long, very long time, the university
looked at me as something they did not understand and
therefore were kind of.
Speaker 2: Tolerant.
Speaker 5: But we're looking for a reason to possibly get rid
of me. And when two thousand and eight struck, that
opportunity was taken and they tried to get rid of me,
even though the cognitive science program was the fastest growing
program at the college. I won't go into all the
details because it'll start to raise my affect in a
way that I don't want. Now, what happened is the
faculty and the students did a lot of protests about that.
They defended the value of the program, and I really
honor the academics who did that.
Speaker 3: They're trying to get rid of the whole the program.
Speaker 2: The whole program.
Speaker 5: Wow, it has to do with inept administrative arguments. Well,
we don't have dedicated budget lines for the cognitive science program,
so therefore we can we should remove it, right, which
is like because of one mistake, you're doing another mistake. Anyways,
what happened is, and I honor people like Joe Heath
and Donald Ainsley and other people, and Jay Pratt at
and the psychology he was chaired at the psychology department.
They went to bat for me, especially the psychology department.
So this is why I feel a tremendous loyalty to
the psychology department, unlike my famous colleague. And so, but
then what happened is they the university also had a
sea change. They realized that they were starting to suffer
because they have a bad reputation for teaching quality, great
research university, but bad and so they made this huge
move towards creating a second stream professors who were being
promoted because of their teaching, not just their research. And
so I slipped into that stream. And then the program
was started to become something that that was properly budgeted,
and then the university did the thing it always does
and got behind it instead, We've always loved this and
this is a gem for something that way we should
always be doing.
Speaker 2: And then and then they were.
Speaker 5: Still looking at me, uh and they were still like, yeah,
you're getting good student evaluations and your students go on
to grad school. But you know, you and Jordan and
a couple other professors and like, we had so much
trouble with Jordan, and we had so much trouble with
you know, Dan and right, and there was.
Speaker 2: All of that you don't fit in the boxes.
Speaker 5: And literally I had I had meetings when I was
applying for my permanent status, my tenure where they were
they were basically saying that they were they would do
it sort of politely with smile well, saying you know,
we've got our eye on you. And then when it
became clear that the YouTube series was not going to
be detrimental to them, but that I continually and reliably
honored the University of Toronto, especially the psychology department and
the cognitive science program, they came around and it was
last This tells you how long things sake. It was little,
just my previous We do a thing called the PTR
which we evaluate our yearly evaluation for how we're doing right.
And it was the first time they officially acknowledged my
public presence having a value, having an academic value. And
I give them credit. I mean, institutions are by nature
very conservative. So now what it is is we don't
know what John is. He doesn't fit into any of
your boxes. But he's our MAVC. He's our weirdo and
we're going to keep him and we like him. That's
what it's sort of come down to. And I appreciate that.
Speaker 4: What do you think about crashing through crashing through, like
crashing through the discipline? But I don't think it's crashing
through in some ways.
Speaker 3: I think that.
Speaker 4: I mean, to me, it's a surprise because you know,
if you had asked me when I was younger, you know,
is cognitive science going to be a place where we
can kind of join ideas about religion and philosophy and history, uh,
you know, and then also more mystical ideas of attention.
Speaker 3: All of these things. I'll be like, what, No, I
don't even know what that is?
Speaker 4: Like, what how would how would a science be able
to do that especially my cynicism against kind of like
science as you know, scientism. You could say, uh, you know,
and so so Chris, or I'd like to hear what
you think about this moment, like how all this is
coming together?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, me answering this question is ironic too, because
I'm not, like, I'm not a scientist. I'm not. That's
not my background either, and that's not my domain of comfort.
I mean, I you know, and and I understand it
well enough too. I supposed to end the writer's craft
and to lend it a certain articulation in certain contexts,
but like that's about as far as that goes for me,
you know, so I think, yeah, what to say about that.
My relationship with it is that goes back to what
we were talking about before, which is, you know, conceptual
vocabulary and tools to pry open esoteric ideas. And sometimes
you know, John has a gift with his you know,
there's a way of expressing things poetically for example. Now
that to me, that's where my I feel more at home.
And yet there's a kind of specificity, there's a technical geometry,
and there is something very very helpful about some of
the scientific conceptual apparatus because it helps to it basically
becomes like a to me, it becomes like a transliteration device.
It becomes a way of bridging in to things that
are very difficult to understand, that often are only in
the traditions that we read in Revere, expressed poetically or
expressed in such a way that that you have to
develop a deep kind of intimacy, and you have to
surpass the constraints of the language that you use with
the language that you use in order to access them.
And there's something about bringing all of that and expressing
it within a scientific domain, aside from giving it credibility
and plausibility, and aside from the people that need that
in order to be credulous or to even give it
a fair hearing, I mean, there's all of that, but
I think in addition to that, there's just a kind
of there's a tidiness to the form of presentation that
makes very things that are very very difficult to understand
and have esoteric histories suddenly within striking distance of the
average person. And I think that the great advantage that
has been given this is really more of aesthetic point
than a theoretical point. But I think it's important, and
to me it's the thing that's most important, which is
to say that there's a way in which people can
touch down on things that they otherwise would never touch
down on. And I think that's what's happened, right. People
who are maybe to use your words, scientistically inclined or
you know, skeptically inclined in the pejorative sense of the term,
who never would have considered any argument for the necessity
or elegance or depth of a religious tradition, passed through
the gate of a series of scientific terms and found
on the far side of that gate something beautiful they
had never thought to consider real. And it was actually
the scientific bridge that made that possible for them, rather
than the science alienating them. It actually became an invitation,
and it became a kind just as they say that
John is. You know, there's a lot of talk about
gateway drugs space right now, but that was a kind
of gameway drug for people. And I think that's an
incredible advantage that cognitive science has been able to have
as this transliteration device. Basically, that's my sense.
Speaker 5: So I've acquired a reputation that now has become attractive
to students. I get students coming to me and I
guess this, I've earned a bit of trust around this
as someone who goes into areas that have could be
considered wo yeah and illegitimate and make them intellectually respectable
and worthy of theoretical debate and empirical investigation. And that
is one of the things for which I'm most I hope,
in the virtuous sense, proud that I have been able
to do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean to me, that's been you know, And
that's one of the things that if you remember, like
you and I were criticized together, you know, trying to
talk about transpersonal agency and trying like at least I
was pushing to connect it to the ancient world because
in some ways we you know, I think that's one
of the interesting things about cognitive science is that whether
something is quantifiably measurable and let's say, in the way
that a kind of nineteenth century materialists would want it
to be in the question of cognitive science and some
ways becomes irrelevant in the sense that because someone asked me,
like a good example would be someone that's asked me recently,
we talked to people I was talking about like actually
UFO and kind of people.
Speaker 3: Seeing aliens or seeing demons and stuff.
Speaker 4: People ask me like, how do you distinguish a real
experience from a delusion? And my reaction to that is
that if you have a delusion about seeing demons, you
need to deal with that, Like I don't care what Like,
I don't care if it's physically there or not, or
if it's when someone says it's.
Speaker 3: Just in your mind, it's like, if something is just
in your mind.
Speaker 2: Does it?
Speaker 4: It's if it's something like that where it's actually incounter
dring some kind of destructive force that is affecting you mentally.
Speaker 3: You can't ignore it.
Speaker 4: You have to deal with it. And some of the
you know, so you would say, well, is it a
chemical thing? Like you need to take certain chemicals in
order to help yourself? And it's like probably maybe an
aspect of it, but there's other aspects of it that
can be helpful, and those are couch in the in
the tradition, like you know, encountering a sage, encountering someone
who can speak with authority to your experience. All of
these types of things would definitely have an effect on
on these experiences. And so I think that That's what's
fascinating is that, you know, like the question of for example,
like seeing a monster, for example, it's like every culture
in the world knows what seeing a monster is, Like
we just know what.
Speaker 3: That is because it's just universally described and you just
you just.
Speaker 5: Know what it is.
Speaker 4: And so if someone asks you, is the experience of
seeing a monster real? And I'm like, what, it's real?
It has to be real to some extent. Doesn't mean
that you can that you can give the monster a
you know, like a species that you could that you
could cut it out, put on the table and like
analyze its DNA. But that experience has to be something
that we have to that we can deal with, you know.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 4: And so I think that the lenk like I saw you,
for example, John Doing, you did a conference that it
was like on subtle Bodies, and I thought, man, he
is not afraid to like go into this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: Yea, And so it's been amazing to watch it happen.
Speaker 2: I have to say, we have a paper JN.
Speaker 5: Soun Kim and I we have a paper in submission
to a bonafide academic journal about all of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that that that.
Speaker 5: Has been really important to me, and Chris has been
a tremendous help in that, I think welcoming back into
you know, intellectual fellowship. A lot of the things that
we orphaned that were proper domains of human experience, especially
transformative experience. UH place is where they cultivate a sense
of the sacred, a capacity for self transcendence. That has
been a way in which my work has contributed to
sort of the re enchantment of the world, making the
world that turning it back from a universe one thing
we can say about it universe to a cosmos. And
I didn't realize I was doing that except in the
intuitive sense that I just liked to go because of
what happened in what happens in my practice into places
that people typically didn't want to go and see if
there's any scientific merit there. That's that's a Socratic impulse
in me. I want to know if this thing that
seems so catchy has any truth behind it. That's like
I like to go and see if things that have
a lot of truth have any transformative potential left in them.
That's the Socratic inspiration running through me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a there's I was gonna say when you
brought up that that that I saw that video of
yours Jonathan, or you had that discussion about the demon
and the demonic and encounters with it brought me back
to experience as a sleep paralysis and it but one
of the really helpful things about that. And you do it.
You do it too, Jonathan. You both do it, but
you do it in their different domains, which is, you'll
take you'll talk about something let's say that has overtones
of the mystical or overtones of the metaphysical, or you
know whatnot. And what you'll do is you'll take the
same pattern, but you'll talk about how the pattern is
actually manifest on let's say a lower scale of experience,
a more everyday quotidian scale of experience. Right, you both
do this in your respective ways and with different vocabulary,
but I think you both do this very well. This
is one of the ways I think you guys have
your work has an affinity, which is that you like
to detect patterns, and you like to take a pattern,
you like to show how it's replicated at different scales
and how actually the thing that makes the higher order
version of that pattern most plausible is the acknowledgment that
it is already affecting us at a lower order scale
of reality, and how we take the sort of in miniature,
the rituals that are present at that scale of reality
to be intrinsically real by the way that we interact
with them in the first place. And so that all
we're doing when we talk about these higher orders is
we're just expanding and scaling the pattern. And it might
be beyond our comprehension to immediately perceive, but the pattern
is no less real because we already have an intuitive
relationship with it. And so I think one of the
things that I think both of you guys do is
it's very platonic. This is the anemesis. You show people
that they already understand this. It's just that they don't
relate their understanding to the scale of pattern that they
feel alienated by because they're not understanding the correspondence. They
think this has nothing to do with them. It has
everything to do with them, and they already know that.
But what you do is you remind them that they
already know that. That's the very powerful thing. That's what
a teacher does.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, that's exactly what I'm trying
to do one hundred percent. And the hardest thing to communicate,
and this is the one that's sometimes more difficult, is
that sometimes the higher order pattern, how can I say this?
It's real, not only but it's real to the extent
that it joins the lower versions together. And so it's like,
for example, like the image a good example, a demon
thing is a good example. Like let's say the image
of the demon in the Fresco, where it's an actual
like hybrid monster and everything.
Speaker 3: It's like, you're probably never going.
Speaker 4: To see that, You're never going to have an experience
of that, maybe not even in a dream, maybe not
even in a thing, but that image everybody recognizes it
as being what it is, even if they haven't had
a personal experience of it.
Speaker 3: Because it joins together there.
Speaker 4: It joins together the dark thing that moves in the
corner of your attention, like and the you know, the
moment that you've had where you're in like utter confusion
and nothing makes sense and everything falls together. When you
see an image of it, like a myth mythologized image
of it, it it joins that, it joins your experience
of seeing something move in the corner, you know, of
your your attention with everybody else's, and so we're.
Speaker 3: Like, oh, yeah, that, but I don't even know why.
It's like, why is it that that is? I get attention?
Speaker 4: My attention is drawn to that, and I think that
a lot of a lot of these higher order versions
that's that's what they are, and that's why we no
matter how much because I know, John, you've said things
like I don't believe in the supernatural, and it's funny
because it's like, I think I probably also don't believe
in the supernatural and the way that a lot of
people think of supernatural. But but I I believe in
top down causality. I think that that it emerges into
these images, but it also constrained from above. And it's like, yeah,
that image of a let's say, a winged person, that's
the right image for what it describing. Like there's no better,
Like there might be alternatives, but there are very few
other versions of it that are good, and they're universal.
Every culture has the image of a wing something to
represent a spirit.
Speaker 3: Like it's so obvious when you think about.
Speaker 2: It, but you know what's the thing?
Speaker 1: Sorry, John, go ahead, that's the thing that.
Speaker 5: First of all, I think I've got to you know,
all things are filled with God, and that's David Bentley
Hart basically also doing what you just said.
Speaker 2: And I'm interested to read that.
Speaker 5: But the thing you put your finger on is the
thing which is I don't want to derail the conversation,
but that is the thing that has fascinated me on
both ends. The thing that the work of art that
really externalized this and it gave me the space so
it could reflect on it was Equus, which I consider
a masterpiece. I identify very strongly with dice Art. The
last lines of that play always reverberate for me.
Speaker 2: And what.
Speaker 5: Diceartain he knows he has to interact with these trans personal,
transjective realities in his profession, but he can't. But he
can't account for them. He can't account for what is
the magnetic force.
Speaker 2: That did what you just said?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 1: Why that?
Speaker 2: Why the Like?
Speaker 5: I know, logically, because I do work on relevance realization,
all the possible things that could be, you know, drawn
together that don't happen, Why that?
Speaker 2: Why that?
Speaker 5: And I think Young doesn't give an explanation. Young just
points at it. The archetype is not an explanation. There's
no theoretical explanation. There there's no mechanism, right in a
scientific sense, not in the mechanical sense, right right, And
that's what's fascinating to me. And that fascinates me from
the scientific end of relevance realization to the depths of
my which I did on you know, the course I
did on your channel, the cognitive science of ritual, the
encounter with the sacred, and that I call it the
equis engine because just for the litter that whatever it
is that you know, is doing that and way. And
what's so weird about it is it's simultaneously very bizarre
when you think about it, like with you know, with
reflective distance, and yet like you said, it's like anemnesis
it seems so familiar and so right when you see it.
Speaker 2: It's like, of course it has that of course to it.
Speaker 5: But if you ask theoretically, you say, okay, theoretically, why
of course the person goes, I don't know.
Speaker 2: And that's the play.
Speaker 5: That's equois and it's it fascinates me and like disart,
like I want to, like I've given up the project
of being able to you know, get get an account
that's going to satisfy me, because I realize I'm going
to die unsatisfied about this, but about trying to get
more and more properly oriented to it and have an
articulated apprehension of it so that we can do a
more profound appreciation of it. I think I've made some
progress on that, and that's you know that really that
has come to mean so much more to me, to
me realize that's what I'm doing and that's what I
want to be doing. And I just I know I'm
doing a bit of a tangent here, but that that
that to me, and you know, I felt it when
I felt that when we were at the gospel seminars,
I felt something like that happened between all of us
and it was profound and it was deeply meaningful to me.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I know this isn't directly about the book, but it's.
Speaker 3: Just watch this.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: They watched this for the insight in the conversation. That's
what they care about it.
Speaker 1: I'm actually curious now that you brought I've heard about
what that experience is like from John's perspective, Jonathan, but
I'm kind of curious now that he's brought it up.
What that was like from your person?
Speaker 4: Oh, the Gospel seminary, Yeah, I mean, this is a
good opportunity because it's just coming out now, you know.
I think it started coming out at the beginning of
the week.
Speaker 2: September first, my birthday.
Speaker 3: They came out Happy Birthday, by the way, they didn't
know I really I was really.
Speaker 4: Nervous about it, you know, because talking about Exodus is
something because Exodus, you know, I mean, it's relevant to
Christians and obviously very relevant to Jews, but it's it's
it's not something that people fight over that much.
Speaker 3: You know, they don't have all this conflict around it.
Speaker 4: But the Gospel, my goodness, the Gospels, the most explosive
thing you can do is obviously talk about about Christ
and about and about his message and also about the
implications and everything.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 3: That's why we had actually had like wars about this.
So I was very nervous.
Speaker 4: And also because Jordan, you know, Jordan, in his amazing self,
just as like, hey, why don't you come to the gospel. See,
he's just like inviting anybody to come. It's like anybody
he meets that he finds interesting, Like, hey, you should go.
He was like, Russell brand you should come to the
gospel seminar. He's like Tucker Carlson, you should go to
the gospel like anybody. He's just like, just come to
the gospel seminar. And I was thinking Jordan like, I
was like, ah, we're inviting all these people. You know,
we had uh it was uh, we had what's his
name from the from uh trigonometry.
Speaker 3: Constantin Kissen was there, which I was like constant Kissen.
Speaker 4: I like Constantin Kissen, But why would he come to
a gospel seminar?
Speaker 3: And so so I was like nervous. But then exactly
what you said.
Speaker 4: There's something about the just I think, the the integrity
of the people, and I think that's maybe what Jordan gets.
Jordan is like, I meet someone who has integrity, and
I sent their integrity and that's the reason why I
want to invite them, because He's like, the integrity will
go more than any of the scholarship or the knowledge.
And we did have scholars there, but I would say
there was mostly this real honest desire to go through
the text, to discuss it openly, to not have hidget
hidden agendas, and that really came out. I was surprised because,
you know, there are some things that I, for some reason,
had massive insights about during the discussion. You know, there
were some some of the some of Christ's parables that
I didn't understand, and all of a sudden, as we're
talking about it, we're exchanging and we're just you know,
ruminating over this.
Speaker 3: You know, it just hit me.
Speaker 4: It was It was really crazy, and I really enjoyed
also watching you John, uh, you know, you know, because
I was one of the things one of the reason
why I liked that you were there. I wanted you
to be there is because there's something that I haven't
been able to mabecommunicate to you as much as I
as I could, is that I really think that the
Gospel and many of the things that Jesus says and
many of the things that Jesus does, is exactly about
the relationship between bottom up, you know, emergence and then
top down emanation. The way you talk about that, he's
exactly about the joining of heaven and earth, and you
see it happening in the in his miracles and the
story and everything. So I was like, I'm hope, like
I just I'm hoping we could tap John there. For
like days going through it, I kept looking at you
and I'm like, you know, and I could see that
you were seeing it right away.
Speaker 2: So to me, that was it was.
Speaker 3: It was really exciting. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Jonathan. It was. Yeah. I mean I.
Speaker 5: For me, what I call the logos showed up and everybody,
I think that was everybody. Everybody got to a place
they couldn't have got to on their own. And and
it was there was there was this field, uh you know,
vibrancy between us that was just you know, impregnating everybody
with insight and self reflection that I found much more
actually communicative of the Gospels than perhaps the particular propositions
we were uttering. I had that experience. You remember at
the end they said, you know, I was talking about
how that and and my sense of devotion to it
and and so I like you, I just I was
very grateful to be there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's cool. Have you had a chance to see
some of it, Christopher or except for the few little
clips that I mean, yeah, so so I will. I
will be very interested to see it. And it's for
length though. When I can, I in it. I like
what you.
Speaker 4: This.
Speaker 1: I can understand the nerves, like I can understand the
stakes or the feeling of the stakes. It strikes me
actually as and I don't say this, I don't say
this to compliment you guys for the sake of it,
but I mean it. It's like, requires a certain amount
of courage to be in a position like that, especially
when you're talking about a source and a text that's
so foundational and that we all have a relationship to
and it could not possibly be it could not possibly
have more gravity that is personal and that is universal,
and you're submitting yourselves to be thinking in real time,
and there's a vulnerability to doing that. That is, you
know that the stakes, I imagine, could feel very high.
And so it's the idea that you found yourself having
insights you had never had, or relating to it in
a way that you'd never related to it at least
to some degree, is a really fascinating thing for me.
I'm kind of hungry to hear. I don't know. I'm
not to put you on the spot. I'm hungry to
know if there's a particular instance or example that comes
to mind. Let's say you mentioned one or two of
the parables struck you in ways that they hadn't before.
I'm just curious if there is any if you can
be more spial asking me. You're asking John you first
and me, Yeah, that.
Speaker 7: There was.
Speaker 4: I even it's funny because I don't I don't remember
right now. There was one particular There was one particular
parable that I forget which parable it is. It's horrible
because it's like I had massive insights about it. I'm sorry,
I can't come up with it right now. One of
the things that that really, I would say, surprised me
and touch me, and it's actually going to go part
of the controversy in some ways of doing the gospel
theories was at someboy, you know, Dennis Brager was there,
which like, really kudos to him for coming and also
being so gracious and generous, you know, ask the right questions,
but also you know, not you know, really kind of going.
Speaker 3: Along with the story. At some point he's like he's like,
you know, we've been here for several days.
Speaker 4: We've been talking about this, and he's like, no one
yet has Basically he's basically saying, no one yet has
told me, Like the usual thing that I hear, which
is how to get saved?
Speaker 6: Right, And it was so funny because we all kind
of looked at each other and we're like, you know,
oh yeah, but also that's not what this text is about.
Speaker 4: I don't know what to say, Like Jesus rarely talks
about that. He actually talks about all these things. And
if you're trying to find for like the things the
boldly that like will get you saved, you're really actually
going to struggle to find that. And the way that
modern kind of you know, maybe more superficial Christians would think, like,
you're really struggling, going to struggle to find it.
Speaker 3: You know, he's teaching a way, he's teaching a way
of being, a way of living.
Speaker 4: And I and I thought, and the fact that we
all in the room, we're completely fine with that, and
we're like, no, we're actually talking about text, you know,
like puts in the text. That was a moment that
I found particularly touching, Like that exemplifies the spirit in
the room.
Speaker 1: You could say, yeah, something like that, that's cool, how
about you, John.
Speaker 5: There was lots of moments. The moments that meant the
most to me, sort of egocentrically, were moments of unexpected recognition.
When we were talking about in the beginning was the logos,
and I was making the argument for the four l's
identity claims, light, life, love, and logos, and for relationality
as being primary in our understanding of ultimacy. I expected
I expected one of two reactions, either you know what
the heck this is ourcane and obscure or no, no, no,
that's not how we think about God. And instead what
happened was people took it up, and then there was
a moment where Bishop Baron intervened and he said, I
think that's the right intuition. And it set me back,
and credit to him, I'm trying to give credit to him.
It set me back. I totally did not expect that response.
I was, I mean, we weren't there to debate, and
I wasn't prepared to debate, but I was prepared to argue,
if you'll allow me to make that distinction, I was
prepared to argue. And instead it was welcomed and it
was taken back in and then Jonathan picked it up
and you did an amazing amplification on it, and it
just sort of went bleashed in a way that I
had not expected.
Speaker 2: And I said this.
Speaker 5: I don't know if it'll make it onto the camera,
might get edited out, but I said this at the time,
I felt a welcoming into a deep fellowship discussion DialogOS
about Jesus that I had thought I would never have,
ever have. And it was very healing for me. It
was tremendously healing for me because of my past. And
so that was a that you know, Hegel talks about that,
that those moments of genuine recognition and trust that are
profoundly capable of addressing, you know, otherwise unaccessible parts of
the human psyche. And that when when Bishop and I
was very grateful to him about that, I know he
looked at me as like, what is John? And he
did it lovingly And I'm used to I already said
the university has done that. That's that's been my life.
My family even talked to me that way, what are
you so?
Speaker 6: Uh?
Speaker 1: But they said that to Jesus too.
Speaker 2: Well, that's not fair comparison.
Speaker 5: But but yeah, but that moment, and there was nothing,
there was nothing flattering, There was nothing like ProForma.
Speaker 2: There was nothing like, well we should do this to
be polite. It was genuine.
Speaker 5: It was cecere and people were caught up in like
the logos of the of the proposal in a way
that I found tremendously powerful and to which I immediately
fat started to feel a tremendous loyalty to the group.
Speaker 1: H Yeah, that's interesting, these these two.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The way that your experiences are different you speak to
one another is interesting to be. I'll say that as
a as a as simply a a audience member, the
thing that I would hope that the ambition that I
would have, but a series like that without having seen it,
so I don't know to what degree this will be fulfilled,
but will be too to help the person watching it
understand that whatever they think they understand about what it
is to be a Christian in the way of the
Gospels is probably not exactly on mark, which is to
say that the strangeness you you kind of alluded to
it already, John, But the strangeness, the uncanniness you know,
I've been I've been going through uh you taught you
brought up David Bentley Hart, Jonathan. I've been going through
his New Testament translation, which I don't find all that
all that different and novel but it's helpful just to
go through it again in any case. And one of
the things that he points out and as introduction and
as a as a as a as a curec guard guy,
that speaks to me a lot is that the what
is required, like the robustness of what is required for
he who calls himself a follower in the way of Christ,
is significantly more demanding than most Christians would believe. And
there is a little bit of a shock to the system,
I think when when that dilute the sort of the
deluded vers of Christianity, that Christianity has turned into a
kind of social problem, or something soft and fuzzy and
cuddly makes contact with that's the strangeness of it again,
the uncanny nose, that feature of it that is genuinely
very shocking and that we should all be shocked by.
And I'm curious to note to what degree. I don't
want to get you to recapitulate the whole Gospel seminar,
but like, to what degree did you feel like that
was present, the appreciation for the uncanny, the appreciation for
the numinosity of Christ, but also the numinosity for the
whole tradition and the novelty of the fact that like
this is actually something if we take it in its
proper register, that places a demand on us even to
contemplate it. That is more than most Christians could most
Christians could ever appreciate and would ever be willing to
entertain for fear of being scandalized by its.
Speaker 3: I think that that was exactly what you're describing.
Speaker 4: I felt like that was exactly the spirit that animated
the group was in some ways, you know, because when
the last time that you I don't think I know
of a time in my life where I've gone through
the entire Gospel story in like basically in a few
cities where we we taught for four hours a day,
like we went through it four hours a day over
I think it was like seven or eight days.
Speaker 3: Uh. And you think that's never happened.
Speaker 4: And so I think that that sense of of strangeness
and surprise, you know, And and this exactly, this vision
of the challenge that Jesus offers to us and to
our to our world, I think came out quite quite
a bit.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: It's it's like, how can I say this?
Speaker 4: And it was it was fun because in sometimes you
had people like Bishop Baron are people that know the
text very well, but they nonetheless were able to enter
into that sense of surprise as well, because we're also
not coming at it theologically where the story, so we're
there are there were theological comments obviously along the way,
but it wasn't coming from the theology into the story.
It was actually coming from the story into the insight
that the story is bringing to us. So I did
feel definitely feel that yeah, and I hope that people
watching it will also feel that wonder at the story again.
Speaker 2: I hope.
Speaker 5: So I set myself and my proper allegiance throughout was
to exactly what you were talking about, Chris. I mean,
my approach to this was in that sense like socratic,
in the Kirkergardian sense that you were talking about there.
I wanted to always, especially when when in the Perils
I was trying to make a case that the closest
analogies is then Cohen, not an allegory. I felt that's
what my role. I don't want to diminish what Jonathan
just said. Everybody took that up, but I went in
setting myself to take that role and to be responsible
to it.
Speaker 2: Throughout.
Speaker 4: I love how this discussion has changed from me interviewing
both of you to Christopher interviewing us like.
Speaker 2: That, Yeah, he does that.
Speaker 3: So I think, I think, I think we you know, I.
Speaker 4: Think we've said, we said quite a bit, and uh,
I will maybe last question I have for both of
you is, you know, what's that?
Speaker 3: What's the next step?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: What are you hoping the book will do? What it
will open? And and how do you see this whole
project moving forward?
Speaker 5: So I mean, I'm hoping that the book. I mean,
obviously part two is coming, and Part two is going
to go through more revisions than part one because Part
two is more scientifically based and science has a faster
turnover rate, and so it's gonna it's gonna be a
harder task. But I can't think of anybody I would
welcome more to join me in that than Chris. So
that's obviously sort of prosaically what's coming. I would hope
also so that I am trying to get people to
pair these two things in mind, the meaning crisis and
the advent of the sacred, And so the philosophical silk road,
which I've talked to.
Speaker 2: You about, is what's next in the most. I don't know.
Speaker 5: Comprehensive fashion, I can think, but it has things along
the way. One of the things i'm doing right now,
and I'm working with a student of mind and then
I'm going to involve Chris and other people down the road,
is I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the psychological construct meaning
in life. I used to just adopt it, and I
think it is in many ways very inadequate for what
a lot of us have been trying to put our
fingers on when we're talking about when we're talking about
the meaning crisis, there are many dimensions that are missing.
I've done this with other constructs. I've done this with wisdom,
I've done it with I've done it with attention, I've
done it with mindfulness. And I need to I feel
very strongly that I now need to address this. Just
to give one taste of the problem, the standard meaning
in life metric is too local and too individualistic. So
you know, if people have friends and loved ones and
projects they're working on, they're going to find their lives
according to this metric meaningful. But when I talk to
these people, they'll say that's all true, and but and
that's the part where the meaning crisis actually lands. They
don't find So it's almost like, in addition to meaning
in life, we need meaning in world.
Speaker 2: How meaningful is your world? Is it ordered?
Speaker 5: Does it afford you self transcendence? Does it give you
proper education and overcoming self deception? Does it allow to
find fellowship with others? Does it help you feel oriented
towards a deeper future? And when you ask people those
kinds of questions, you don't get Yeah, Yeah, it's going
really well. They've become very critical because they feel their
lives are filled with burgeoning bullshit and burnout. They feel
that they're starving for flow and for fellowship. And so
part of what I want to do is by having
the Advent of the Sacred and the meaning Crisis talk
to each other, I want to try and articulate much
better what is actually going on when we're talking about
this meaning that's at issue. Yeah, I wish I could
have even changed what we're talking about here, because it's
more like we're now moving to a stage where we're
coming to a decision like a chiros about how are
we going to try and achieve meaning? Are we going
to concuone and withdraw into a little private sphere that
we clutch onto and that's where we find our meaning
in life. And COVID showed, ah, that's very dangerous. Or
are we going to try and do what religions used
to do for us? Is to open us and to
consider right a much more encompassing and transformative understanding of
what it is to seek meaning in one's life. And
it is inseparable from helping the world to become a
more meaningful, meaningful place for others and in itself. And sorry,
that's just a very gist and it's inadequate because there's
so much more going on. But for me, that's one
of the next The two big things are the philosophical
soak road and this scientific project of articulating a reformulation
of what we mean when we're talking about meaning in life.
And then thirdly, I'm working on a project with two
good friends of mine, who's Seen and Daniel, and they're
both graduate students. Daniel just successfully defended his PhD. And
we're going to create an academic article laying out the
four pi's of knowing to get it, like really really
crystal clear and on a scientific footing. So those are
the things that are what's next for me, right you, Christopher.
Speaker 1: I'm just hanging out.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 4: Then, well, look the book is it is out now,
like it's available at it so there it is right
there behind John. So get the book. You know, brings
it together and you know, spread it around.
Speaker 3: It's easy.
Speaker 4: It's easy to lend it to people to kind of
help them understand their world and the world they live
in and the issues, you know, the kind of issues
that face us. And so I wish both of you
really good luck with the book and also good luck with.
Speaker 3: All these projects that are coming on. So thanks, thanks
for talking.
Speaker 1: To Thank you, thanks for just being so supportive. Jonathan. Yeah, really,
I really really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Thank you guys, A joy, really appreciate your friendship, really
appreciate your support. I know we'll be involved in projects forthcoming.
I look forward to it for.
Speaker 3: Sure, for sure. Thanks everyone.
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