Brendan Graham Dempsey: Matters Over Time

31:12Yeah, great question. I mean, this was actually one of the driving impulses for me in really exploring this material from the beginning. I think that this is one of the biggest topics or questions before our culture, actually. And I think it goes something like this, right? Like many people might have had this experience where growing up as a young kid, maybe they were in a household that was, I don't know, maybe very religious or maybe not, but there is a sense of just this is the way the world is and that's just that's it that's just you know you have your kind of frame and it's like okay yeah this is reality and people might disagree with it or whatever but this is this is the way um and then you get a little bit older and you have more encounters with other people with different perspectives or with different cultural backgrounds or different worldviews and that easy kind of absolutistic frame uh is is challenged um And then I think that this can go a couple of different directions.

32:12People can double down and they can say, you know, no, my frame is the right frame and everyone else is wrong. And you can really kind of, you know, try to seal yourself off from all of the pluralistic complexities of the world. That's one approach. And there are ways that, you know, that's a self-preserving sort of move.

32:35because if your bubble bursts, that's a very terrifying prospect to be in, right? Our meaningful worlds that we produce and that are co-produced, that we enter into, but that we are enculturated into, they work to create a world for us, to kind of carve out a little order out of the potential chaos of reality. And that's called like a nomos. It's like a sociological term that means sort of like, an order, you know, an order to things. And what happens if your order is disrupted is, well, your bubble kind of bursts and you are open into that chaotic confusion of what is the world? What's up? What's down?

33:17You know, Nietzsche in talking about the death of God, you know, when with the madman who comes out with the lantern in the morning, it's like, where is God? I seek God. You know, he says, we've killed God and there's no longer, is there any longer any up or down, you know, there's a sense of just a radical orienting confusion because your frame of meaning making has dissolved and your whole sense of sort of a hierarchy of values goes with it. And so there's a strong pressure, psychological pressure, and often also a sociological pressure to try to conserve the nomos, the meaning making world frame at all costs.

33:54So it's a very deep self-preserving move. And it's not something necessarily also to be sort of, you know, mocked or belittled or undermined. I mean, that's a very important thing that we humans do. At the same time, it can also be very limiting and constraining. And in the process of trying to deeply kind of just keep your world together, you're keeping out everyone else's world frame. And so there are deep limits, I would say, to your own growth and development that can happen if that's your approach to this issue. On the other hand, if you just say, well, my my original simplistic, naive meaning bubble burst, I guess it's all just a bunch of people's bubbles.

34:36And that's all that meaning is. And so, look, I'm cool with your bubble. You'd be cool with my bubble. And we'll just all agree that, you know, all this is kind of absurd, but we have to do what we can in a kind of meaningless universe or what or what have you. Or there's a sense of, oh, well, I come from this perspective and you've got your perspective And they totally disagree. But, you know, who's to say whatever? It's all good. There's a kind of easy pluralism or a relativism there that creeps in. And I think that that actually winds up creating its own source of chaos. Right. Which is that on the on the other hand, it seems a bit more open and there is a degree to which it is.

35:09You're letting more of reality in. Um, but it also then creates this kind of infinite plurality of potential worlds. And that's just as chaotic and confusing, you know, as sort of, uh, anomie or meaninglessness itself. So the question of relativism, the question of a radical relativistic frame that's really heightened in sort of a postmodern cultural context, that's a big question for people. And I think it's a real source of struggle for our meaning making to make sense of that. Because once your bubble bursts and you see that it's not that simple, how do you recognize, how do you integrate the plurality of all this other meaning making?

35:45And so that was a big question for me. And I think that to boil all this back to what this offers, I think, is for a long time, I've been looking for an order in that pluralistic chaos, right? How do we make sense of the relativity of different meaning making frames, but still have a kind of center or a core or a ground? And one of the major lenses that this course will be using is a situation of our meaning making process as part of a broader complexification tendency that we see in other aspects of reality. So I begin the course, I think in the second gathering, actually, the reading will be talking about situating meaning making in a cosmic context and how that's a complexification or a developmental process.

36:38And then, of course, throughout the rest of the course, we'll be using developmental models like James Fowler's faith development theory and other ways of looking at complexification of meaning structures to understand the pattern that connects these different ways of making meaning. And what that does, what it did for me, and I think it can be very helpful for others, is to see that there's something beyond that just radically relativizing move. It's an important step in the process. I think it's an advance beyond just a absolutistic trying to maintain your own worldview bubble at all costs. But it also, you know, it can be itself transcended by being able to situate what's going on with meaning in general and meaning development.

37:20And then when you can see that these are different kinds of meaning making that unfold along a progression, you're able to order or set in relationship different kinds of meaning making. And I think that that has a real benefit in being able to return a sense of a kind of meta order to the process. So hopefully that's making sense to people. This will be a big focus of the course. But all that's to say that the question of relativism, the question of, you know, the relativity of different ways of making meaning and finding value is a big focus of this course. And it's an attempt to offer, I think, an orientation beyond radical relativism and value nihilism, which is often what people experience, by a way of framing this meaning-making process in very broad terms and being able to relate meaning-making structures together so you have a pattern, you have an ordered way of making sense of things that exists at a higher level.

38:22uh so if that doesn't make sense uh but it sounds enticing you know you see you can uh join the course and see what that all really means and looks like in practice um but yeah that would be uh how i'd start to answer that well as a recovered nihilist that would be the first to sort that made me too like i'm wearing good company you know yeah i and you know there is this sense of well um when i was you know a younger man right i had i was existing in exactly one of these bubbles that you're talking about, you know, and it was kind of, I suppose, this sense of being like a starving artist, right?

38:58So like, I have to, I have to live on barely a dime and try and get grants and try and do my work. And there's a romantic kind of notion around it. And the way that I kind of navigated the world, including through other people, right, by means of other people and the people that I was hanging out with were very much in this, I wouldn't say a validation of it, but the existence that in and of itself of that particular worldview, right? To say like, yeah, you're a starving artist, you know, that's the way that it is, right? And I think that's the, that's kind of the headline, I suppose, right? Which could have been put on a shirt for 10 years of my life, right?

39:41Perhaps even more like that's just the way it is, bro. Like, and it took a long time. And, you know, in this sense, I say that, you know, COVID did me a real solid in terms of just being able to kind of shut that out for a little bit. And it helped me to move into the kind of interior depths that you were talking about, right? So in the course, you explore kind of like the psychological dimension of meaning making and then you bridge into the sociological which I'm hearing you sort of articulate in that piece that it's not an isolated process and nonetheless there is an important stake that the individual psychological plays in that in its relation to the worldviews of others.

40:33We can't just do, I agree to disagree because then we fall into what is ultimately the question of the one and the many, whether it's the one and the many beings or the one and the many views that each being holds, right? So there's this infinite kind of fractal nature of meaning making. And I'm hearing what you're pointing at as really landing for me as taking a look at, oh, but hang on, Why did I pick that particular slogan, right? Why did I choose the myth of the starving artist or the myth of the, or like, you know, Joseph Campbell kind of frame. Why the hero myth, right? Why the finance myth, whatever it is.

41:20And I want to just sort of like push it because I know that you go from the sociological, I think, to more broadly the cultural, but also situating it within time. Like when we talk about matters over time, you explicate kind of what ancient meaning making processes were and the development across time up until modernity, post-modernity and then you propose that which comes after which I'll leave you there with, you know. I think what I'm kind of holding as a question is just in terms of our let's say 2026 life, like our culture and the zeitgeist at the moment, there is a lot of information. We're putting it out there right now.

42:09We're adding to that haystack of all kinds of information that influence the ways in which our meaning-making structures selectively sample how we participate in the world. So why is it important that we understand our epoch, like our time at this point in time? Right. In relation to the grander history of the evolution of our species. Oh, big question. Yeah. I mean, there's so much in there. Welcome. No. So thanks for bringing this bringing this element up, because so far what we've largely been talking about is individual meaning making. And that is kind of the first first third or so of focus, I would say, of this course.

42:59and that's largely well it's it's it's it's multifold part of that is you know to understand something by being able to ground it in your own experience I think can be really helpful so before dealing with you know cultural evolution or what's been going on in the meaning making of 10 ,000 years or so you know starting just with your own life and and kind of contemporary life and seeing patterns in that in that space can be a good way to make meaning making tractable before you try to expand it out. I think the other thing, though, one of the major claims, hypotheses, you know, working arguments that I find very compelling and has been a source of my research is the notion that there are similarities across these different scales, that there's a way of if you understand what it's like to make meaning as a person over the course of a lifetime and that There's a development that can unfold in that process.

43:58Can you use those maps that help us understand that process and see a version of that unfolding across human history? It's a bold claim. It's a claim that people have made in various ways for a long time, some very clumsily, some more precisely. But it's still a fascinating claim. And as I've researched this topic, I find a lot of credible reason to indeed look at the story of humanity as itself a learning process, as itself a story in which we've been gaining a overtime in the aggregate and certainly in very reversible ways. But sure enough, a kind of steadily increasing, expanding scope of meaning making in what's available to us in our worldview structures.

44:47um now this isn't a necessarily a triumphalist story of progress in any modernist way but it's also not a kind of post-modern oh everything's you know either always been more or less the same or if anything it's all getting worse kind of narrative either um i'd like to thread the needle there i'd like to you know show what evidence there is for looking at things this way um and uh but also you know be mindful of the ways in which uh if you just kind of take all that too simply, you know, then you can just sort of have a kind of nice story that that doesn't necessarily meet the fine grain reality.

45:23So that's a big focus of what this is all about is, OK, having looked at individual human meaning making, looking at how people's senses of the meaningful and the sacred and life purpose evolve or can evolve over the course of a lifetime, and actually being able to measure that developmental complexification with certain metrics, which I talk about in the course and use as the basis of my research. Can we apply that and look at human history? And one of the things that I think is really important about that question, and again, is kind of the big claim, is that there is a process underway that, yes, we experience and are a part of and identify with, quite literally, but it's a cosmic process.

46:05It's one that you can actually trace back in all the way down the levels of complexity and all the way back through time to see that indeed the universe. So the argument would go is unfolding itself and complexifying through the same sorts of dynamics of learning that ultimately human beings also use to learn. And again, I think that when you can see yourself as part of a broader cosmic process, that always stirs in me a deep sense of spiritual significance that when I feel at home in the universe, when I can identify as being, in a sense, the cosmos in some way, when I situate myself as part of that long story, that moves from just kind of interesting theories and models to what you could call a grand narrative to a whole worldview way of seeing and relating to yourself and others and everything that you encounter.

47:01So in that biggest scope, if indeed something like this is unfolding in the world, that's a huge insight. That's a huge claim. That would seem to be an incredibly powerful thing to explore. And so to be able to see if it is indeed the fact that what humanity has been doing in some long way has been complexifying in our understanding and growing in that sense of widening embrace over the course of our history and that that story is itself the tip of the spear of a much longer cosmic story. That's really kind of the big, big picture that all this is situated in. And at the end of the day, I find that to be, if true, a very meaningful story as well, which again is the way that all this kind of folds back on itself of like by understanding meaning making and the processes that go into it, that not only gives you an understanding of what it is, but is itself experienced as meaningful and is in a sense, the story of meaning itself and how we fit into that story.

48:09So, yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you're pointing at something which I was just having this conversation today, actually, which is, I hear what you're doing with this course as challenging and very important fundamental presupposition. So when we say that, oh, I want to be connected to something larger than myself, I tend to kind of like tilt my head at that in a questioning fashion, not in a hostile fashion, right? But in the questioning fashion of like, you know, are you not already? That's what I mean by the fundamental presupposition and what I'm hearing you kind of articulate in like, this has been going on for a long time and it's kind of always been the case when we talk about a relational ontology is that like you're already connected, right?

48:58So when we kind of come back to the initial, one of the initial role plays at the start of this call, right? That sense of we're not meaning making creatures. We're sorry, we're not meaning finding creatures. We're meaning making creatures. If we assume that meaning is out there to be found, then we also implicitly presuppose that we're disconnected from it. And at the same time, in order to make that claim at all, to say that I would like to find meaning in my life, is exactly to enact a meaning making process. So it's for me, this question of like, well, you can we can we offer to some, I think for some people, they'll take it as a as a theoretical framework.

49:43work, but I imagine that over the course of the course, it moves itself away from being an abstract theoretical framework into actually an embodied kind of worldview that I'm actually already connected to all of this stuff. And you're putting those pieces in place such that that realization is possible. Is that fair as a kind of offering? Yes, very much. And I want to experiment a little bit with that and see exactly how much to lean into that as well. And so that will be something for me to explore in the course of the course is to see how much to underline that aspect. This is a really unique opportunity to do a course like this in this format, right?

50:26If I were doing this course in a university, like a state university or something, right, There would be a way that I'd have to limit this conversation to a certain kind of hyper empirical kind of value neutral as possible and yet really smuggling into values kind of presentation that would just say, all right, well, here's here's evidence of a particular claim and do with it what you will. in a context like this where people I think are are coming in because this is very personal right this is very this is existential and I think people are drawn to John's work and and a lot of the the material coming out of this broader you know space online and whatnot that's about making this real that like it's not just a theory to talk about how humans make meaning like there's nothing more meaningful than what actually that is and feels like.

51:22Right. And so I think that if this were happening in a kind of more classic sort of academic, you know, stuffy, we have to, you know, pretend like this is just it's fully objective and we don't have any, you know, this view from nowhere kind of modernist assumption, then it would lean much more just towards, you know, talking about facts and trying to set out an argument. But I do want to invite people over the course of this to really take it on board. I'm not going to again, I'm going to navigate that depending on what that's feeling like for people in the course. And if people are interested in that, then that's very much what I would like to lean into as much as people are comfortable with.

52:00Because I do believe if you take these insights on board, they are transformative. They transform your way of seeing the world and understanding yourself. I think that what is very common for people today and in some ways is kind of the default uh answer and approach in sort of polite society and certainly intellectual society is to assume something like we're just these you know organic things that came together yeah on some rock out in the corner of space and you know uh out of trillions of galaxies you know and therefore Or because we're so insignificant in that sense, this is all just some weird cosmic fluke.

52:48It's a joke. It's absurd. Right. And and, you know, that's kind of the standard take that seems to be easily promulgated by people who seem to be in the know and who are maybe engaged in the sciences and whatever that that that framing of human life is somehow. Yeah, you just got to come to, you know, accept that. And I think that that framing of reality is wrong. I think that when you shift your perspective, and it's not to change the facts. Yes, we live in a very big cosmos, and there are many, many galaxies, and it's a profound sense of scale, to be sure. But if you're just using size as a matter of like what actually matters, then that's a very poor metric to use.

53:36Right. I don't go up with a ruler and say, you know, hey, what's the most significant thing here? Oh, well, that's 10 feet tall. Right. Like, that's ridiculous. Now, if you can actually see that in that grand theater of cosmic space, there is a story unfolding that is a complexification and a developmental story that things started simple and little particles and then formed molecules and molecules came and formed life and life, you know, formed multicellular life and then the animal life of minds and then from minds into, you know, social animals and then from social animals into cultured human beings using symbolic speak to make meaning.

54:12in that telling of a big history, we are doing something very unique that we don't necessarily see anywhere else. Not to say that it's not happening else in the cosmos. It may very well be. But in fact, that would only give deeper evidence to the notion that there's a particular directionality to the unfolding of the cosmos itself. And if we take that through line seriously, we can no longer justify the claim that human beings are some insignificant thing. Our brains are the most complex thing we've ever discovered in reality, right? This phenomenal experience of consciousness and our ability to communicate and make meaning at the level that we're doing is the most complex thing in the universe that we know of.

54:59Now, I want to say all that. And then I immediately want to, you know, again, qualify that with, well, you know, We don't want to fall into some sort of anthropocentric, simple story in which, you know, oh, everything's about us or this kind of thing. Rather, it's an invitation to see your experience of reality as being at the spear point of a billions year long cosmic process and that your learning of meaningful information is at the cutting edge of what the universe is doing. And I find that to be profoundly meaningful, which means that when you wake up every day and your meaning is just, oh, I got a nice car and I want to go make more money or something.

55:41Right. There's clearly more to what you could be doing with this, you know, life, this precious opportunity to be a part of that story. And then this brings in this this this additional element that I want to, you know, name, which is that. Yeah. At the end of the day, what is this all about? So what? Well, if we really take seriously that this whole long process is leading to this moment and we are kind of the inheritors of a complexification trend, I think there's a sense of responsibility there almost, right? There's a sense of responsibility of both taking seriously that the story of cosmic development and complexification has been leading to increasingly conscious beings that are able to relate in more higher levels of dimensionality and depth with each other.

56:29And to extend that process further, right, to to to keep growing and developing that the call towards wisdom and insight is that movement of the cosmos itself into its next moment, its next phase of complexity. And so without blaming or judging anyone who just wants to get up every day and eat some nice food and watch Netflix, there is a sense in which we are probably called for something higher than that. And the degree to which you can take into your can more of reality and become knowledgeable more of the universe, then you are a means by which the cosmos comes to know itself. And you are in a position to advance that in some way.

57:09And again, if there is a kernel of a deeper kind of calling here that this course would want to make real and alive for people, it's really grokking that. It's really inhabiting that. It's really getting that and then living that. And I don't know how you can live that and not feel that your life is incredibly meaningful at the end of the day. Oh, yeah. And, you know, you're pointing at something also which is really implied in what you said. but you know it's not just about like your personal experience of it right it's in a lot of ways independent of how you might feel in a particular moment you know I reminded of uh when I gave a talk uh in London a couple of years ago and I was talking about um parenthood right and because I think I'm borrowing John's sort of piece where at least when I was married to my ex-wife right like um the aspiration to be a dad was very much alive for me and i was sort of sharing this piece of the ways in which when um that relationship dissolved like i had to renegotiate my relationship to that particular aspiration because it was deeply meaningful for me and it drove a lot of life choices and i remember one lady um came to me after the talk and you know she was um sharing with me like you know it was actually really difficult when i i have three kids and like you know being a single mom that was really tough for me and you know it's not something that like i enjoyed at all like it was really tough and i don't i think you over romanticized the the call in a way to um to recognize something other than yourself as more important more significant and i sort of looked at her i went okay having shared all of that would you change any of it and she thought for a moment she went no right i think that it that that's you can read one way as i can't play a socratic cop out but on the other hand i think that's also an exemplification of i think what you're talking about which is in the grandest scheme of this one very courageous individual's life.

59:28Like, no, there is deep meaning and profundity in going through all of that, right? And could have possibly wanted to be any other way. So the reason I point that this is because, you know, of the subtitle that you added to the course, which we haven't quite touched on yet. And I want to, you know, kind of invite you to speak a little bit about this piece, which might not be able to exist within the institutions as we know them as such, which is the relationship between meaning-making processes and the sacred. And, you know, John's been talking a lot about the advent of the sacred as a proper response to the meaning crisis.

1:00:08And I'm wondering if, like, before we kind of close out this dialogue, if you could, you know, speak to whatever life that you desire, about the ways in which this kind of contributes to the larger conversation around the advent of the sacred and what that frame might be in the course. Yeah. So this is really big. I mean, one of the things that's directly related to all this, and it's sort of just a natural extension of it is not only in my own meaning crisis, which was a faith crisis, it was a religious crisis. Not only did that lead me to start thinking about meaning making as such, it got me thinking about what is the sacred?

1:00:59What, you know, it there there seemed to be a way in which it extended beyond any particular moment or way of thinking about it or a particular model or a particular tradition or something that there was there was something generalizable and even universal there in some way um and so as i began deeply studying meeting making and and these processes uh the way that i came to interpret what we mean by the sacred uh was a big part of that and i would basically put it like this so there's many many facets to this but it's something like because meaning is a kind of knowledge that links us to our world in a way that enhances our viability.

1:01:47That is a process that gets selected for in our evolutionary history. And therefore, it undergoes transformation and evolution. But what continuously makes it still the same thing, even though it's transforming, is that role that it's playing. How is this thing enhancing the strength, the fecundity, the flourishing of something in its context. All right. Now, deeply, I see that to be the essence of the sacred, that what we mean by the sacred, I'll put it this way, what the sacred does when properly related to is the enhancement of flourishing in the directionality of that cosmic groove towards development and widening and complexification.

1:02:38Um, I think the sacred, uh, when we encounter it, it's experience of awe. Um, and one of the things I draw on a lot to think about the sacred is its relationship to, to, uh, what we mean by wonder and awe. And I see that as a, uh, an encounter with the, the mystery of the fullness of reality, in a way that is coming at us in a manner we can't fully fit into our current meaning making frame right it's bigger it's bigger than our current meaning making frame we we made a little form for like what's most meaningful or what's most significant and then when we encounter something that is sort of like beyond our very ability you know to to cognize because of its sublimity and its transcendence we physiologically experience a thing and it's something neurological it's physiological, but it's a psychological moment of just open receptivity to this bigger thing that intuitively promises to transform you for the better, right?

1:03:47That by being able to accommodate yourself to this other thing out there, you can grow, you can increase, you can flourish more, you can expand more. And so I think that human beings have been having that experience for millennia for always. And what we've done is I think we've, we've tried to pass it on. We've tried to codify that, institutionalize it, give it to people like this, this is really important. This is really important, right? That's really what sacred things are. Even if you look at the anthropological literature, this thing's special, right? There's the sacred and the profane, the profane, the profane isn't bad.

1:04:24It's just not particularly special, but the sacred, you know, This thing is special. And over millennia of cultural evolution, people have been encountering that and that fullness of reality that they're trying then to to to put into culture, back into culture, into cultural knowledge so that when younger generations come through, they get that that tradition is handed to them. They are said, here are the potent symbols, right? You get initiated into your tribe or you get baptized into your religion, whatever it is, right? There's a sense in which this, we've all found this to be profoundly meaningful.

1:04:58Here you go, you know? And then what happens is that process continues to iterate. Individuals go through their developmental process. They learn, they grow. And in the process, they relate to reality and to their own symbols of the sacred in new and maybe more expansive ways. And so then you get people, you know, prophets and various sages and people who are trying to speak to the current best form of the sacred people have got and give it an update. And they're like, whoa, yeah, it's really cool. This like, you know, sacrifice that we've been doing of animals and the magic and all that. But like, what if you see, you know, that that's a symbol for, you know, something else?

1:05:40Or what if you see that if you sit with, you know, your internal experience long enough, then you generate an energy that we can read in terms of the ancient symbols or something. Right. So you wind up getting reinterpretations of the old and you wind up getting extensions of what had been sacred into new registers. And so, for example, it was really good for a long time for people to be like, hey, you're my tribe. Like, I love you. We're in this together. You're my kin. You're my friend. Right. And then that helps you that that that that shores you up. That enhances your flourishing, especially when there are other tribes out there, other groups of people who you don't know.

1:06:20You don't know what they want and they don't have your best interests at heart. Exactly. And so we can band together and we can kind of do our own thing. And it's us versus them. That's great. Like that's that kind of sacred brotherhood or bonding or whatever can be a powerful, meaningful and significant experience in that context. Now, if you try to take that mentality into a 21st century, you know, pluralistic city environment or something, and you're looking at everyone as a potential enemy or your sense of tribe or band has broken down because where are your kin or this sort of things, then that's a chaos.

1:06:54And so you actually have to update according to different social environments what's actually, in a sense, more meaningful. So the ability to go from like, hey, it's us versus the world to, hey, what if we're all somehow one big tribe? What if we're all somehow a common humanity or something? What if we were a bit more open to other ways and other ways of living in the world? These kinds of things. We can actually see that that's a widening. It's an enhancing. It's extending. Right. And so this is part of that developmental process. And what I'm getting at is that as this unfolds through history and as people learn and develop and they have new insights of a higher kind of order, they can put back into culture new ways of relating to what's ultimately valuable and significant.

1:07:43And so in that way, the sacred itself gets an update. And so what I'm really interested in my work is to not just look at meaning in a sense, but what's most meaningful of ultimate concern, which is the sacred. And how does that evolve and transform and complexify over time? And a big way that I'm really particularly interested in to try to vectorize this is using my background in biblical studies and my engagement with the Christian tradition specifically to chart that story as it relates to how people have related to God differently across the cosmic, uh, cultural evolutionary story, right? How does God go from, you know, maybe a particular kind of, of, uh, a warrior deity of some kind in its earliest manifestation, right.

1:08:29To, uh, to more of like a lawgiver, uh, for a people. And then from a, a people's lawgiver to like a universal transcendent being that's morally good to, you know, starting to evolve even beyond that into, you know, the universe itself and its deep laws and logos and order to it and so on and so forth to ultimately, you know, the vast mystery of reality itself that is an evolving process that we ourselves are an instantiation of and can identify as, right? So I think that there is a way in which the sacred complexifies, it develops, it evolves and God in our relationship to the divine, we can also track along this vector.

1:09:09And that's a big part of this course. So this will often be using sort of as case studies in the most significant way, how people sense of the sacred specifically and the divine and the holy and how these things have moved across cultural evolution. And this is amazing, right? I'm kind of blown away because this is something which, I really do agree that it's a massive claim, but I think more and more as we come to, especially if you've been doing the courses up till now, like Generations of Joy with Mark, Between East and West, which is John's course on Xenoplatonism, and then coming to matters over time, the notion that our relationship with the sacred and by extension the sacred itself is evolving.

1:10:02is depending on how you look at it, right? Can be an incredibly liberating notion. And at the same time, also deeply confronting because it confronts a, I think what you're pointing as a perennial presupposition that the sacred must be absolute and static. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's the ways in which we are relating with that which is perpetually beyond our experience, right? What we call the numinous really highlights this sense that no, the pluralism, this is borrowing from John Thadamano, right? The pluralism is a promise that, and this comes around to what you were talking about with postmodernism, that we're not just socially constructing God.

1:10:47I don't think that claim can stand anymore, right? But there has to be something at the ground of any and all relations that transcend relata, that transcend relations itself, the ground upon which that is also itself evolving. And this is really powerful that you're taking us through like a step by step from the deeply personal and individual into the psychological, into the sociological, into the history of it, right? All up to where we are now such that we can realize this as actually still happening. Yeah. And it sounds like there's one way which you could read this course as like absorbing information, but I think the way in which you're describing it is actually a kind of deep contemplation.

1:11:42Mm-hmm. Is that fair? Yes, 100%. I mean, there's a million things I'd want to say. I mean, as for the contemplation bit, there's a fascinating way where i i heard this once i'm not sure if the physics behind this is still the case but um according to relativity theory there's this idea of like if you were to just keep going out into space long enough you'd eventually see the back of your own head uh and i guess that has to deal with this curvature of space-time or something again not sure if that is physically true but uh that was a anecdote i used to hear but what i'm gesturing at there is that I think if you deepen enough into the study of meaning making and value and the sacred, you wind up looking at yourself and you're looking at yourself in enmeshed in those processes and as those processes, as a product of those processes and as the process itself.

1:12:39And so what I mean by that is that I think the widest layers, horizons of meaning making push us towards seeing ourselves as all of this unfolding and identifying with that. And I think that there's a deeply, as I said earlier, kind of a mystical insight there, you know, thou art that, right? Or, um, or the sense of the I am, or, um, you know, the insights of non-duality in Vedantan traditions. And I mean, pick what kind of, you know, mystical tradition you will. There's a sense of that, you know, the very eye by which God sees you is the, you know, the eye that you see God. Yeah. And so these deep insights, I think they gesture to something deeply akin, which is the fact that if we are the universe deepening along this trajectory and gaining through learning more knowledge, we are gaining self-knowledge.

1:13:41And so I think in the sense of contemplation as know thyself, you know, nothe sauton of deepening your own understanding. And when you see enough into your own nature, you will see actually insights into the highest levels of reality, some kind of promise of that nature. I think that that is what this kind of, again, it fully kind of taken on board leads to. So there's the invitation to do it in that way. Of course, you can't just take it this content you can learn but yes i think there's a deeply contemplative thing there i wanted also to speak to something which was originally i think the the the point of your earlier question about how all this relates to john's uh notion of the advent of the sacred and whatnot and and how this all ties into these broader things i mean understood in the way that you know that we're talking about there's clearly an urgency for uh a relationship a a connecting back a religio to the sacred in some deeply meaningful way.

1:14:37And I think this has been so much of the struggle for contemporary modern and late modern people is how do you do that? I think this is what John's work addresses in many ways, is like you somehow both have to have all this modern rational understanding of these deep mechanics and evolutionary processes, et cetera, but not get lost in just abstraction and left brain sort of analytics and kind of like to the point where it all just becomes, again, just a theory on paper, right? This ultimately is about being in the world and understanding those processes better for the purposes of wisdom and flourishing and all of that and philosophy, right?

1:15:11And so we seem to have a currently, largely in our cultural milieu, at least in many contexts of kind of Western industrial culture, post-industrial culture, severed that tie to the sacred in a profound way. And people are really struggling with that, understandably. That is a meaning crisis when you don't feel connected to something like this, when you don't have a sense of ultimate concern that you can ground yourself in. So there's a deeply important project before us collectively to re-home ourselves, to re-relate to a sacred basis of some kind, not in a kind of regressive reactionary, oh, we need to go back to something we lost, but precisely in the way that we need to move forward through this process and keep learning, keep growing and keep expanding what's at the leading edge of that sacred participation.

1:16:00And so when John, I think, talks about the, you know, inventio and that both discovery and invention, that's a part of this. And, you know, even going all the way back to his work when he was exploring the religion that's not a religion and certainly now what he's doing with the Silk Road, all these things, I think, are an effort to rehome us in relationship to the sacred in a way that is meaningful to us in the world today and that are part of, and I think this is the most ambitious claim and certainly one that's open to, you know, kinds of critique and skepticism. But I think that there's in its most bold attempt to be of service to the sacred, to be a kind of divine functionary, right?

1:16:40To almost fulfill a kind of priestly or even a prophetic role in contemporary society by You're trying to say there is a new movement of the sacred. There's a new next step that's unfolding. And how do we participate in that? Because that's going to be both profoundly meaningful for us, but it's also going to, believe me, tie you into something much greater than yourself. And if what you're doing is somehow, again, not just waking up every day and going to work and you're happy enough, but you get up every day to think about how do you extend the lightning of the divine into its next further branchings along its cosmic complexification vector.

1:17:17I mean, that's pretty profound, I think. And it feels very meaningful. So, again, many, many different kinds of ways people can feel comfortable entering into all of this discussion. But right now, we're, I think, really getting at the biggest evocations of what I'd like this course to kind of be. And it does certainly reach into a contemplative and even a bolder register. Wow, that's that's fire. And thank you for dovetailing with a lot of the work that John's been doing on seeing God again for the first time. It's also present in the book that he and I are writing together beyond and between, which funnily enough, you know, that quote that you were naming from my start, Eckhart does emerge.

1:18:04you know, the eye by which I behold God is the same eye by which God beholds me. And there is, I think in that, a deep profound connection with Tillich's notion of being. And so, okay, if I could, I will rename this course beings just being. And, and I think that's, that's something which is, it touches me deeply in that sense of, what is it to be in the world again? Not because we've been ontologically severed from it, but we might have forgotten that we already are. And I think there's a reclamation of that relationship, which is fundamentally important for the ways in which we move forward in our culture, but also evolutionarily as a species.

1:18:52So with all of that said, I want to just thank you so much for coming on doing this cause it's a pleasure to have you on the platform it really really is I think you're you're filling a gap um which for at least as somebody who tends to lean towards abstraction um even just in this conversation alone like has really softened something for me um and I am also going through a kind of uh spiritual uh reconciliation let's call it that on reconciliation and remembering. So personally, thank you. And on behalf of the entire team, John as well, I'm sure would be happy to thank you for the time that you're spending.

1:19:35If you are interested in everything that you've heard from Brendan so far, please go down to the course page. It's in the show notes. The course is called Matters Over Time. And you will be able to see the course curriculum, a kind of summary of the argument that we've been engaging in thus far. I really hope that you'll join us on matters over time. Any last word, Brandon, before we close? Yeah, just real quick, I'll say a huge thanks again. I'm deeply honored to be doing this course on this platform. John has been really influential for me in many, many ways, as I know he's been for so many people, and what the lectern has become and what his work has become and everything, and you're a deep part of that.

1:20:20It's a really significant contribution. And so I feel deeply honored to be doing this course here. The other thing I guess maybe I'll just end on as a kind of deflationary note is that this is certainly a big course, right, in many ways. And it makes big, bold claims. And it's, I guess, you could even say demanding in the sense of some of the things it would want people to sink into in terms of the material. But it's also a learning process at which people are really invited to engage that at the degree that they're comfortable with. And to and this is the point I wanted to emphasize, appreciate that this is also a learning process for me and that in in good learning processes, there's an openness and there's an epistemic humility.

1:21:08And so after saying all these big things, I also want to just say, and maybe that's not true. And, and maybe, you know, we can rethink this in radically different ways. So I want, I want that to be there because I don't, I don't present this material as a way of being like, ah, we've got it. And this is the whole big story. You just got to sign on or whatever it is. It should be both a process of dialogos, a working through together and and something that is open. And it's a it's a it's open for improvement, certainly. Right. I mean, that's the whole point. But skepticism, critical thinking and problematization of all kinds.

1:21:50So I just wanted to throw that qualification on all of this, because I don't think it would be doing justice to the bigger mystery if we felt like, you know, we could put a neat bow on everything. So I wanted to say that. I really hope people find this interesting and sign up for the course and would love to engage with people on this material in July and August. absolutely and there is in that already an exemplification of your character as a teacher who's really inviting people into uh self-correcting the course like the course cohort self-corrects and of course it will get better and that's kind of the point so thank you very very much brendan thank you everybody for watching much love and we'll see you on the lectern ciao everybody bye

1:22:44Thank you.

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