From Flow to Mystical Experience

31:40But what is being destabilized and reorganized, it's not necessarily the representational matrix. That's one way of understanding it. But from an inactive perspective, from complex systems perspective, we can also understand that the system itself, however understood it can be the mind or the personal system or the patterns of sensemaking or relevance realization, are themselves being broken down. And the system is kind of organizing into a more viable pattern or more adaptive pattern that fit the context in a more, again, optimal grip that can optimally grip the context in a more adaptive manner.

32:26And that expresses itself as the experience of insight. And here we draw from existing work such as like like Steven and Dixon's work, showing how people, that these inside processes can be tracked during certain gear turning tasks and can be quantified using entropy. And entropy is, yeah, it's just one of the measures that can help us quantify the process of complexification, the process of destabilization and reorganization, that when there is destabilization, when the constraints are loosened, when there is a disorder, there is greater entropy. And then as the system reorganizes itself and there are new constraints that are being formed, then there is a new order that is being established.

33:17So then insight instantiate or implies a sort of kind of successful entropy minimization that increase in entropy necessarily follows or should follow a decrease in entropy for a successful reorganization.

33:34Dr. John Vervaeke:So to use Tobolinsky in Reber's language, it's kind of a fluency spike, right? It's a fluency spike, exactly. It's a fluency spike. And yeah, so, you know, we, again, like kind of showing that fluency is indeed that this kind of domain general attunement process and insight is very much that spike in fluency that is being more global. um and uh yeah this also aligns with the uh the current literature of insight on insight um in many ways um so yeah i think that's that's pretty much on inside yeah um and again one thing that we point on and we can point uh touch on this later on um you know some people will think Well, insight, you know, I would understand insight.

34:27What about emotional breakthroughs or therapeutic breakthroughs? That's a pretty global insight. And we acknowledge that insights are relatively local in some ways, but they can also be part of more global phenomena, such as mystical experiences that can be very much global, that can be very much systemic in that sense, that can inform, that can include our sense of ourself our sense of world and it can be world shifting in that way so it's not necessarily this um this only kind of localized phenomena but it can also be instantiated in terms of like more

35:05Dr. John Vervaeke:global uh global phenomena yeah and then yeah instead of just solving a single problem uh you can solve a like this is a piagetian notion there might be a systematic relationship between sets of problems and you can get an insight into an entire set of problems and that systematic insight would be much closer to kind of a kind of developmental change in the person rather than just solving the nine dot problem or the multiple marriage problem or something like that exactly exactly there's a problem with um the i mean it's not a problem it it is it's a it's a feature not a bug but it can become a bug that we often have to study insight by giving people very local specific problems that we have.

35:47Dr. John Vervaeke:Right. Right. But, and that's not how they're generally experienced. Uh, just, just to be clear, we, we address that tension. Please continue Hussein, this is going great. So we're, we're into, we're, we've, we're passing from insight now into maybe flow. Yeah. Yeah. And, of course, flow is, uh, again, uh, people familiar with your work, John will be familiar with flow, first introduced or popularized by the Hungarian psychologist, Sig Szent Mihaly, that is referred to as kind of the optimal experience, where very popular in sports psychology, you know, people refer to it as being in the zone.

36:29They feel this kind of effortlessness, this action awareness merger, being one with the task at hand, this kind of critical, nagging self-narrative quietens down and you're just in the moment. So, you know, people, it's a universal experience. I'm sure that everyone at some point in their lives had this experience, you know, playing a sport or listening to music or playing music, again, very kind of domain general. And you already in the past,

37:03Dr. John Vervaeke:uh i can't remember your uh co-authors uh and and and herr bennett um yes herr bennett yeah yeah uh from um yes flow is spontaneous thought 2018 yeah 2018 yes uh so in that paper you already i think very in a very compelling way make the case uh for flow being an inside cascade yes it's a chain of insights. And we very much make use of that and already kind of understand insight to be kind of extending, sort of understand flow to extending these same processes, these same fundamental processes that are being instantiated in insight and kind of making it more global and more temporally extended in a state.

37:55So it's a series of just aha, aha, aha. And then like, you know, like simple and you make this, give this example very often, like kind of bouldering, right? Bouldering, if we understand bouldering of like series of like problem solving, just like, you know, how do I approach this little rock here? How do I place my hand? And then the solutions just come to us and we just keep flowing, right? In this. So, yeah, we understand flow in these terms of like this inside cascade of globalized insight. And we also draw some parallels to the existing work by, I think, the first author is Yeleb Brownberg with Julian Kiverstein and Eric Rietveld being other authors, where they're not really touching on flow in that paper, but they developed this very much grounded in ecological psychology, but drawing from complex systems, the inactive approach, they developed this understanding of metastable attunement.

38:58Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which ultimately goes back to the work by Kelso and others on metastability. Yes, by Scott Kelso on metastability. And again, for people that are not familiar, metastability, very much Scott Kelso from the dynamic systems perspective is a term that refers to this in-between state of seemingly being stable, but being able to move to a different attractor, kind of move along the trajectory space, if you may, or phase space with the smallest perturbation. And we kind of draw these parallels and actually make the case, if I may say so myself, quite convincingly that we can indeed understand flow in terms of meta-stable attunement as well.

39:47Because, yeah, like really the nature of it being this kind of inside cascade, this effortlessness comes from being this kind of meta-stably attuned or charged state that without the smallest perturbation, people in a very flexible way can adapt to the context in an optimal manner.

40:14Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, sparring comes to mind. Sparring, yes. And part of what we're arguing is this proposal allows to account for some of the central features, especially phenomenological features, which is super salience, which is like the flash of an insight but extended, ongoing sense of discovery which is exactly what you have in insight and this uh sense of participation you don't make an insight you don't just you know that you don't receive you sort of participate in an insight so these three phenomenological features of flow which are dominant the at one mint the discovery the super salience are well explained by regarding flow as an insight cascade showing meta meta stable attunement yes very much so very much so yes uh and uh yeah we'll touch on phenomenology also later on i'm kind of going like kind of chronologically or like in order of like the organization of the paper in some ways but of course you should i think what you're doing right now and you know we're amplifying it along the way because i'm trying to make sure it connects to a more more broader uh set of students is you're basically you're going through the continuum and i think just continue doing that yes uh so after flow uh we finally arrive uh mystical experiences uh which is yeah again like considering the origin of the paper and uh that the paper is in fact a part of a special issue on mystical entropy uh we couldn't uh you know write a paper without touching on on mystical experiences.

41:52And so mystical experiences is the most global in terms of states. We, again, we, after, in the later versions, as we revise the paper, we kind of like touch on transformative experiences and we can talk about that in a bit. But yeah, we finally arrived to mystical experiences. and here we make use of the existing literature on on psychedelic neuroimaging and we kind of we we make the caveat and say that like not all psychedelic experiences are mystical experiences and vice versa and vice versa of course mystical experiences can be can be brought about through other means contemplative practices or spontaneously or ecstatic dance or yeah you know all kinds of stuff um but uh assuming that psychedelic experiences especially the ones reported the ones that are phenomenologically quite uh memorable and meaningful and intense and also potentially transformative are uh indeed uh can be understood to be mystical experiences, both phenomenologically and also from when we look at their third level, kind of third person analysis, specifically the neural data.

43:20And here we draw parallels from the Rebus model, from the kind of extension of the Rebus model, which is called the Albus model, altered beliefs under psychedelic states that kind of extends the rebus model and says, not necessarily the case that psychedelics leads to relaxed beliefs, but it depends on the context and the beliefs can be relaxed or reinforced, which very much aligns with our emphasis on context dependency on this kind of relational ontology, broadly understood. And yeah, we drove from the existing neuroimaging work that shows psychedelic induced mystical experiences to lead to states that can be characterized in terms of increased entropy, increase self-organized, that pushes the firing patterns of neural assemblies to criticality.

44:29So again, this is, I think, to some extent aligned with the entropy brain hypothesis that our normal day-to-day kind of waking consciousness tries to find this kind of sweet spot between low entropy states that are very kind of orderly and predictable, and they don't have the capacity to carry too much information. But then if you have too much disorder, too much entropy, then it's too organized and there is no intelligible order that can arise of it. So complex adaptive systems tend to organize themselves and tune towards this criticality in a very adaptive manner. And as you make this case, John, as well, as they fire in criticality, they also tend to wire in small world ways.

45:18Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah, small world networks, yeah. Yes, and in the paper, we don't really explicitly touch on small worlds. Some of my work is about that as well. But so we make use of this existing literature on psychedelic neuroimaging and the phenomenology of mystical experiences And we make the case that we can fairly kind of understand or conceptualize these experiences in terms of a globally enhanced capacity for relevance realization. That these same processes of complexification, destabilization, and reorganization is being extended even more globally. And hence, this global kind of nature of it also makes it so transformative, potentially, given the right kind of context.

46:14Dr. John Vervaeke:So you're kind of flowing at the level of what Daniel was talking about earlier, the fundamental interpenetration, irreducibility, but inseparability of self and world. You're flowing at that most fundamental level, which has the broadest reach of sort of the deepest, the depth of yourself to the depth of the world. Exactly. Exactly. That's the scope. The complexification has given emergent functions of optimal gripping at that very comprehensive level. yes and i think in the first version we even included this kind of meta optimal gripping uh but then we we realized okay maybe there's too much meta yeah it's it's kind of getting out of hand so maybe like we can leave this out but i think it's still fair to refer to it as like meta optimal gripping or even like a meta flow it's flowing at this meta level flowing at this global level of sort yeah and there's a couple connections there uh you know so meta optimal grip is you're trying to find this ultimate this not ultimate sorry this sort of uh sweet spot between all your potential optimal grips uh that you might have in particular so it's not at the level of solving a problem and that's the it's at the level of meta problem solving uh yes it's about the it's about the skill of problem solving itself to sort of say yeah and then that that lines up with sort of work on uh psychedelics and mystical experiences as pivotal mental states.

47:48Dr. John Vervaeke:This is Zach Brooks' work and others, right? And, you know, Patrick McNamara, who I'm going to be recording with, we've hit it off also. And the idea of de-centering and that these states are states of evolvability. These states have an evolutionary function of allowing us massive, rapid transformation that might be needed in an extremely volatile environment. And so there's potential connections that way. I think what you're bringing out, and I want to give Hussein and Daniel the full credit for this, like the amount of evidence and theoretical argument that was brought to bear in this powerfully convergent manner.

48:37Dr. John Vervaeke:I mean, it's just, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm one of the authors, so it's self-congruent. I was one of the authors, but I'm standing outside and saying, this is excellent. This is excellent. The plausibility of this paper in terms of the, just the amount of empirical evidence, the amount of converging theoretical argument, the deep bridge building between phenomenology and functionality. I mean, these are the things that I think it's becoming apparent. I can see you, Hussain, you're struggling. like you're thinking of, I could be saying 17 things right now or citing 30, like many of our points have multiple, multiple citations backing them.

49:19Dr. John Vervaeke:And so you wove things very well. I want to now give Daniel a chance to see if there's anything he wants to add at this point. Maybe one addition about the point regarding kind of the meta-optimal grip, like what is so special about the mystical experiences. It's a kind of flow that is going beyond just the flow in the sense that it's ultimately very reflexive. So reflexive in the sense that it's kind of an undoing and the redoing of the most fundamental structuring of our experiences in the sense like the structuring into subject and object like what is what is below that there's basically that's the kind of first thing that comes in the process of connection it feels.

50:20So reflexively recognizing that and reflexively also undoing it and allowing it to fall away and kind of reorganize and that doing it and doing that in a from moment to moment to moment to moment, even though that happens so fast, that is kind of a special aspect of mystical experiences, even though I don't really like that term still, I must confess.

50:46Dr. John Vervaeke:But the term mystical experience. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, welcome to psychology. Right. Yeah. Right. I've bound to terms that I mean, I'm, you know, I have to do video essays about reformulating the mindfulness construct wisdom. I've done one now on the meaning in life construct. So, yeah, I hear you. Now, there's a couple of things. First of all, the connection. I just want to give due credit. there's a providence here and I'm aware of it and it did influence me so I want to give credit where credit's due. Stephen Batchelor in his book, Alone with Others, explained enlightenment as this kind of comprehensive flow state.

51:27Dr. John Vervaeke:That's how he understood the Buddha's experience. So I want to just, and he was, I think he was doing something that very converging with us because his existential approach is very, it's very transjective in nature because he's talking about like these connective modes. So, but I just want to give credit to Stephen. He proposed that. It's a very clear thesis in Alone with Others. The other thing is I wanted to bring in something that, you know, we've talked about here and there. We don't expressively, at least focally bring it up in the paper, but it's, so I was at, I was at his end monastery, United States, Maple Academy.

52:10Dr. John Vervaeke:I was talking to the monks and I was talking about some of this work. This was a while ago. And then they, and then in dialogue, because they were sort of pushing back, but the way Zen monks would push back. And then I was pushing back and they're pushed back as John Brevake is wont to do. And what came out of it was sort of an insight that I've been working with and I brought it into some of the courses, which is the idea that, and it picks up on some of the ideas around Satori and also aspects in Taoism, that relevance realization can come to a state where it realizes its own irrelevance. So it's not a content-driven judgment about this is irrelevant.

52:56Dr. John Vervaeke:It's that, and this goes to Murdoch's notion of sensibility transcendence. No, no, no. This attempt to do relevance realization is itself the thing that is irrelevant in the sense of blocking me. And the idea is that relevance realization is good for all the beings, all the individual things and all the complex systems they might form. But being, capital B, that, you know, being in the Heideggerian sense is not something that should be grasped by relevance realization. but instead by the release, the active realization, active release from relevance, realization. I wanted to know what you thought about that, because it seems like this lines up with a lot of the literature, that the fundamental challenge when trying to understand being, or maybe the better word is apprehend being rather than comprehend being, is that one has to give up all of the processing that is normally used for how we think about individualized substantial things or beings.

54:04Dr. John Vervaeke:I wanted to know what you thought about that as an idea. So we're taking it out of what we were trying to focus on in the paper, which is, you know, the neuroscience, the functionality, the phenomenology. Now I'm trying to bridge it out into sort of, you know, Heideggerian, post-Heideggerian philosophy. This, you know, to not make the fundamental mistake of trying to apprehend being the way you comprehend beings i wanted to know what you might think of that yeah you want to go with any war yeah sure unless you have a very urgent thought no no no i can i can wait and maybe i'll like formulate my thoughts better great um Yeah, I think what you just said feels very resonating with me.

54:54Also, the argument is very convergent with the argument that I made in the paper that is called Knowing Groundlessness and an active approach to the shift from sense-making to non-dual awareness or something like that. Yes. Where I argued basically that for a moment of knowing groundlessness or for knowing shunyata, for experiencing reflexively and non-dually. One way to do it requires actually sense-making to stop, to vanish for a moment temporarily. It can be helpful. So sense-making is basically from an inactive perspective, is bringing forth worlds, is kind of also So approaching and avoiding is based on that.

55:43And in that sense, as we already said earlier, sense making and relevance realization are very convergent or basically synonymous even in this context. We could say, well, relevance realization needs to vanish for a moment. You cannot grasp all that. You cannot make sense of this in a habitual way. You need to kind of fall into that experiencing without making sense of it, without kind of grasping after it, without approaching it, without trying to achieve it. And also in other traditions, for example, in Mahamudra or Dzogchen practices, I kind of compared what I'm just saying right now to also Mahamudra practice in another paper called Knowing the Knowing from 2022.

56:29There is also a similar account where effortlessness is so critical. effortlessness is required you cannot make your mind towards it you cannot cognize it in the habitual way so letting go is extremely important and also in the psychedelic world psychedelic experiences um i also did a little bit of work um is of course acceptance is a big term and also in psychotherapy and and so on acceptance acceptance acceptance why because usually the things that stand in the way are the things that we're grasping after, right? Like the problems that we are having are actually our common solutions. So the solutions that we usually use, the kind way we make sense of the world, the way we cognize has become part of our problem, has become a reason why we suffer.

57:23So we need to let go of our habitual solution. We need to become effortless for what you know and whether we can try that trying not to try there are different strategies but one is to let go and to accept and and to your point these the

57:43Dr. John Vervaeke:most tried and true are the ones we are going to most identify with and how we're going to most identify the world that's that self world and we're trying to destabilize that um right so this This reminds me of a recent conversation I had with William Desmond where he talks about astonishment and over-determinacy. Not indeterminacy or determinacy, but over-determinacy. Where what you're doing is not trying to render anything determinate. You're not flummoxing around in indeterminacy. What you're getting is the combinatorial explosive over-determinacy of the inexhaustibleness of being. Right? Yeah.

58:24Yeah, really well said also, Daniel. Yeah, that was beautiful. Yeah, I think that really like we are kind of in the domain of like the 4P paper now, like what we've been talking about in the 4P paper. So also in response to what John said, like a paper that we cite in the 4P paper is Hannah DeJager's paper, who is an inactive philosopher, a theorist, called, I think it's Inactive Knowing, or Knowing and Loving, or something like that, Engaged Knowing, I can't remember the title of it. But she very much makes the case of this kind of finding the middle ground between like uh under determining uh and um and kind of over determining and and letting be of sort yeah

59:24Dr. John Vervaeke:i just i just want to make clear that william desmond by over determination doesn't mean yes yeah no no exactly he yeah i don't like the term and other people don't like it dan chappian i don't like it uh he i i think super determinacy or or superlative he needs a he needs he needs something that points to the inexhaustible abundance inexhaustible right like you can't accommodate for you can't account for you can't grasp it in its entirety and you will lose you will lose the reality and the corresponding state of astonishment as soon as you take up the task of determination That's the main point he's trying to make.

1:00:03Dr. John Vervaeke:As soon as you do this, you will lose this fundamental feature of reality and the state that is most appropriate to recognizing it. That's his point. That's his point. Yeah. But I don't want to go into the 4P paper yet because I want to talk about a little bit about transformative experience. Yes, please. Yeah. um so uh i mean so there's there's a general thesis and um i'm trying to remember some of our citations please forgive me you guys are closer to that the minutiae of the paper the details of the paper that i am um but the idea that i mean i believe yaden talks about this and other people that having a mystical yeah is it necessarily a transformative experience in that people can have mystical experiences and then they're not properly taken up.

1:01:00Dr. John Vervaeke:And the idea here is I want to bring this in because there's a sense in which this is getting into that existential mode that Stephen Batchelor was talking about. There seems to be something more needed for this to be something that results in a fundamental transformative experience that brings about a different being, a different seeing, a different set of, like when the person, like it's talked about in the noetic quality paper, Yadin et al., where they undertake this dramatic transformation of everything in order to come into a more continuous conformity or contact with that really real. And so if you two could talk a little bit about, you know, What's this added thing that might take up, if that's the right verb, I don't know, might take up a mystical experience into a transformative experience?

1:01:53um yeah um maybe uh just briefly one thing that i want to touch on uh that that was also like i think a um a helpful and interesting contribution that we made in the paper uh was bringing a little bit of um nuance to the notion of self-transcendent uh experiences that's good this is perhaps

1:02:20Dr. John Vervaeke:relevant to the point i think it's relevant yeah yeah um and it's relevant to yeah it's like this kind of like being mode and this existential reorientation and we make use of this work in uh in the 4p paper as well uh where we uh make use of hans jonas's uh kind of philosophy of life phenomenology of life um and he uh in the phenomenon of life he frequently talks about how indeed life, as I referred to earlier, seems to always kind of go back and forth between like kind of withdrawing and drawing its boundaries and making itself distinct from the world, but always going beyond itself and beyond its horizon and transcending itself to open itself up to its environment, to maintain its material existence.

1:03:15Dr. John Vervaeke:He calls it needful freedom. He calls it needful freedom, right. And I want to talk to you later. I think there's a continuum between needful freedom, the either arbitrary nor algorithmic nature of relevance realization, and the voluntary necessity that Frankfurt puts at the heart of love and sort of notion of it's compelling but not compulsive that's at the heart of reason because i think there's another kind of continuum in terms of this sense of how how strongly we feel called i'm trying to come up with a like because it's like that we're called into it we're not we're not forced um so i i think that's important too i um um but anyways go back to the hans jonas and the self-transcendence?

1:04:06So this is, we call this self-transcendence broadly. And self-transcendence is universal to life. The way life is organized, its autonomous organization necessarily implies a form of self-transcendence, that it must always transcend its current organization and kind of orient itself to a future horizon in a kind of anticipatory way to maintain its material existence, the continuation of its existence. And then, yeah.

1:04:40Dr. John Vervaeke:I just want to say, I mean, that seems to follow from our argument that cognition is inherently complexifying, and complexification gives you emergent new functions. Very much so. And so it's possible for cognitive complexification, if it's coupled to reality, that it can complexify to get a new emergent functions that then allow it to handle more complexity in the environment. And that is an open-ended process. Yes. Yes. Yes, exactly. And then we kind of move along the continuum of complexification, if you may. And we arrive into multicellular organisms, into animals. And already, yeah, we make use of the existing literature, the existing work to show that animals do display really new forms of behavior, new capacity for flexibility, new capacity for evolvability in many ways.

1:05:42And this implies a sort of, yeah, a greater capacity for self-transcendence. And then we make use of the existing literature on, I think, convincingly demonstrating fluency and insight in non-human animals.

1:06:00Dr. John Vervaeke:Yes, yes, yes. Whether through play in kind of developing young animals or tool use that is very common predominantly in social animals. We kind of show that, okay, like clearly non-human animals are also capable, but they're not quite self-transcendent experiences. There is a distinction between fluency and insights, both kind of co-ocatively organizationally, but also phenomenologically. So then we coined the term peri-self-transcendent phenomena. Peri as in it precedes, it provides the necessary grounds for self-transcendent experiences to emerge, but it also can follow self-transcendent experiences, right?

1:06:44Can insight and fluency emerges from flow experiences, it emerges from mystical experiences, right? We talked about systemic insight. So then we make this distinction of peri-self-transcendent. And then we make this claim drawing from existential phenomenology, but specifically, again, Seneca Dehan's work in active psychiatry, where she makes this distinction between basic sensemaking, which is universal to all life, and existentialized sensemaking, which is universal, which is unique to persons, as she calls it. She doesn't make the case that only humans are persons, neither do we. But to be a person, to have this capacity for existentialized sensemaking, we need to go through a sufficient level of socialization.

1:07:30And we draw from Vygotsky and his theory of socialization where – and his name is eluding me – social psychologist that does a lot of work on like comparative psychology in primates, ultra-social animals.

1:07:49Dr. John Vervaeke:Francois? No, no, not him. No, no, it's fine. I can't remember. Anyway, it's fine. But yeah, we drove from multiple sources of relevant literature. And we make the case that to be able to kind of have these self-transcendent experiences, which is very central to transformation, we need to have this kind of capacity for existentialized sensemaking. And that implies a kind of metacognitive capacity. That's right. that we know that we know, we can make sense of our own sensemaking, but it doesn't have to be necessarily explicit. Existentialized mean that it transforms our entire sensemaking, that any act that we do, it's intrinsically existential, right?

1:08:39Like the, for example, food, the food is no longer just about sustenance, right? Sex is no longer only about reproduction. And the possibility of suicide emerges, for example, that goes beyond these kind of basic sense-making and biological imperatives and survival. So then we make the case that this is the capacity for self-transcendent experiences, flow, mystical experiences, self-transcendent emotions such as love, gratitude, wonder, awe, which are very central to transformation. So transformation can emerge from or can follow any of these self-transcendent experiences, given that they're relatively global.

1:09:26Because I wouldn't say that like an insight about a single problem, right, about mathematics, wouldn't really lead to transformation. It requires something more systemic, something more global.

1:09:36Dr. John Vervaeke:Like a psychotherapeutic insight. Like a psychotherapeutic insight, a relational kind of interpersonal insight, a breakthrough of sort. But we draw from the existing work, as you mentioned, Yadin's work, Newberg's work, Pivotal Mental States, kind of quantum leap, early work on quantum leap, that there are certain change and transformation processes that are more gradual and progressive, but then there are others that are very discontinuous and sudden, that kind of entails a qualitative shift of sorts. and this the latter one is the one that is often associated with self-transcendent experiences especially mystical experiences yes um that was very well done hussein that was very well done thank you thank you i appreciate it was a bit too much but no no no that was well done thank you i appreciate um so we drawing from our um our kind of theoretical foundations that we built earlier in the paper, organizational causality, inactive approach, relevance, realization that cognition is intrinsically context dependent, that this brings in for self-transcendent experiences and transformative experiences, the crucial importance of context.

1:11:02Yeah. That it's not necessary to just destabilize the organization of someone's mind and then expect that the transformation arises and it's a virtuous transformation and it's for the better. Not necessarily. We can already see this. We have been seeing this for millennia, but maybe more in a more kind of systematic way, you know, like in the 60s with the first wave of psychedelic research. that these states are transformative because of the destabilization that they entail a sort of vulnerability. We use the notion of epistemic vulnerability. That's not ours. I can't remember the name of the first author.

1:11:46We draw it from him. But that vulnerability is intrinsically a double-edged sword, right? So the contextual constraints that is available to a person as they're going through the state, the context that they're embedded in, and that entails setting and set, the expectations, the personal history, the dispositions that one might have, the family history of psychosis, on and on and on. All of this comes into play that would guide both the quality of the experience as it unfolds, but also the potential trajectory that the reorganization might take after the acute experience subsides. So the trajectory can go a transformative direction or a dark transformation, as is referred to in the transformative learning circles.

1:12:41So it's very much about, you know, like you have this experience, but then the real work starts then. Right. That's why, like in psychedelic research, this is referred to as integration. you know practices coming to you know ecologies of practices as you like to to to refer to ethical frameworks are very important that's why like for example will it be britain and and jared landall's work of like the dark side of mindfulness that you know take mindfulness out of the context and then you go to a retreat in the u.s and then just destabilizing practices Just break down the organization. And then people experience depersonalization and derealization and psychosis.

1:13:23And it's their surprise because we always think, oh, mindfulness, it has to be necessarily good, right? It has to lead to transformation, not by itself. like the the the the you know more conventional buddhist frameworks knew this right that's why there was always the dharma and the sangha uh and the the the you know the eight uh um spoke wheel um so um yeah like this shows that like for transformation to to arise context is very much crucial uh and uh yeah i i would add to that and this goes is the work i'm doing with zach and

1:14:01Dr. John Vervaeke:some other paper the states of epistemic vulnerability which are the pivotal mental states are also states of extreme suggestibility yes emerging evidence for this so you need setting you also need a sapiential system you need a sacred story you you you you need you need a lot around this exactly you need you you need uh you know you need relevantly internalizable role models the literature is emerging about i mean i'm going to speak a little bit uh provocatively here but basically you need something like a religion wrapped around these experiences if you want to you know really um because that's where we have traditionally found all these things yeah and given and given wins work on traditions and traditions as long-term experiments across generations um we've got you know um yeah that the and the what that our attempt to secularize them and commodify these experiences which by the way gets some reinforcement from the neurocentric approach very much right um is something we're also at a cross at a cultural level we're criticizing that uh we're saying that that this is i mean you you cite willoughby Britain's work, you know, this is like, there's a degree of unethical irresponsibility in this formulation.

1:15:25Dr. John Vervaeke:I'm not accusing anybody of being malicious. I'm not doing that. But I'm saying there are consequences of trying to have a context independent modeling of this that actually do not properly understand how an experience can go into a transformative path, trajectory, or can go into The same in terms of the biological markers, that's all I'm talking about, can go down a deeply pathological path. I just wanted to bring that out because I think this is very important. And I think our work gives a counterbalancing scientific and phenomenological framework for counteracting those, I think, toxic potential consequences of the framing we're criticizing.

1:16:18Dr. John Vervaeke:I hope so. Again, I'm not attributing malicious intent to Robin Carhart-Harris or anything like that. No, of course not. But I'm saying that this framework leads to that. It has that real potential in it. Yeah. Go ahead. To his defense, him and his collaborators very frequently talk about the importance of context. There is a 2018 paper that very much is all about the essential importance of context. But I also agree with you that, yeah, like this overemphasis and reification of certain neurological markers or neurodynamic markers runs the risk of kind of simplifying and taking away from the importance of context.

1:17:00Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, and thank you for making it clear because you've altered my point that I don't accuse him. I think there is a sense of responsibility. But I think the ethical issues are not properly thematized in the fundamental ontology of the framework. We're trying to close that gap, I think, in a very important way. I hope so. Yeah. I hope so. I think it helps to do that. I think so too. And yeah, like, yeah, in the paper, as you mentioned, like, in addition to Willoughby and Britten's work, we touch on like, false fluency and false insight and suggestibility. And of course, depersonalization and derealization, again, going from local to global, right?

1:17:44You get this false insight, and then like, oops, I was mistaken. But then at the global level, that mistake is that like, you know, spiritual materialism or spiritual bypassing or spiritual narcissism or psychosis. So again, like these sapiential frameworks, these ecologism practices are just fundamental to transformation.

1:18:06Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, I think these periods of vulnerability and extra susceptibility, if I could put it that way, are ones that are particularly prone to being parasitized by parasitic processing. Because basically you've removed a lot of constraints and the self-organizing and sort of deeply entrenched biases are going to be the ones that probably plausibly remain in place. And so, and you see this, and I think we have a metaphor for people being overtaken by powerful parasitic processing. And we talk about people going down a rabbit hole. Yes. It has the reciprocal narrowing imagery in it. Yeah. Yeah, and I think I am concerned the degree to which people talking about mystical experiences are not interdisciplinary enough.

1:19:02Dr. John Vervaeke:They're not paying attention. I mean, nobody can do it because everybody's got something to say if Hegel's right. But we're trying to get the phenomenologists, the people who do religious studies, the psychologists, the neuroscientists, the cognitive scientists to all talk to each other a lot more to try and mitigate against this. I have always been opposed to the presentation of mindfulness as just a panacea good. And I'm also deeply opposed to the presentation of psychedelic experience as a panacea good. These are very dangerous propositions. Very much so. They are immoral in that they can cause significant amounts of suffering.

1:19:53Dr. John Vervaeke:So I want to point out that I'm going to point this out because I don't think it's just an, I don't think our paper is just epistemically significant, which I think it is. I think it's ethically significant. I felt that one of the things we were doing was helping to address this concern that I've always voiced. I wanted to thank the both of you for making that possible. Thanks, Shibu. We appreciate that. All right. I think maybe what we'll do is we're sort of at our time limit. We poked on the 4P paper, but I'm going to propose the two of you come back and the paper's in revision. And so it's reasonable to believe we're going to get it published.

1:20:35Dr. John Vervaeke:Notice what I said.

1:20:39Dr. John Vervaeke:but why don't you two come back when the 4p paper is published sure and we'll do this again and then maybe by that time we'll have another paper in the works and we can just keep doing this we can have a cascade of appearances for you to come in and I do want to mention some of you might have seen the preprint Daniel and Hussain in the 4P paper have also engaged in a significant critique not just criticism but a critique, a reformulation of the 4Ps which I think has been excellent and I'm wholeheartedly behind that and it meshes with it actually allows the 4P paper the 4P theory of knowing the four kinds of knowing as Hussein alluded to, to integrate much better with the cognitive continuum.

1:21:37Dr. John Vervaeke:And I think that that's wonderful. So I want to, we're going to end here, but I want to give, let's do it this order. Daniel first, any, like anything that is nagging you, I wanted to say this or anything that you want to put on the table. And then Hussein, and I just wanted to, my end thing before i say goodbye to everybody is just thank the two of you uh it's it's wonderful like i said uh you two uh a teacher wants to and i mean this as a compliment i hope it comes teacher wants to see their students surpassing them and you two are doing it with my work i really appreciate it thanks sir that means a lot

1:22:26Well, yeah, taking it from here, one thing that came to mind is, back to the question, are mystical experiences transformative, positively, negatively? Are psychedelic experiences positively, negatively transformative? Same for mindfulness and other meditative practices? The answer is, it depends, right? It's all about the context. It's all about whatever happens. Every perturbation is structure determined, is context dependent, is observer relative. So with that in mind, it's important to keep an eye on all the other factors that are in place too. It's not just one thing. It's not just the brain that makes any experience.

1:23:17It's not just the drug, maybe in psychedelic experience. It is not just mindfulness that does something. It is the whole context around it. And when we are wondering, okay, will this be having a positive, transformative experience in my life? Then I think it's very worth looking at all the other things that you do in your life that you do before, that you do after, that you do during. and the intentions that you said. And I think that's something that is so obvious, but at the same time, so easy also to forget, right? And to think it just needs this one thing. No, it needs, I mean, the problem that we are trying to face is something habitual.

1:24:07Something habitual to change just in a split second is dangerous i mean you might be very lucky but you might also not be very lucky so it's important to have a context that kind of steers it into the right direction that's all that came to mind excellent hussein um yeah that was that was really nice um maybe i can kind of on a similar vein apply these principles or practices to the practice of science itself. I think what I'm the most proud of with this paper and with the 4P paper and like the work that we are currently doing with Daniel and hope to do is this reflexivity that just having this ongoing awareness that as researchers, what we're doing is enacting.

1:25:03We are participating with each other, with the participants taking part in our research, with the broader society, and we are bringing forth worlds together. And this brings the ethical importance of the ethical import of of what we do as as people in general but but as researchers uh in particular so i think uh it's you know whenever i uh in my in our work but also in other words whenever i see people kind of you know um biting the bullet and saying no no no my perspective is just you know one of many perspectives uh this is not this is not objectivity this is not a view from nowhere here are my assumptions given those assumptions here is my theory and how do i study this right because it's not science is not like one size fits all right like we have to be critical we have to be reflexive and i think that has not just epistemic uh and and kind of practical and pragmatic import but also ethical import so um yeah that's that's how i would finish so it's a good time for a big unsaying no what we said happens only in the context and it's not it's not descriptions of

1:26:25Dr. John Vervaeke:reality right yeah i would point to an excellent recent book that picks up on hussein's theme which is the blind spot by frank absolutely and and whiteheads i think one of his greatest insights that isn't foregrounded enough that performative contradictions matter as much if not more than propositional contradictions. Well said. Thank you, gentlemen. This has been amazing. And it is only the first of at least a couple more. And so I look forward to it. I hope you're both well. I hope you stay well. All of you who are watching this, please take a look at the paper. We'll put a link to where you can get it.

1:27:08Dr. John Vervaeke:You know, we sometimes got into the weeds. We were trying to go back and forth. We have two, we have potentially two audiences watching this. We We have, like, you know, I don't like this term, but lay people. And then we have researchers who are in these fields, and we're trying to to and fro sail between Scylla and Charybdis here. And so be a little bit charitable around that. We're trying to make it. We're trying our best. So take care, and I hope to see you on our next conversation. Thanks, John. Thank you.

1:27:54¶¶