How Nonbeing Haunts Being: Corey Anton on Death, Spirituality, and the Meaning of a Finite Life

28:11And now they're kind of like, they're, they're holding out for something while they're ignoring one of the greatest gifts that they could have to really discover who they are. Like, who do people think they are? Do they really think they can like enjoy sunsets, hold hands, taste foods from around the world, cry to music, and then not have to pay the ultimate price in the end. It's almost as if people are underestimating that they already are more than anything they could ever do or ever achieve. The idea of going out and seeking salvation seems very strange when you realize you're actually the entire cosmos opening to itself.

28:52You are that. Well, I want to pick up on that because one of the things I say is you can have a profound phenomenological awareness if you don't close off your experience of grief. Because when a person dies, you're not just losing, I'll use your phrase, the sack of skin. You're losing a precious portal onto the world that is irreplaceable once they're gone. And that's what you like. Like when I've grieved people. And I'm not saying grief is a good thing, but one of the wisest people in my life once said to me, John, don't get into a serious relationship with somebody who hasn't tasted grief because they're not fully human.

29:33and i i i've tried because because if you stay open to grief and what you realize is yeah you're losing a way you're i i call it a portal you're you're losing a portal onto the cosmos that becomes inaccessible when that person is no longer a person and you're grieving that as much as you're grieving the loss of the sack of skin that's one point and the other point I want to make is there's a Buddhist practice where they basically say, well, okay. And it picks up on the point you made, right? The point you made. And they say, well, you're immortal, right? So you can't suffer. And so you really try to be as rationally consistent with the proposal.

30:23Like you really try to live the picture. And yeah, there can't be any longing. There can't be any satisfaction. And not only that, none of my friends can die. None of the plants can die. No animals can die. Like, right, because if I'm frozen in time, I'm freezing time for everything else because everything is interconnected. I'm rushing through it. But when you do this in great detail, what you get is you get this horror of an absolutely frozen, absolutely static. It's a Parmetti at the end kind of one. It's absolutely static, absolutely motionless. And it's actually horrific. And you realize, oh, I don't want that.

31:05I don't want that. I don't want that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's, again, I think that's, that's really, there's so much that I, that I resonate with in there. Yeah. And I think some of it is, it's so, it's almost like it's so obvious. You know, I think some of the things I'm saying are so obvious that it's hard, it's hard to get the distance to have the beginner eyes again, you know, like Harding, you know, Harding says, you know, we begin our, our, in our infancy and we're at large, we just are the world. And then no other being shrinks down as much as we do. And I think there is, there's like a young line where sort of like, you know, you're trying to build a healthy ego in your young adulthood in order to become a mature person.

31:49And then as you get mature, what you need to do is learn how to deconstruct that and let that go. Exactly. Gain a kind of acceptance to, again, who I really am. I don't think that if there is no life after death, then there's no moral weight in our actions. I don't think if there's no life after death, that somehow this doesn't matter or it's somehow trivial. Again, I see it as a kind of appropriate price to be paid for having been invited to the greatest banquet of all banquets. The only banquet there is life itself. I mean, who expects to have all that they've experienced at no price? Who do they think they are?

32:29I think they've lost touch. I mean, I think some people don't know how to recover the gratitude toward life because they're holding out for something other than it and they don't know how to really engage in it because they think they're just representing it. Okay, that's really good. So, okay, I think that's a very powerful critique. I mean, people lose a sense of their own no-thingness, their radical no-thingness, and many traditions talk about this. Even James has the distinction between the, William James, between the I and the me, and And the me is always an object and the I is never an object and all that sort of.

33:03And that's important. And also somehow that that mystery is intrinsically in relation. And you use some of Sartre's language. The being for itself is always also a being for others. That's right. So Sartre is fairly critical of Harding. I mean, I think Sartre would accuse Harding of being a sadistic practice or bad faith. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be Sartre's language. I don't know if I necessarily agree with it, but I would see why Sartre would make that critique. Sartre is a much more robust ontology of non-being. I think that Harding is somewhat – he's trying to be angelic, as it were.

33:54Yeah, but it's a good service. I mean, but okay, let's hold them both in tension. I get that. But what I see you doing, because you're sort of holding both of them together in the book, right? Because you do. You talk about Harding's proposal of the double vision, the stereoscopic vision between that liberates us continually from either a sadistic solipsism or a masochistic alienation. And so I want to put a proposal to you, which is what that points to, that stereoscopic vision discloses is this deep interpenetration between being and non-being. We tend to try to abstract one from the other or reduce one to the other or identify one with the other.

34:41And I'll use some Buddhist language here, but their proper relationship is a non-dual relationship. And then I wanted to say, I want to, like, so D.C. Sindler and others from the Platonic tradition, Neoplatonic tradition, talk about this, that that's a kind of antonormativity, a goodness to realness. because what it does is there is an ongoing perpetual affordance of liberation from sadistic solipsism and masochistic alienation that happens in every genuine moment of realization. Because every moment of realization requires that you're neither sadistically solipsistically nor masochistically alienated.

35:29You are somehow getting that non-duality between non-being and being, and the non-duality between being for itself and being for others. How does that land to you? There's a kind of goodness there, and it's not a moral goodness or an even aesthetic goodness. It's kind of like we seem to have this deep presupposed preference for real over non-real. And this is what people report in the height of mystical experience, Yadin's work. They say, I encountered the really real and they'll change their lives, right? Their identities, their jobs, because they want to be closer to the really real. Yeah. Okay.

36:13Yeah. There's so much to think there. Let's see if I can first say something about Murillo Ponte, who you mentioned earlier, and then maybe something about psychedelics. You know, so Emerilio Ponte's, I guess, his maybe final book, Visible and Invisible, something like that. You know, it's his most sustained engagement with Sartre's being a nothingness. And I think he's trying to refine it. And for me, very inspirationally, like going back to Sartre and trying to, you know, what's salvageable in that project? And can you give it the kind of finesse? And he called it the chiasm, right? The sort of intertwining of this notion of flesh.

36:44He started to introduce his notion of flesh, which was both the person and the world kind of in their intertwining. Yes, yes. And I think, you know, some of it is, you know, going back to these spiritual epiphanies that people have, I think sometimes some person will do a strong psychedelic and then they will experience a kind of ego death. That is, they become aware of a reality that wasn't aligned with what they had built up through their inner representations of what they think the world is and who they think they are and all this kind of stuff. But then for me, they make this false leap into there must be life after death because there's life after my ego death.

37:28Yeah, that's you. That's a person on drugs. You're not you're not experiencing what life will be like after death. You're experiencing how much what you called yourself and the world were a slowly built up and a construction. And you were able again, people were able to sort of dismantle that, get on the other side of it. And then they, again, they jumped to a false conclusion from that. In my opinion. In my opinion. Yeah. Not to be dogmatic about it. No. And the empirical evidence says there's a variety of responses. I do work in the psychedelics. Yeah. You do definitely get people who think that, the problem is people come out of this and they'll spin all kinds of rabbit hole metaphysics.

38:10That's why you need set and setting. You have to have a whole ecology of sapiential practices for dealing with our proclivities for self-deception. You need a sacred canopy that helps you integrate. If you don't have those things, you're going to go all kinds of. But people will also come out of the psychedelics and say, not that I'm immortal. They'll say, I'm no longer afraid of death. Which isn't the same thing. I agree. Right. I agree. And I think for me, I think when people have a successfully ventured ego death, they realize that they're much older and other and larger than they imagine. Yes, yes.

38:52The discovery of profound importance. So this sounds a little bit also like Spinoza's proposal, that the quest for immortality is the thing that most blinds us to the eternal aspects of who and what we are. Amen. Yes. It's all right here. You know, it's the Gnostic gospel of Thomas. You know, we're in the paradise right now, but people can't see it. You know, it's being able to recover the sense of mystery and live it down in the sacredness of all of us. This is, you know, I think of Lingus, Lingus' book, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. You want to find the true commonality for humanity.

39:33It's not found in race or age or ethnicity or sex. There's one community. It's the community of the dying. We're all dying and we're dying together. And we need to find our humanity there. And even there are more than humanity. I think people would be well to discover that they are human, but they're also more than and other than human. They're a place of the cosmos opening to itself. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. So all of this, it feels like we're really resonating on this and we're bringing in some excellent people. Now, one thing, a question I wanted to ask you, because there is, you know, there's a famous philosopher who thinks a lot about death and he comes up in the philosophy of death, which is Epicurus.

40:15And, you know, and he makes an interesting point. I mean, I agree with you. I think his argument that, you know, there's no difference between the non-you before your birth and the non-you after. No, that's a problem. Yeah. Yeah. But, but let's, so let's put that aside, but let's, let's say that, let's say we, we do, we, we do an Anton-esque version of this and we say, but we can, we can come to lose a misplaced antipathy towards non-being and right. And then Epicurus, I could still say Epicurus saying, right. Okay. But that sort of gets the same place my not so good logical argument doesn't quite get to.

40:59But he would say, in the end, though, that's not enough because it's not only non-being that people are non-being in total. Right. And I think you have something to say about this is why I'm asking the question. So it's not being dead that people fear is dying. it's the process of losing this and losing that and losing the pleasures associated with that a couple of things there one i would go back to what you were saying earlier about you know what is grief and grieving i think of you know there's a very poignant painful beautiful part of uh douglas hofstetter's book i'm a strange loop where he talks about the death of his wife and how much of his grief wasn't of his loss for her, but grieving for her lost possibilities, like watching their sons grow up and all this kind of stuff.

41:52So, I mean, I think there is a lot that's going on in grieving and in our sort of openness to others. But, okay, I think I lost. What was the question that you raised right before when I just, I was trying to remember the Hofstetter thing, but you had asked this question. epicurus tries to oh yeah he he says there's like to to to cure people uh it's not sufficient it's necessary but not sufficient to get them to no longer his his whole thing is stop being afraid no longer being afraid of being dead um and like you and i both agree there's a little yeah it's the dying it's the loss it's the diminishment and you know and because there's a lot of things that we it's not just pleasure there's a lot of things we attach significant moral value to.

42:42I've been with a lot of old people that are aging and they're losing dignity in a really important way. And it's not out of hostility or anything that everybody around them is trying their best. So, I mean, I'm not saying it's always like this. We treat old people horrifically around the world. But let's say that's not happening. So there are contexts where everybody's trying their best, they're surrounded by love, support, and yet they are losing their dignity. And there's something morally repellent about that. And that seems to be... So that's a different problem. I'm trying to... I think that's right.

43:34I mean, first I would say, I mean, I think there are other layers. I don't disagree. I think many people, it's the dying, not the being dead. I think that's very true. On another sense, I would say, you know, something like Ernest Becker, you know, so much of people's life's meaning comes from having felt like they've done something with their lives. And so their willingness to go into oblivion is partly a, I've lived my life, done my thing, my children are going to go on, or my music will continue to be played, or my scientific achievement will serve others, and I can go to my grave knowing that.

44:09So there's all these other kinds of things. But yeah, I mean, I think this question about the fearing of dying, I don't want to be glib or breezy about it, but I will say I'm sort of a strong advocate for the right to die movement. I think no one asks to be born. We all have to have someone else make that decision for us to make the entrance in here. But I think people should get the right to choose to die with dignity. Yeah. And, you know, I shouldn't be done cavalierly, but, you know, a person wants to, you know, approach a doctor and say, you know, I want to show that I'm of good mental health and that I've thought about this decision and my life and my family and other things.

44:51And I want the right to, you know, in a dignified and respectful way, you know, end it. And it doesn't have to be this suicide note with goodbye, cruel world. It could be a note that starts with at an awesome time. I loved it. I love my family. I'm out. I'm out on a high note and I've nothing but gratitude all the way down. The idea that people should be able to bring their life to the completion that preserves their dignity and sort of safeguards the meaning should be the ultimate right that people have. and there's a lot of confidence you know the Stoics they called it the golden gate and you know they thought that a person that was one of the things that a person has under their own control was the you know the ability and their life but then they got a bad rap because you know Zeno and then Chrysippus evidently both took their lives and won what the Christian spin off on it was over a hangnail and this kind of stuff so there was this kind of degradation of the Stoic life philosophy.

46:00And I think, you know, in Christianity, suicide was deemed to be a worse sin than murder. Because if you murder someone, you could at least ask for forgiveness. But if you commit suicide, then you can't even ask for forgiveness after the deed. So that's really interesting as a problem.

46:22So I've been with people, and I think you're pointing to this in what you were saying. I've been with people, people I love, and they said to me, I'm done. It's kind of like at the end of The Good Place. Have you ever seen that TV show? I've seen some of it. I know what it is. Well, at the very end, they go to heaven. Julian Barnes does it also in his History of the World in 10 1⁄2 chapters. This guy goes to heaven, right? He meets St. Peter's. And he does all this stuff. And then after a while, he's like, you know, I'm sort of done. And I understand what they meant. They, I understand what I mean is I empathetically get it.

47:12Now, what I'm asking is if we could reflect on, because of course, we're not there yet. I don't think I'm there yet. I think this stoic philosophy should be understood as getting to a place here now, as soon as you can, where you are done. You've touched the depths of eternity and you don't care about the extension of your life anymore. I think chronic pain can be very, very world shrinking. Elaine Scarry's book, The Body and Pain, is a wonderful exploration of this. I had, you know, I was a farm kid in Wisconsin, grew up and I injured my back as a teenager, like basically picking rocks. And I was foolish because I thought people didn't know what they were doing.

47:52They told me that I had injured my back. And I said, no, I have pain in my legs. My legs are my, my leg is wrong. And they were like, no, you've injured your back. And it just, it went on. And at a certain point I couldn't walk. I had been, you know, days and weeks without sleep and screaming agony, you know, and it was just, it was really a horrible situation. And I think anybody who's ever had sciatica pain or, you know, really bad nerve pain, it, when it's chronic and unrelenting and it starts to go on for years, it's easy to go, you know, what is the point of this? Uh, you know, I had a miracle surgery.

48:28Um, I, I would never recommend anybody have back surgery. I think when you're in an absolute dire position and you have no other recourse, maybe that's what you did. It's what I did. There were many other professors who had had this particular neurosurgeon do their back. So I kind of trusted that the guy knew what he was doing. And it was a miracle. I mean, my life was, this guy literally gave me my life back and it was life changing. And I still have some pain now, but nothing like I did for well over a decade. I agree, Corey. I agree that chronic pain, persecution, torture, slavery, there's lots of things.

49:10And this is why inflicting them on other humans is so immoral, really shrink people's possibilities. I get that. And I want to acknowledge that you're making a legitimate point. I want you to consider the opposite, right? The person who's not in pain, right but they've come because this i like i say i get it but i don't get it and so i'm asking for your help here because they're saying something like i've actualized all my possibilities and it's like what does that and i'm trying to understand uh what that means for them because that's that's a more problematic notion for me yeah i think sometimes well again i think sometimes again, we're going to need like psychoanalysis and is the person self-deceiving and just actually depressed or, you know, I've always liked David K.

50:02Reynolds work. You know, I think he's, he does this stuff on constructive living on Nikon and Morita where, you know, again, the sort of the illusion is I'm over here and reality's over there. What I need to do is I see myself as reality's way of getting reality's work done. And, you know, I think he dealt with a lot of people who would fall into this kind of profound forms of self-absorbed depression, which does make it feel like there just are no possibilities. You lose interest in food, you lose interest in hanging out with friends, sex, other basic pleasures. You lose interest and you go, what's the point?

50:37I really don't enjoy it anymore. It could be a profound phenomenological disclosure of one's desire to end it all. It could just be, again, a person who needs to go out and get some exercise, get some sleep and, you know, go have a conversation with a friend they haven't talked to in a while. Okay. So, good. Okay. So, we're doing good conceptual phenomenological analysis. We put aside the people's whose possibilities are being crushed because they're losing their dignity or by pain. And then we'll say people can come to that state because of significant depression. But what about this possibility?

51:18Because realness is a comparative. I'm always, so it discloses the primordiality of relationality by itself being inherently relational in nature. This is a Neoplatonic argument. To say this is real is to compare it to its shadow, which is less real. So real is a comparative like tall. And so that holds open the possibility of kind of an ultimate realization that we get, and I think this is in your book too, there's the mystery against which everything else is sort of measured in terms of its realness. Now, whether we're doing that explicitly or implicitly is an important question, I'm putting it aside for now.

52:02Is it possible, let's say Siddhartha Gautama, right? And you have a moment of enlightenment where you come to the dropping away of all these dichotomies and deceptions we've been talking about so that you come into the fullest possible participation of the greatest possible realization for a human being. Would it be then the case that they might say there is no reason to continue because everything would diminish in comparison to that moment? I would say no. Okay. Again, I think more of that there's an embedded teleological assumption. I think you don't dance to get to the end of the song. Yes.

52:47Sometimes if you don't feel like you're really dancing well, you need to pay better attention to the music. You need to sort of get into it. But if there were me and I tried to get into this conversation and up the ratchet, I would say, you know, is there a possibility that many people are going to be hurled into a very real despair about life as AI takes over everything? Of course. More and more people lose their sense of purpose and relevance, and they feel second class citizen to an artificial being. And they've lost employment and they don't really know what to do with their time. And they're feeling highly exploited, basically like a slave class among super wealthy, the billionaire, trillionaire class.

53:32Could that be a genuine disclosure of diminished possibilities in a profound way? Yeah. I mean, it may be sporting revolt rather than just despair of suicide. But I think for some people, the powerlessness is more inclined to go, at least I'll have some kind of meaningful action. I'm taking myself out. I agree with that. And I do a lot of work on the intersections between the meaning crisis and the possibility. I don't think we're there, but the possibility of genuine artificial general intelligence. I agree that's important. But I want to go back to your answer because I think the answer is important too.

54:13Because I think you and I are actually in deep agreement on that point. Because I think also implicit in religions was the idea of sacredness as a rest, as a completion, as a finish. And so I was trying to give the greatest – I was trying to steal a person that position and say, what could be the moment of rest? Well, it's the ultimate realization. And you were basically saying, and I think you're right, yeah, but you're still finite. And you have not, which as long as, and non-being haunts being, and therefore the possibilities have not been closed. And so I want to propose to you an alternative notion of the sacred, rather than it being closure and rest in being finished.

55:04Instead, the sacred is an inexhaustible source of intelligibility, and this is a very Taoist proposal. And the Tao is a well that we can always draw from but is never used up kind of thing. This even did show up, by the way, in the Christian tradition. It shows up in the Eastern Orthodox, the Cappadocian Fathers, Epictasis, the idea that what God is, is God is the field that affords perpetual self-transcendence for human being, that they never come to a place of rest or finality. So what would you think about that as an alternative? Yeah, no, I agree with that. I mean, I think there's even, you know, Eastern orientations where, you know, after enlightenment, after story, whatever, it was time to go, you know, clean your rice bowl.

55:53Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's things that need to be done and you need to learn to open your eyes to realize that you don't have to do it. You don't have to do it at all. Reality will do reality's work and you can just do it there one dish at a time. You know, it's sort of like it's to be to really shed the ego and to see oneself as a place and moment of the world. It's to not worry about constantly being in the state of enlightenment. It's to realize life goes on after that. You just go on with it. So this is the classic Zen. Before I did Zen, rivers were rivers and mountains were mountains. What I was doing then, they're not mountains and they're not rivers.

56:30And then after Zen, they are mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. But you're supposed to say it as if it's in capital letters kind of. Right, right. And you can even spin that in a socially oriented way as well with the Sufis where you say, before I began the practices, I wasn't worthy of the robes. Then I needed the robes. And then eventually I grew past the robes, but then I needed the robes again for other people. So there's a sense in which it's caught with others as well. But yeah. That's good. I think that's very good. So thank you for that, for letting me return to that. Let's go to the point you brought up next, which is that there's a lot of fear.

57:13Let's still use the distinction. There's a fear of dying in the sense of losing of personhood and selfhood and a diminishment of our possibilities with not just AI or even the AI we have right now. The AI interwoven with social media, the rise of the plausible rise of techno fascism, techno feudalisms and then a careening between fantastical nostalgias and utopias, both promising, you know, some kinds of immortality to us. I agree that all of that is really exacerbating meaning. So I want to zero in on meaning because one of the things I've been arguing, because I think it has to do with relevance realization, but we don't have to get into the cog-sci of that right now.

58:07The idea that meaning is, this is Desmond, meaning is some relationship. It's an inherently relational. It's like between truth and relevance. We don't pursue all possible truths. We pursue the truths that are relevant to us because if you even, even like if you tried to pay attention to all the possible information in this room, it's combinatorially explosive. You can't do it. Right. But on the other hand, we use truth to correct relevance. We, when you have a moment of insight, you realize that what you are judging is relevant, isn't actually what's relevant. Oh, I thought she was angry, but she's afraid.

58:44Right. So truth and relevance are, and we're always kind of assuming one to try and determine the other. It's kind of like a Heisenberg thing. And so meaning is somehow it's caught up with this non-duality between truth and relevance. And that truth and relevance are transjective. They're not subjective or objective. They're the way in which, I'm trying to use your language, the world is disclosing itself through our opening to the world. Right. There's a porosity. That's William Desmond. But you use porous in a couple of places, too. Right. The idea that one of the things that is behind the world we're in that can threaten us that way is all these disastrous dichotomies given to us by the by the European Enlightenment.

59:39Like we gave up the vertical dichotomy between the natural and the natural, natural and the supernatural, but we surreptitiously replaced it with the subjective and the objective, right, dichotomy. And, you know, and then we, and you also, you attack more in this sort of interesting way because you have the anaturalistic fallacy, right? Which is undermining, you know, the fact value dichotomy like Putnam is done. So there seems to be, I want to say, I've been proposing that everything you're saying about AI and social media and techno feudalism, right, undermining meaning. I think that's true, but I think it is a result of a much longer history, a genealogy that we've inherited from modernity that has really made us radically misunderstand the transjective nature of meaning, the transjective nature of agency, selfhood, personhood, etc.

1:00:46What would you do? Very much so, John. Yeah, we're on the same page. Like I say, the book that I did prior to how non-being has been was a book called Sources of Significance. And it's also called Worldly Rejuvenation and Other Resources for Neostoic Heroism. And it's sort of riffing on like the Stoics, but also the work of Sonic Zubare and putting together people like Ernest Becker, Hans Jonas, and Kenneth Burke. And so I would say some things about meaning here real quickly. One is that I think meaning ambiguously slides around between intent, definition, and significance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the word meaning.

1:01:25But then when you get it, like how is meaning constructed in people's lives? The model that I created in the sources book was basically there's five different dimensions. One is how the action connects to the past. One is how it connects to the future. One is how much adversity has to be overcome. one is on whose behalf and one is how much suffering was entailed all five of those you take christ on the cross it's all five dimensions in full full extension um and all athletic discourse i mean a lot of it was when i was first doing this model i was trying to understand why athletics seems so meaningful because it has all this self-sacrificial for the team and it's caught in legacies and the projection of where you're going to land in the playoffs or next season or whatever.

1:02:17And so I think AI and a lot of these social media technologies, they're atomizing people, they're liquidating the past into an ahistoricism, they're diminishing long-term goals, they're promising a frictionless life. So in a lot of the dimensions of the models that I was trying to work on, they're directly assaulting people's horizons of meaning and the way people generate meaning in their lives. That's excellent. I want to put two things out and see what you think about them. One is Hartmut Rose's work on resonance. So anyways, he talks about these moments. He talks about modernity, you know, is built around ideas about certainty and control.

1:02:59But he says, like, when you see the sunset, you use the sunset too. The reason why it is so powerful is you're actually on the sweet spot. He has a book entitled this, The Uncontrollability of the World. You're not totally overwhelmed like you would be in horror, but you're not just – you're not smoothly consuming your environment. It is surprising you and it's disclosing that it is much more than you thought it was. And it's that sudden enrichment. It's a disclosure of the inexhaustibility of reality that actually gives us some of our deepest senses of meaning. He calls it resonance because people often use resonance term.

1:03:38And then in connection with that, there's all the work, because I do a lot of work on both the philosophy and the psychology and now the neuroscience. I guess you'd call it the cognitive science of meaning in life. And one of the themes is, you know, people need to be clearly, coherently connected to something larger than themselves. And by that, they don't mean something, and this goes towards your point, they don't mean something that as a thing is larger. They mean they need to be connected to a greater, deeper sense of realness.

1:04:13And those two seem to go together. We seem to have a need to remember, sati, of course, mindfulness actually means to remember, to remember, right, the inexhaustibleness. That seems to be a primordial thing, a primordial need we are meeting when we talk about things being meaningful to us. How does that land for you? Yeah, no, that works for me a lot. I mean, this is sort of, you know, if I'm with students, I try to ask them, are you sure you really want happiness? Is this what you're after? And like, I think happiness, it oftentimes ends up like something inside you where you're going to fix it with a chemical if it ain't there.

1:04:54Whereas I think I want to say, are you sure it isn't relevance and purpose? Yes. Maybe what you really want to do is grow yourself into the kind of competent person who has something to give. And can you identify the kinds of problems in the world that you want to actually understand well enough to make significant contributions to? Maybe it's not the question anymore of what do you want to be when you grow up as much as what are those problems in the world that you want to devote your life to and see to what extent you can make some headway on them. And I think their happiness just shows up as a shadow cast by purpose and by relevance.

1:05:34But people struggle with purpose and relevance because they think it's supposed to be a – life is supposed to be about comfort and ease and convenience and having a good time. Yes. Yes. I mean, so the part of a critique I've been, I did a video essay with Arjun, Aurora, we together like, so the modern construct of meaning is a, is a personal private possession of a setting of preferences that order our, our, our potentials for pleasure. And of course, meaning doesn't work that way. I mean, we've got Heidegger and Hegel and Wittgenstein, right? Meaning has to be, it has to be, you know, mutually created, mutually curated and mutually corrected at all times, or it's not meaning.

1:06:16and meaning is you know this goes back even to Plato but you see it in Kant and Hegel meaning has a normative dimension when I say somebody has a meaningful life I'm not merely describing it right I'm also recommending it in an important way and so we we're one of the we're a weird culture we're like historically and geographically because we've separated meaning from the cultivation of wisdom right which is And again, that's part of what modernity has bequeathed to us. That's why I don't describe myself as a postmodernist. I'm a countermodernist. I'm trying to escape these straitjackets. But so I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of meaning.

1:07:01And I think your way of putting it aligns. I tend to replace the word purpose, even though that's the word even used in the psychological literature with orientation. because when people hear purpose, they hear goal state, they hear trophy reward state, right? And that's problematic because if you don't get there, your life was meaningless. And then if you get it, then your life is meaningless. And that, I think they mean something like they have a compass, they have a way of orienting in reality that, you know, structures their judgments. And then what you said, relevance. But what's interesting is it's kind of like you're trying to get something that's not only relevant to you, but more importantly, that makes you relevant to others, right?

1:07:47Turns the arrow around in this really important way. And that other doesn't even, isn't limited just to other human beings. It can be other living beings. It can be the conditions for life, et cetera. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I think for me, the tension that brings to my mind in listening to, again, some of these wonderful observations is that there's on one sense, yeah, there's the purpose driven life of trying to be a good human being, of trying to take care of your neighbors, of trying to minimize the damage on the planet. And there's all this kind of stuff. And I think that's important. That said, I think there is, as I was mentioning, you know, maybe I don't know, half an hour ago or something, but it's, I think to get people to understand that it is important to strive and to to try to thrive and grow and development and do all this kind of stuff.

1:08:39But also at every point, never forget that you're always already more than anything you will ever accomplish. You're, you're more than like, yes, you were born into a body that has billions of years worth of survival value. And some of your greatest riches will never be your personal achievements or your private possessions. Like you are the sunset. You are that. you mean again you like the music that you listen to that makes you cry like where is the music you know you could say well it's just out there in the world but no it's the the actual unfolding of the event is you in that place and that moment open to that music and there's the whole thing is part of who you are you're not just representing it once people really discover who they are I think they've realized they've been given everything for nothing.

1:09:33Yeah. William Desmond calls that the agapic dimension of being. Yes. Yeah. I think mystery for me, the sacred is where the mystery and love, they just bloom together and you go, this is sacred. Yes. That's, that's really cool. You know, I think parents, when they look down at their, their infant, they can see the profound mystery and the sacredness and register it. And somehow they lose that ability when they go look at a grasshopper or when they go look at the neighbor who looks a little different than them or whose music they don't like or whatever. Well, that's interesting because, by the way, that the training of the virtue of being able to transfer the seeing and being when you see your newborn child to your neighbor or the grasshopper, that's important.

1:10:22So I want to first flag that. And secondly, I want to say that I use that as an apropos example with my students. I'll say, well, you know, when you have a kid, what happens is your finances go down, your health goes down, your subjective wellbeing goes down. You're not sleeping, you're hungry, you're wet. Your nervous system is being alarmed by a primordial alarm, the kid crying. The person you thought loved you most in the world doesn't really like you particularly very much right now. It's like being a, and what, and, but why do people do it? What's the one thing that goes up, even though all of those things we are told matter most go down, it's meaning in life.

1:10:58People say I'm connected to a reality outside of myself and my, and I am not, I'm trying to make myself as relevant to that reality's realization as I possibly can. And so, um, but I like what you did with that, Corey. I'd like, you said, yeah, yeah, good. Notice that moment, but also cultivate the virtue of transferring that seeing and being to the grasshopper, to your neighbor. Exactly. And that's, I mean, that's very much the kingdom of God being spread abroad. It's so difficult for me sometimes, John, because I mean, I do, I feel like I've really grown as a human being over the years and as I thought about it.

1:11:38And then there are times when I like, just to be honest with you, you know, I'm sorry if I'm going to hurt some of your audience members, but like, I look at Trump and I look at some of these people and I try so hard to look in his eyes and go, this too is the divine manifestation of the mystery. But I find myself going, what is wrong with this guy? Like I, I, you know, when I find somebody who I just so see to be cruel and to be like, I don't know, self-absorbed and, and just not a good person And not to just be sorry for him, but profoundly wish that he could discover who he is. And for me to not be judging that he doesn't seem to have that.

1:12:20Do you know what I mean? No, no. I'm glad you brought that up. Let's say that's our final major point we'll wrestle with today. And I am inviting you back to come back. I want to take a look at your other book as well. Yeah. And you can see this tension. You know, Jesus says God makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust, but he drives the money changers out of the temple. Right. And it's like, how do those two things go together? I wrestle with that, too. I wrestle with, you know, you do when you're doing like something like a Buddhist practice of metta where you're trying not to just have wonderful feelings towards people.

1:13:05I don't like that North American reinterpretation of meta. But what I'm trying to do is see in them what I'm not habitually seeing in them. I'm trying to open up. I'm trying to forgive, give before new possibilities, right? Rather than saying, I've closed this person off, closed them down, right? And so one of the things you do is, obviously, you do that with family and then friends and your fellow beings, and then you do it with foes. And then you do it with people you fear. And perhaps it would be Trump for a lot of people or Putin for some people. And you come to that, you come to like, you come to this thing where.

1:13:47And this is also part of why people want heaven and immortality. So there's the personal thing, but there's the other one of. Right. It seems there's no way to put this other than by using some traditional language. We're confronting the mystery of evil. Let's put aside, and I'm not trying to mean satanic. What I mean is, there seems to be things that take a hold of people and drive them away from everything we're talking about. And it's hard to understand what is it in reality makes that possible. For example, I don't think that evil is just psychological. I don't think it's just defects in us that bring that about because of all of what we've been talking about.

1:14:39I think the world and us are too interwoven for that to be a legitimate answer. And so for many people, and I don't find this satisfying either, the idea is, oh, well, all of that will be addressed in the afterlife, right? Everything, all the evil will be eradicated. And for me, I guess I, and I'm not trying to pin you to give an answer because I think this is really hard. But when I'm wrestling with people like that, you know, and there's a degree to which I can do what you can do too. I can remember that there is a real possibility that they could come to know themselves Socratically. They could come to realize their Buddha nature.

1:15:22That is still a possibility. None of us can pronounce, only God can pronounce that that possibility has been closed off. And the Bible does this, by the way, with Pharaoh and the plagues. Pharaoh is always hardening his heart, but at some point God hardens his heart, saying, you know, yeah, you've closed it off. So let's say we never have that God right to pronounce on anybody but their clothes. Nevertheless, we still have to acknowledge the reality of all the ways in which they are, I don't know, appropriating non-being in a way that is destructive and hurtful and causes the loss of agency and personhood and selfhood and beauty and the reduction of the disclosure of truth, etc.

1:16:15And so, again, Corey, please, I'm commiserating with you. I'm not trying to pick you around. I mean, I think I see it, you know, in what you've said, I sort of see, like, this is where, for me, you get this merger of East and West, where it's something like the kind of neo-Stoicism, but also you get the Bodhisattva rather than the Buddha. Yeah, yeah. You know, the person who willingly contributes to the betterment. And, you know, for the Stoics, and this is as opposed to like for Aristotle and for Plato, I think for Plato, the person is kind of not really from here. They're basically from elsewhere.

1:16:53And for Aristotle, the person is really part of nature. Whereas for the Stoics, no, you're part of a civic community. It is something inherently civic about the human being and that we have sort of duties and obligations to family and to others that makes them sort of positioned uniquely in the ancient Western world and nicely gearing into some forms of Eastern thought. I agree with that. And I also think of Whitehead. Whitehead said the only universal about – the only thing we can say determinably about evil is it seems to be inherently self-destructive. Now, that self-destruction doesn't always time with our judgments of justice.

1:17:36Stalin doesn't, like he goes to his grave, right? Untouched, right? And that's, again, that's why people want an afterlife, so he can get his just rewards or just punishment. But I think the only answer, but it's not an answer, it's more like a response, is the Bodhisattva. It's the Bodhisattva who says, I will not give up faith because at the heart of evil is a self-destructiveness. But at the heart of other people is the perpetual possibility of waking up to who and what they really are. And so I will not be enervated by evil. I can't give you the pronounced solution because I think it's bound up with some of the mystery of being itself.

1:18:19But what I can say is I know this about evil and I know this about people. And therefore, I'm going to continue to try and bring all beings to enlightenment. Yeah. No, it's good stuff. Good stuff. So, Corey, we'll wrap it up here. I'm definitely going to have you back. We'll talk about the second half. Really enjoyed it, John. Really enjoyed it. Well, I really enjoyed it, too. First of all, let me again hold the book up. Yay. Strongly recommend. Beautifully written. And the way, like Corey showed you here, see how seamlessly he moves from sort of analytic argument to phenomenological, even poetic or lyrical richness.

1:19:01I mean, that's what the book is like. Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate your kind words. You know, I think, you know, anybody who's an author, you write, you spend countless hours toil trying to get it all out. And then it's still impossible to get anyone to read it. And this book, this book required my university to give a 5000 subvention to bring it down from 90 bucks. Who spends 90 bucks on a book? And even now it's ridiculously expensive. So it's it's really disheartening, you know, but I appreciate it. You know, well, I want to recommend your books. I mean, I did that with James Filler and his amazing book on Neoplatonism and the history of being, Heidegger and Neoplatonism, the history of being, and relationality as the ground of being, which, by the way, converges with your arguments very significantly, Corey.

1:19:50Well, I really appreciate you giving me a little bit of a dialogue here. I mean, I do think that I would love it if you have other people who want to read it. I'm more than happy to talk about it. I mean, we can do a reading group or whatever, man. And I want to get the word out. Yeah. Well, like I said, you'll come back and we'll do the second half of the book, you know, and also I'll try and get your other book and we can sort of weave between them.

1:20:20And we'll see. This is the beginning of a relationship, I hope. Oh, I love it. I really appreciate it. Like I say, I can't say enough how much I enjoyed our discussion. It was really great. Thank you, everyone, for being here with us. As you know, don't heard. Corey's coming back. I look forward to seeing all of you again in the future. Take care, everyone.

1:20:59T-R-E-P-A-R-A-N door.