Poetry Wakes You to Reality | John Vervaeke & Adam Walker

34:50And this is part of a much larger argument that I'm not going to repeat here about how we're in a meaning crisis. But I've come to believe that the response to this has been an advent of the sacred, an attempt, an amnesis, if you will, drawing people together, drawing them across disciplinary boundaries into dialogical conversations, mutually transformative, what I like to call dialogos, right? And I call that the advent of the sacred, that the sacred is trying to renew and give birth to itself in a new way. And I bring that up because this seems very, at least prima facie, convergent with your proposal that we're in the dark times that presage a new renaissance that is about to come.

35:52So tell us a little bit more about your proposal. And then when it seems right to you, reflect back on the proposal I've just made, because we're deeply in the space of the sacred right now, or the place of the sacred would be a better word. Go ahead. Absolutely. And I would, just to speak to that, I do think that the awakening or the gradual coming to our spiritual senses that is bound to take place soon, I think, given the signs of things and is deeply related to that ocular metaphor that we've been using and seeing through the idea of the vocation of being called, because it really is the awakening of our dormant faculties to see through things.

36:44And Wordsworth's famous poem, Tintern Abbey, describes the moment when it happens. Or rather, he describes the change that happened, where he awoke to the sacred. And it's strange. It's usually never taught as a conversion poem, Tintern Abbey, but it really is. Because in the beginning, he's talking about his childhood days. To me, nature was all in all, he said. no further need of interest unborrowed from the eye or thought supplied, meaning it was all sensuous enjoyment. He was enjoying the cataracts, the mountains, the waterfalls. And then you have this fall where suddenly something happened to where he was no longer able to connect with nature in this very sensuous way of the material excitement, the emotional excitement.

37:37But he says, for that loss, he has received abundant recompense. And he says, for I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing sometimes the still sad music of humanity. For I have felt emotion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought and rolls through all things. What he's describing there in that passage that I abbreviated was the sacred. He's discovered the sacred, which doesn't necessarily exclude the material enjoyment, but is layered there within it. And it's that insight that I think is so integral to the concept of the new renaissance because, you know, Wordsworth was talking about his material enjoyment with nature, which is a very innocent and wonderful thing to have.

38:37But I think now in our own age, the post-digital age, we might call it, there's also a materialism. There's a consumeristic materialism, a philosophical materialism, a scientific materialism that has really reigned over our better faculties, I think, and has allowed other ecologies to exploit those faculties. And we talked a little bit about this before. and so I do think that the idea of the sacred and what the work you've done with your awakening from the meaning crisis videos fantastic avenues different avenues to really the same truth that to varying degrees we have been clouded and the paths to the sacred have overgrown almost to the point where we can no longer distinguish where the entrance to these paths are but there are inroads being made and I do think that Little by little, people are recovering the sacred and not a sacred that's tied to an institutional or doctrinal belief.

39:44Because as you said, this is happening from all different corners. I even think there's a certain discovery of the sacred in certain atheistic books. Martin Haglund's This Life is an atheistic pursuit of the sacred. and what he might call the spiritual, which is very much tied to that spiritual freedom. It's a commitment to something. And I see it happening all over. And what's really beautiful is that this concept of the sacred is so integral to so many different discourses that it's actually providing the rallying point that various thinkers and writers and readers are able to rally around and gather to envision something that's not necessarily tied to institutional belief, even though many of those readers and thinkers belong to certain traditions.

40:36I think that's really where the strength will be in this new movement, because previously, religion provided that rallying point. But I think a larger concept of the sacred that you've outlined in your lectures, and that I talk about in my poetry videos, is something that is more original than the doctrinal and institutional expressions. But I do think it's really tied to an awakening of that spiritual energy and the faculties and seeing through the illusions of our own day.

41:14And I wonder if I could just throw this back at you.

41:22And the title is called, of one of your series, The Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Yes. And I'm wondering if we're kind of journeying along the same path here and what one is awakening to or what is being offered as the awakening moment or the reality that's beyond the state of sleep in this metaphor. Yeah. So a couple of things I want to say about that. That's deeply provocative and evocative. So here's where I'm deeply influenced by Mark Wynn and then his book, Renewing the Senses, which I keep recommending as a masterpiece.

42:07And the connection I've made to the whole literature around the spiritual senses, an idea going back, at least its first explicit philosophical presentation is in the work of Origen. And notice the language, we've got this ocular thing where we're seeing through things, but it's not physical seeing, but it's not not physical seeing. Let me play with this for a sec. And then we've got, well, we're hearing, we're being called, right? This sense of being called, vocational. But we also have in here, we have touch. We have being in contact with what's. And so there's an idea in 4e coxci, which is called exaptation.

42:49which is the idea that what cognition does is often repurposed and what life does. Let's give a living example. I'm speaking with my tongues. Tongues did not originally emerge for speech because lots of organisms have tongues, but they don't speak. Or at least they shouldn't be speaking to you. Anyways, but the tongue is very sensitive for poison and salt and sugar, and it's very flexible to move food around. So it's great. You don't have to make a speaking organ from scratch. You've got the tongue and you can just repurpose it. And then what it turns out, and there's a lot of work increasing, is what the brain does is it takes sensory motor patterns, right?

43:33And it exaps them. It reuses them, right? Those processes for abstract. And I don't like that word, but I'm just using it in contrast to sort of, you know, concrete experience. abstract cognition. And we see this, I just did it. We see this right in how we are constantly using what Lakoff and Johnson talk about as conceptual metaphors. Our language is carried along. I hope you're following what I'm saying. I hope, but I'm wondering if you're grasping or getting my point, even though maybe this is a little hard for you to make your way through, See all that language. This is all sensory motor navigation orientation language.

44:20And I'm gesturing at the same time, which is also sensory motor action being exapted for communication purposes. And so the idea is the sacred in doing what it's doing, what we're talking about, this is my proposal. It awakens us by calling us to exact our sensory motor sensibility into a spiritual sensibility so that we can experience what we can realize, better word, what John Wright talks about when he's talking about Iris Murdoch. He calls it sensibility transcendence. It's that great line in Murdoch where she talks about the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. She thought her daughter-in-law was coarse and rude and impulsive.

45:08And then she has this beginning, a glimmering of an insight, insight, right? That, no, maybe she's sincere and authentic and creative and down to earth. And then she gets a reciprocal insight that, wait, maybe I've been just too blinkered in my framing. I'm too rigid. I need to open up the way I'm framing reality. And this is sensibility, transcendence. and we awaken our ability to see with insight, to hear with vocation, to be called by the resonance of voluntary necessity, to be in contact that gives us a sense of erotic pleasure in being at one with something because we're in contact with it.

45:54So we find things attractive to touch. We find them appealing to our hearing and we find them affording to our sight. That's my proposal. What's being awakened in – what we're being awakened to is we're waking up the spiritual senses. That doesn't mean anything necessarily supernatural. It means the expectation. That's a proposal I have in answer to your question. I think so. I really like that. And find it really affirming of the body in a way that some versions of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism can kind of get a little too petty. Exactly. Thank you for noticing that. Sorry for interrupting. I just want to thank you for noticing that.

46:35That is intended. It is a full-blown embodied notion that I'm presenting. Yes. Please continue. Well, you know what the weirdest thing, just to talk about that, the weirdest thing, the weirdest doctrine to me in Christian theology is the ascension of Christ into heaven. Like the idea that his three-dimensional body is actually supposed to be somewhere in a place. Like that's the thing that's very strange about this. And a lot of, I don't know, I've never heard like a sermon on the weirdness of that. If you think about it, it's like it's the material world somehow taken up into. I think that's like one of the key points of the whole resurrection theology, which is very body affirming in a way that Christianity often has, I think, maybe ignored or just kind of neglected intentionally or not.

47:28But absolutely. And something you mentioned about the idea that, okay, these, the bodily senses are then put in service to something higher. It's not a negation of them, but it's a, it's a putting them into higher service. So in a way it's recursive. And I think if that word, uh, recognize to, uh, well, to, to, to think again or to cognate again or to see it again. And so, so you come back to it in this, in this way. Um, yeah, sorry. Did it, by the way, did I interrupt you? Were you, were you still going with, with that? No, no. I wanted to hear what you said about that because I mean, I have a second half of the proposal.

48:14Maybe I'll lay that out in response to your question. And then I would like to hear you respond at length. So the agent side is this awakening of the spiritual senses. Our sensibility, transcendence is afforded. And then on the other side, this notion. So we have this notion of valence and we're being drawn. Things are being drawn together, right? And I want to talk a minute about a work of art that has had a profound influence on me. And so it'll seem orthogonal at first, but give me a moment. I'll come back around. So one of my favorite plays is Equus. Because it deals, and I identify very deeply with Dysart, with the psychiatrist, because his profound ambivalence.

49:13He wants what Alan has, but he has to cure Alan of how the sacred is coming alive to Alan. And I sometimes read, in one of my courses I read from the very last passage where Dysart is facing the audience and Dysart says that Equus comes out of the cave. It's Plato's cave, obviously. Equus comes out of the cave and says to Dysart, account for me. Account for me, which is one of the original translations of Logos. Give an account, account for, be accountable to, right? And Dysart's wrestling with this. And for me, Schaeffer's got this, I think this is like what often happens in a great work of art.

50:02You get a prescient intimation of something. And so what you see in Equus is you see these things being drawn together. They're being magnetized together. There's this image and this moment. And the movie, by the way, can do things that the play can't do because it can it can just show you imagery and do flashbacks. Right. And Richard Burton, I think, is his greatest performance as Dice Hart. And but you see all these things being drawn together. Right. And then, you know, you look at. You know, biblical literature and you see L and YHWH, I won't pronounce it because it's offensive to Jewish people, you know, being drawn together.

50:44And then that being drawn into relationship with Ahura Mazda, and then that being drawn into relationship with the Platonic good, and then that being drawn into Jesus of Nazareth, who himself is this magnet for all of this, right? All of this stuff being drawn together. And then that gets magnetized to what's been happening in Platonism and how it's drawn in Aristotelianism and Stoicism and Pythagorean. And you're getting, I call it a semiotic symbiosis. And my proposal is that far from that being comfort to the village atheist, that is actually perhaps how we should now start to think about the sacred.

51:26That the sacred is this inexhaustible drawing together that draws upon, like I'm talking about when we draw and draws, traces, right, that valley of intelligibility and draws us towards the inexhaustibility. I mean, when I encountered that in Equus, I went, oh. And then when I'm reading this otherwise, you know, this huge book by Lewis, you know, the origin and character of God, which is overwhelming and pedantic, but not in a really horrible sense. It's like, I'm going to be relentlessly thorough and rigorous, right? And he's making this argument, right? And you've got all this stuff happening.

52:08And I thought, we should stop pretending that religions are pristine and pure and homogeneous. That's not Not what all the research shows they are. And we should instead, instead of that purity model of sacred, I'm proposing this semiotic symbiosis model of the sacred. And what our spiritual senses do is awaken us to that poiesis, that poetry. Yeah. That's my full proposal. Gosh. that makes me think that's so fascinating and it's and to me so true um you know and it's part it's partly what i was trying to do with my dissertation because it's very much in the post-secular vein because yeah yeah i wonder if this would would i'd be curious what you think about this in relation to what you just said about the draw because there's the call right there it is this as you said compulsion um you're compelled but you know we've been thinking at least in the English speaking and the German speaking world, we've been thinking of religion and secular in completely wrong ways.

53:19And I think in the ways that you've just described is the higher way. Ever since Karl Lüwitz's idea of the secularization thesis, the transposition thesis, which stated that anything that's secular is a departure from Christianity, which made Christianity the touchstone as to whether it was religion or whether it was secular. Exactly. You see a bit of this in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, although he complicates that thesis a bit, but he's very much within that same vein where there's so much of the re-enchantment discourse, there's so much of the secularization discourse that is being done by Christians and really great work too i think of paul kings north taylor and to some extent david bentley hart perhaps um maybe maybe rod dreher um although i haven't read his work but it sounds like he might be within that that tradition i've met him i think yeah i think he's doing that go ahead i think so yeah he's got a book on wonder and it seems to be doing that as well where where okay the departure point is christianity in the modernized world is the secular world that has departed from that And that thesis by Lovett got picked up by literary scholars in the 20th century.

54:36So that, you know, when you get to people like Wordsworth or Coleridge or William Blake, who do not fit within the institutional circumscriptions of religion, they're labeled secular. But that's not how they thought of themselves, right? Like that just doesn't work that way. And neither is it how their original readers thought of them. So the post-secular discourses try to, it sounds very much like what you just described, this concept of this deeper reality, this spirituality that draws into orbit these other systems of philosophy. And they're all part of really the same solar system in a way, bound together by that pull, that draw, that impulse that really comes from the human heart, but is also made intelligible by the soul of the world, we might say.

55:30um and that's very recent these post-secular studies are saying well you know the binary between religion i.e christianity and secularism i.e everything else just doesn't work uh it's just not a way of looking at at what's really happening here yeah and and um yeah and you know and taking apart a lot of the fables that support it, like that there's been an endemic, an inevitable, unavoidable conflict between religion and science. And that's the history. And, you know, Harrison, Peter Harrison has just demolished that. And there's a new book out, what's it called? Flat Earths and Footnotes that just demolishes that.

56:19And then you have, like, you know, is capitalism part of the secular world? of course the world of business oh yeah but tell me about this entity you believe in that the economy and where is it um and and how do we get access to it oh it has an offspring the market that has an invisible hand that moves things um and we participate in it with magic symbols that have no power other than the power we give them to participate in all of this we call it money Like, come on. It doesn't look. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So the point I'm making is like, I gave a talk about this just recently at the University of Toronto for the UTIM, the International Conference on Cognitive Science.

57:06And I was basically making this case that if we're going to talk about religion and we should in cognitive science, because religion forms a huge part of what makes us cognitive beings all the way back to the upper Paleolithic, then we should be paying attention to what religious studies and comparative theology and interdisciplinary work is saying, how it's undermining all of these fables of modernity. I wanted to bring up one more point about that sort of semiotic symbiosis, because that's exactly what I see happening in the advent of the sacred. People are crossing lines. They're being drawn together by they know not what, right?

57:47And they're talking to each other. My prototypical example is, you know, you've got John Ravakey, this cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist, Jonathan Pajot, Eastern Orthodox icon carver and studier of symbolism in the way Coolridge means symbols. And then Michael Levin, who's, you know, a cutting edge biologist, and we're all drawn together to talk, right? And sort of the, we found Neoplatonism as a shared language that allows us, not that we're arguing that Neoplatonism is true, but it's the language that creates the courtyard by which we can come together and it gives us the furniture, right?

58:31So that we can sit and talk to each other and orient to each other. But that's what I see. I see what's happening is that the The sacred is drawing people outside of their boundaries, across. Go, go, go, Adam. No, no, no. What you're saying is exactly right. And it's amazing. It's beautiful to see. And I just love the way you were describing it because it makes me really excited. This is, this is happening. But if you look at before every Renaissance moment, you have this reintroduction of the sacred or this rediscovery of the sacred. And usually it's through the introduction of the Platonic and Neoplatonic lexicon.

59:10Like the beautiful courtyard you described there, because you have it in the Florentine Renaissance, which ignited the European Renaissance when those Greek texts were brought over after the fall of Byzantium into Italy and the rest of Europe. You have it at the other Renaissance moment of Romanticism. You have Thomas Taylor. I believe it was Thomas Taylor. Last name Taylor, the great English translator of many of the - It's Thomas Taylor. It's Thomas Taylor. Is it Thomas Taylor? Exactly. Yeah. And he's lecturing just across the street from Blake's engraving shop. Oh, wow. Right. I couldn't tell if they'd ever met.

59:50Peter Aykroyd, the biographer whose biography of Blake I read, and Mark Vernon and I talked a little bit about this. Don't think that they met. Blake becomes a little critical of Plato after, but it's this confluence. It's this symbiosis you were describing, right? The other Renaissance moment, the American Renaissance, the platonic element introduced by Emerson to create a uniquely American philosophy for the first time. It's so Neoplatonic. And then, of course, with the modernist movement, you have the rise of esoteric movements, which are compatible with Neoplatonism. if not often derived from the hermetic texts, for example, or the discovery of it.

1:00:34The Golden Dawn and all that going on at the time, which is certainly influencing people like Yeats, who was a part of the Golden Dawn, and Joyce, who wasn't a part of it, but was aware of it, and many other artists who are coming up with new expressions. And what's interesting is it's almost like when this platonic lexicon gets reintroduced in a way that can fuse together these disparate fields in the way that your conversations have been doing, you finally have common ground. And that's what the platonic lexicon is really doing a lot of times in these larger cultural movements. If you look at our own moment, there's this really interesting thing happening now where there's such an interest in esoterica.

1:01:23Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Have you noticed that channel esoterica? I've met Justin and when he and Zevi Slavin and I have done a few videos together. His, his, his work's amazing. I strongly recommend it. Uh, yeah. His channel esoterica is brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah, I watched his video on Paracelsus. And at the end, he says, yeah, you can't find a really good edition, but I have this one from like 300 years ago. And, you know, he shows it to the camera. Like, man, that was my introduction to his channel, which, yeah. Like you, he has struggled with standardized institutional academia. He recently left, didn't he?

1:02:05Yeah, yeah. He was sort of forced out. um yeah and and in a way that's not really sort of morally justifiable um yeah i i yeah i that yeah that story is is a familiar one i hate to hear that it happened to him but um and it's good to see how successful his channel has been it's partly owing to that you know um revived interest in fields of knowledge that were legitimate during the European Renaissance and have fallen out of fashion recently. I'm pulling together a literary lecture series on the tarot. I'm using the old Marseille deck, which was popular in France in the 17th and 18th centuries.

1:02:53Are you using meditations on the tarot? Yes. Do you know Tom Berg, his work? Of course. Of course you do. I think if someone asked me, can you give me a single book that would act like a Bible of Neoplatonism to me, I would recommend Meditations on the Tarot, which is just astonishingly a good book. I was at a conference last summer on Tomberg, Barfield, and Jung. Really? There was a conference on that? Yes, I spoke at it and so did other people. It was really, really wonderful. What did you talk about? I talked about that I was originally very critical of Barfield's notion of second participation because he saw it as this sort of historical stages.

1:03:49And my point, which I made earlier to you is no, no, we're already using all kinds of language that has a double sense to it. Like, he attacked my argument. That's like both like, right. Like, and so I said, the cognitive science seems to be undermining that. And then, but I said, but then I've come around and said, oh, but maybe the cognitive science, which it's notions of 40 cog sci and participatory knowing is actually the vehicle by which we are fulfilling what Barfield was prophesying, which is bringing about a notion of a deep, a recovery of the notion of participatory knowing. So that's what my talk was on.

1:04:28That's fantastic. It's supposed to come out in publication. We're all supposed to be writing to an anthology. Oh, fantastic. Let me know because I would love to read that essay and others in that. It's fantastic. Yeah, but Tom Berg. Yeah. Go ahead. You were talking about meditation. Probably the best book I read last year. I read it for the first time last year and I want to reread it again and probably every year for the rest of my life because it's just a fantastic, fantastic book. Yeah, I'm using his, but I'm also trying to connect it to archetypes and literature as a way to kind of systemize a symbolic approach to world literature.

1:05:08So, you know, in The Fool, it's an interesting card. I was thinking of him with something you were saying in relation to the setting forth on the draw, on being drawn, on fulfilling the call. because there's that that one card at least in the Marseille Tarot which Tomberg uses with the dog behind the fool has has the stick of course and he's looking up and behind them is a dog that's that's biting down his pants so that he's exposed from behind and yeah I mean this is so it's so Christian it's so hermetic it's so you know this is the person who is so captivated by something that it doesn't matter that it's almost shameful and it doesn't matter exactly what other people are thinking you think of dostoyevsky's the idiot um prince yeah um and don quixote which you think this is a delusional guy but i really want that world he lives in um yeah yeah there's so much strange paradox with fool with foolishness and wisdom um even in the christian tradition but Yeah.

1:06:20No, go ahead. Well, the fool, I mean, Diogenes, right, the cynic is showing up. He shows off, obviously, in the hermit card. But there's elements of it because one reading of the fool is we become foolish because we become obsessed with the purity code being violated. His pants are falling down. Big deal. He's not doing anything immoral. But notice that you're obsessed about that and you're ignoring that something is, right? Who's actually the fool with the fool card? I think this is part of the way you have to play with that card. That's a great point. I hadn't considered that. But yeah, there again, it's the paradox of language that we're often wrestling with.

1:07:05The freedom to be enslaved or to give up freedom, rather. Yeah. I often use that example of when I'm trying to teach my students the difference between a purity code and a moral code because the cynics the ancient cynics were about trying to make it starkly apparent to people that they should not be identified the purity codes are not moral codes and vice versa and that's why he's carrying the lamp he's looking for the one honors first but he would also do other things that were deeply provocative i mean and like the pants like and i would say like imagine i'm in my class and lecturing and my pants just fall down i'd be very embarrassed.

1:07:44The purity code has been violated. You're not supposed to see me naked. But have I done anything immoral? No. And then I'll say, you know what? I don't want to see my parents having sex. They're both dead right now. But I couldn't possibly on pain of performative contradiction claim that it was immoral for them to have sex. And try to get it right. And I have a feeling, I can't back it up with any research into the history of the tarot, But for me, the fool card is, who's the fool? Who's the fool, right? And they played with this with Forth Gump. We think he's a fool, but then we start to realize maybe we're the fools, right?

1:08:26Maybe we're the, because we keep killing all the good people and we keep running all this machinery that is destroying lives. Is he the fool or are we the fool, right? That's so profound. Such a rich well of wisdom, these cards. Yeah, exactly. I had not considered that, in fact. But that's exactly right. And that's part of the dynamic of setting forth, kind of looking back and realizing that, wait a minute. It's the prisoner right before he leaves the cave, right? Wait, I thought I was wise, identifying all the shadows. But I now know I know nothing. So, exactly, it's the realization that you see yourself in the fool.

1:09:08Oh, that's great. And it might be a dog because cynic means dog, right? I did not know that. So, you know, you're living like a dog when you're a cynic. That's the idea. So, I don't know. Again, I don't know if that's the intent of the original card makers or anything like that. I'm just saying I find that a resonant reading of that card. and so I'm just proposing it as one possible reading. I'm not trying to claim it's definitive or anything ridiculous like that. Again, these cards are inexhaustible to go back to our - No, and that's the thing. Nothing's definitive in a way. The interpretations are always subject to the dialogic process of revision and recognition, I think, right?

1:09:56Yeah, and that symbiotic symbiosis because the way cards are drawn together and you put them together and the associations you draw. Now, we're getting towards the end, and this leads me to the question I want to bring up for our third episode in this series, not the final time we talk. This has been one of my longstanding criticisms of romanticism. Sometimes unfair, I will now say that, and I've admitted that. So I'm not happy with the way I presented this criticism in the original video version of Awaking from the Meaning Crisis. Qualified it a lot more in the book version, which is right there.

1:10:38But all of this, like this, I'll use some language from cognitive psychology, cognitive science. These are states of epistemic vulnerability. They are states in which what's happening is people are very vulnerable in terms of what they can know and how they can know. These are called pivotal mental states. They have a phenomenology of weirdness because this seems to be a trigger for an evolutionary function of, okay, you need to rapidly learn. And you need to learn very insightfully, very rapidly, very comprehensively. Um, and so that seems to be what the sort of biological evolutionary mechanism is.

1:11:23You probably know I'm not a reductionist in any way around that, but I'm just saying there's reason to believe that functionality is going on. That's what happens when you take psychedelics and so forth. Sure. The thing about epistemic vulnerability and massive learning, well, think about psychedelics set setting, who's sitting with you. what sapiential framework have you built so you can deal with self-deception? What sacred story do you have for integrating it? And if you don't have any of those things, you can come out of a psychedelic and go down a rabbit hole. And I get email from these people like this all the time, right?

1:12:00Where they believe their rabbit hole metaphysics and their rabbit hole God. And AI can do the same thing to people, the chatbots. And so these epistemic vulnerable states. See, now I'm presenting, we've been very critical, justly so. Now I'm presenting the conservative defense of institutional religion, which is if you don't have role models, time tested by tradition, you don't have ecologies of practices, you don't have a sacred story that helps people integrate these anomalous states into their everyday lives. You don't have people who will sit with you while you're suffering through these transformations, there is a very good chance that all of this will just go awry.

1:12:49And you see Plato wrestling with this. It's just somehow you have to keep the poetry and the logos together, right? The rationality in the Platonic sense, not in the modern Cartesian sense, but in the sense of not falling prey to self-deception or self-delusion. Exactly. Yeah. So, and one of my concerns, and again, I have already publicly admitted multiple times, I'm doing it again, that I will now be more qualified. I'll now talk about decadent romanticism as a subspecies, which are romantics who don't address this concern responsibly, right? And I can find people, I don't think you doubt that.

1:13:31I can find people that are definitely like woo, right? Sure. So the question I'm going to leave you with, and I want you to reflect on is, okay, given that we've got the advent of the sacred and a lot of what we're talking about here seems to be outside of orthogonal, not necessarily antagonistic towards institutional religions. Nevertheless, they, and this will sound like a paradox to so many atheistic years. They were the guardians of reason. They were the guardians against madness. So they were the guardians to make sure that we had people that were trained in looking for self-deception. They gave us reliable role models that put us on the right path.

1:14:20So Neoplatonism has Socrates, Buddhism has the Buddha, Christianity has Jesus. We have these figures that can guide us. We have practices that have been time tested, rich ecologies of practices that are not just gravitating to our egocentric preferences so they can challenge us and they can correct us. We often have to, we are responsible to other people in a community and meaning has to be mutually shareable and correctable. So I'm now, you see, I'm doing, I'm doing, I'm doing, pyro would be happy. I'm doing isothenia. I'm giving the completely counterbalancing argument. which is, and I'm asking you because you and I, I feel we share a spirit.

1:15:03This is why I hope we become friends because we are both, right? We are both saying a lot of what we're talking about. It doesn't seem like the organized religions are the place where it's happening. Now, I believe that neither you nor I are antagonistic towards religion. And if people are finding this within religion, more power to them, more power to them. And I really mean that. And I'll do everything to help them that I can. But there are many people that are deconstructing and a growing number, the spiritual but not religious, the deconstructed, which are spiritual but not religious, often without realizing it, that have rejected because of the trust apocalypse um institutional religion what what should we and and can can the great poets guide us towards where do we go to make sure that poesis remains properly bound to logos where what i mean by that is like all the ways that prevent us from going down the rabbit hole of madness and i'm i'm i'm alluding to uh lewis carroll for obvious reasons um so it's a beautiful question yeah yeah i'm sorry i was just going to say and and it's and part of what we can get into next next time uh will be uh the romantics participation in that deconstructive trend in the sort of the impulse to to be anti-institutional and anti-traditional uh which which the movement has certainly introduced and Charles Taylor has helped with that, elucidating that.

1:16:45But yeah, it's a complicated picture. I so look forward to talking more about that. Good, because I can't think of anybody as an interlocutor, the partner, me, as we wrestle with this. This is the key question for me right now. Because I see the starvation, the asphyxiation of the meaning crisis, people trapped in the straitjacket of modernity. But I also see people that are intoxicated and inebriated and drunk in a pejorative way because they have just abandoned any, because they have identified reason with the Cartesian proposal as to what reason is. And because of that, there is madness. There is madness.

1:17:40And I think a huge part of a good life is a kind of sanity that can afford moments of intoxication. I'm thinking of Rumi, but is not just mad. Yes. Yes. I think we'll have so much. And also to your point, I do think we are kindred spirits and it's my hope too that we will become friends through further conversations about this. But yeah, it's such an important point and it does tie into everything we've talked about so far. So yeah, absolutely looking forward to it. so adam i always give as you know the interlocutor the last word my last word to you before you give your last word is this was amazing um this just took took flight i hope i did not talk too much i feel that i should have been listening more uh but you you you were you i guess i just wanted to share a lot with you and i i and um i had a sense of uh of the depth of receptivity um and reflection you could bring to bear so i just want to thank you very very deeply for your graciousness and also your insight um and the sincerity of your insight and the passion that accompanies your sincerity so thank you very much thank you john and for my last word may i also say that um i've learned so much through this conversation.

1:19:06I've actually written down several book titles that I need to now go track down. So I wanted to thank you for what might be called dialogic hospitality and everything that you do on your channel in bringing together that symbiosis and that conversation and finding common ground. It's so interesting for me personally speaking from the very academic literature world to be hearing your metaphors and your concepts and words and concepts from your own tradition to enrich the way I understand that as well. So this has been a wonderful moment, these two past conversations of an overlap and of having the ability for me to kind of enter into a little bit more of your expertise that you've so generously shared.

1:19:56So, yeah, thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Take good care.