Silk Road Seminar - Elizabeth Oldfield

36:39Like people tell the same stories about them. The place where it's really, this kind of dialogue and this listening really helped me see my own faith is often through interviews on my podcast, The Sacred. So I've got one coming out next week with a guy who's a druid. He was the chief druid of the UK. There is such a thing?

36:58Dr. John Vervaeke:Wait, wait, wait. I want to notice this. I just don't want to lose that fact. There is a chief druid of the UK. Well, there is the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, and they have a leader who was called the chief druid for a long time. This guy, Philip Cargom. Oh, wow. He was very uncomfortable with the term chief druid, so he never used it. And it was only right at the end of the interview that was like, wait, were you the chief druid? And he was like, technically, yes. Okay, so tell us about that. Absolutely lovely man. I asked him why, as a teenager, he was drawn to Buddhism and then later druidry.

37:37and he said honestly I think it was the difference between the picture the picture of a buddha of the buddha sitting peacefully under a tree and christ hanging in agony on a tree right and I was drawn to the peaceful one yeah yes and I was like oh yeah yeah that symbol is saying such different things to you than it is to me. And you've just unlocked the semiotics of it in a way that I might just not have been able to see on my own.

38:16Dr. John Vervaeke:That's a fantastic example, Elizabeth. Please say more. That's exactly what I was asking about. That's exactly it. This is how we learn in general, right? I do believe in persons and we and embodied persons with a soul and we can see some part of the world and we have our experiences and we're formed in certain ways but in order to be jonathan roush again says in order to be a reality rooted community we have to be people who can take the perspective of other people and this is just like key data for figuring out what life looks like and so again and again I have Jewish friends who have taught me such deep things about suffering, essentially.

39:09Post-Holocaust, how do you navigate the meaning-destroying event of the Second World War? So this might connect to your pilgrimage. Last week I was helping lead a pilgrimage run by some friends of mine who went to Harvard Divinity School. uh the person who founded it um jewish background but is an atheist and started wondering could she apply the spiritual technologies of sacred reading pilgrimage all these things to other texts and so she started reading jane eyre and then harry potter and now jane austen and i learned my traditions sacred reading practices from her i learned let you divina i learned have ruta which is a jewish one i learned pardes i learned sacred imagination i don't know any of those things and i learned them from an atheist who reflected them back to me and again and again i see more clearly because of what because of listening to what other people see

40:14Dr. John Vervaeke:essentially that's so sorry for misrepresenting uh the people you were uh um but i mean the examples you gave were were perfect and germane um and so now now the interesting question it sounds like we're we're really resonating on this um and this is what pilgrimage pilgrimage is you go to a place you you go through tolkien's recovery you do the anthropological ethnographic shift right and you try to adjust to the place you have a different person can you tell me what tolkien's recovery is oh tolkien's recovery theory so fantasy literature is just escapism and he says fantasy literature can be escapism uh but and this is where he's relying on the distinction between you know and the imaginary although i don't think he quite says it although he might invoke coolridge's distinction i might be misremembering that but anyways he says no no with good fantasy literature it's like an anthropologist going to another country and they have to acclimatize to that.

41:20Dr. John Vervaeke:They have to put on new glasses and then they keep the glasses on and then they come back and this is like T.S. Eliot and they see it again for the first time. Right, yeah. And he said, that is recovery. You're recovering your world because of the fact that the best way, as you said, to see yourself is from another perspective, through other people's eyes. and you you can you can ritualize that you can do it imaginally in literature or you can do it literally um in pilgrimage um and as i as i've been saying to everybody the original meaning of theory theoria was people sometimes know oh it's that means contemplation not explanation but the original original meaning according to nightingale and ward of theoria is pilgrimage That's what theoria originally meant.

42:12Dr. John Vervaeke:And this is Charles Taylor's notion that I call meta-noetic passage. If somebody's here and you're trying to do a premise-by-premise argument with them, you can't move them. But if you get them to go over here and then recover where they were, they can go, oh, oh. And then you move them again, and then they go, oh, oh. And then you move them again, and you go, oh, oh, oh. And that's what pilgrimage is until you get the through line and it starts to take on a life of its own. And you're going through grieving and acculturation and there's all this demand on you. And, you know, there was a place.

42:51Dr. John Vervaeke:Each one of these has a presence. There was, you know, Istanbul or Rome or Sevilla. Each place has a presence. And then there was the presence of my interlocutor, like Jonathan Pajot or Charles Stang or Bishop Maximus. And then each place had a say that the interlocutor was trying to presence to me through themselves and the geophilosophy and the architecture and the art. And so you're going through this again and again. That's recovery. You're doing this metanoetic recovery as you're going through pilgrimage. Sort of cleaning your cognitive glasses. If the doors of perceptions were cleansed, right, then I would see things as they truly are infinite.

43:33Dr. John Vervaeke:So that idea, right, brings me to what also emerged for me in the philosophical Silk Road, because I've been sort of slowly, from a cognitive scientific perspective, which I admit is not exhaustive. okay everybody hear that but nevertheless it is needed you need a theory of the cognitive dimension of what i there's a cognitive scientific theory of mystical experience i'm trying to get a paper published on it right now right i probably going to get published because we it's in revision etc and then i've been also doing and this came out of the philosophical silk road the the idea of sensed presence and shareable sensed presence.

44:22Dr. John Vervaeke:I talked about this in Chicago as what spirit is, and those are spiritual experiences. And one of the things religion does is trying to get like the mystical and the spiritual to live well together because they can pull away from each other. And so why am I saying that? Because I had an experience that was mystical, spiritual, about, not about with, I'll just be really honest here. I had a mystical spiritual experience with God on the philosophical Silk Road. It was very profound.

45:02Dr. John Vervaeke:And it was due to the journey. It was due to reading an amazing book by Samantha Harvey called Orbital. I had been in three conferences talking about theosis and Barfield. And then I was suddenly alone in Zagreb in a country I'd never been in. All the right conditions were set, you know, and I had, and, and, you know, and I came to, I came to realize, because I'd always been, I'd been always very critical of personal notions of God. God should be impersonal because of the Heideggerian critique. God is not a substance. God is not a thing. If you make God a thing, you're just subjecting him to the system of things.

45:41Dr. John Vervaeke:I still think that all of that is correct. you know, Winn's not the same as a thing. No, exactly. But I didn't. Yes. And I, I am admitting a mistake. I am, I'm publicly admitting a mistake. And, you know, and that's what I'm getting from Yanaris and Desmond and others. And Zuzielas, a person is not an individualized or individualizing substance. He says that boldly. Right. And so I get that. but what what win wins masterpiece renewing the senses he talks about people he's going through james's religious conversions like he's from the variety of religious experience and james reporting on all these conversions and there's this theme that keeps coming out where people have this flip where they go instead of the universe is a container in which things are put in it that fill up the universe becomes a face the cosmos becomes a face in which every part signifies the whole, the way a human face does.

46:39Dr. John Vervaeke:And now you have the sense of reality facing you and calling to you in voluntary necessity, right? The thing that's at the core of love and reason and beauty. You find it intrinsically good just because it's the really real and it's just good because it's really. And these are all the features we have as we encounter persons. They're intrinsically good. They call to us. They make demands on us. They face us, you know levinas etc and i had a very powerful version of that and i came to realize for all my critiquing of dichotomies i was carrying one around which is you know the impersonal personal and that spinoza talks about the face of the cosmos and spinoza is often misrepresented as God equals nature.

47:27Dr. John Vervaeke:That's not Spinoza. It is God, nature, look through them to what is beyond them, because God is actually an infinity of attributes, and those are only two of him. So, right? And that's what I realized. I realized that either the purely personal or purely impersonal were somehow inadequate. That's what came to me. Why am I saying all of this? Because

48:04Dr. John Vervaeke:I'm trying to be really existentially honest with you. I don't like the word authentic, because it's part of the autonomous self-mythology. So, So as I get into and find myself increasingly loyal to the philosophical Silk Road, which has transformed me, I used to always carry a cloak of melancholy that I think was part of the wounding from fundamentalist Christianity, and I no longer wear that. I'm in the midst of Meniere's flare-up, which normally makes me dark and despairing. I'm not kicking up my heels because it's Meniere's, but I'm not in despair. And so I just, you can't get into this. What I'm saying is you can't, we're talking about it, and that's good that we're talking about it.

48:55Dr. John Vervaeke:But I think if we really pursue what we're talking about, it can't leave our sensed presence of the sacred as it was. I think that this inter-religious dialogos, I don't want to say dialogue, is part of the way in which the sacred is trying to renew itself and renew us towards it right now. And that for me means a reconsideration of what we mean by the sacred or God. That was a long speech because I'm trying to get to something that is really important to me because, well, I consider you a worthy interlocutor to bring it up with. And just how does all of that, what does that do? Does that resonate for you?

49:49Dr. John Vervaeke:What does that sing to you? Does it, to something, does it, I like to talk about how relevance realization becomes resonance realization when things ring true for us. um is that ringing true for you or what's it provoking in you it's mainly provoking like it's mainly provoking joy for you to say i used to carry a cloak of melancholy and i don't wear it anymore i'm just really glad about that um so i got a bit distracted about by that um so i became well i don't know this language falls apart but the simplest way to narrate is i became a christian when i was 14 ish 15 maybe and it was through noticed in your book you call them altered states of consciousness ascs yes yes driest possible way of describing and they're called pivotal mental states because they make you epistemically vulnerable it's all important language and it when you say it it sounds like and here's a little piece of your brain yes yeah yeah yeah yeah uh you know the way i had an encounter with capital l love right it was a meeting yeah yeah and everything has flowed from there and this thread I'm trying to pull on about relationality and difference it does feel like it goes all the way down somehow yes and again in my tradition I mean there's different there's different parts of it speak about this very differently yes but I think at least one orthodox interpretation is God and humans are not the same right yeah yeah yes That we are made in the image of God and are not God.

51:56And yet we are loved. That while we were still far off, he came towards us. Right? And this is where I feel very out of my depth in terms of, is there a big difference here with Buddhism or with Taoist, Dharmic religions? like I'm always interested in whether this concept of oneness is more puts less emphasis on difference you know Jonathan Sachs a wonderful um Jewish thinker rabbi yeah amazing he talked one of the books called the dignity of difference and it was very formative for me and I think booba goes there as well right almost and this is where it looks like the erotic that that you actually can't it's it's the difference it's the seeing from the outside it's the uncontrollability it's it's the instability actually of being out from ourselves are like secure skull-sized kingdoms as david bentley heart talks about it that is where aliveness is and where eros is and where love happens and we want we want relationality that is safe yes we want we want love that doesn't challenge or question us or make us reassess our beliefs or ask difficult questions of us and so we're deeply lonely because that's not a thing um and coming to go diff like diff and this is what where i was trying to push rodrea who agree with loads of stuff on and deeply disagree with loads of stuff on I think we have a, at Midwest Street, we have a fundamentally different understanding of difference.

53:43And I think, I don't know where he'd locate it in his political theology or in his theology. But the deeper I go into the New Testament, and again, we pick the bits we like, and it's polyphonic. And I'm like, I like John because he's mystical. And other people like Mark because he's a little bit more, you know, fully aware of the perspectival nature of my readings. my scriptures and how we bring in all my priors and all my biases but something about trinitarian theology and then this command of jesus to disrupt the tribes and to stop drawing lines and to not just love our neighbors but love our enemies feels to me to be saying something about difference being central to how we grow up ourselves and become fully human.

54:33So, yeah, that encounter with the personal nature of reality, and I think the personal nature of reality is God, love, and the fact that difference is somehow required in there. I wonder if we're feeling our way around similar things.

54:51Dr. John Vervaeke:I think we are. I think we're doing Plato's perambulation. We're doing circumnavigation around it. like the men around the elephant if we can pick up on a good aspect of it if they were actually moving and they could bump into each other it would be a better analogy that's one way but anyways

55:12yeah

55:14Dr. John Vervaeke:it's like I said

55:25Dr. John Vervaeke:Tillich talks about as i i've invoked the the autonomous autonomy autonomy autonomy is the magic word of the enlightenment is this and we even we even make autonomous and therefore atomize the true from the good and from the beautiful and then habermas goes oh my gosh we got to from help put them back together um etc um but tillich says well there's that but there's also heteronomy in which we are being oppressed and we are being destroyed and uh and we are losing agency selfhood and personhood he often equates that with the demonic heteronymous that destroys our agency our selfhood and our personhood um and the three levels of meaning in life that go with that and he says but what we're being offered um is uh he says in christianity later on he opens it up when he starts to talk about the world religions, but he says we're offered something that's neither autonomy nor heteronomy, and this is theonomy, which is what I think the state of theosis brings us into.

56:32Dr. John Vervaeke:It doesn't bring us into ontological or ontologically identical to God, but we are deeply participating in God as this capacity for deep communal being. Where theonomy is where we experience, and when people say what do you mean theonomy well it's it's it's neither you're doing it like this conversation has an aspect of i'm not making it you're not making it it's making it's taking shape and it's taking place and it's leading us to um but to give you how you sense it and this is all the work i've been doing around like frankfurt's notion about voluntary necessity The kind of voluntary necessity you find in a good argument that is compelling but not compulsive.

57:22Dr. John Vervaeke:Or love. I can do no other but love, Sarah, and yet I don't feel like I'm imprisoned or losing my agency. There's a beautiful thing, and I feel compelled to behold it. Listen to the word, by the way, beheld. Behold it, but I don't feel like I'm losing my agency. Right? Johannes. Not Johannes. Jana. Jonas in The Phenomenal of Life calls life a needful freedom, right? All of these things where, right, it's neither autonomous nor heteronymous. It's this. And I think why we think of those things as central and how Plato kept trying to find the through line between all of them, reason, love, beauty, resonance, right?

58:09Dr. John Vervaeke:He's trying to find them all. I think those are all our sensed presence of when we're in a theonomist. kind of situation as opposed to an autonomous or as opposed to a heteronymous. We're not offered against the demonic. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, by the buffered self-reliance, because it was trying to protect people, to keep them protected from a world that was looking increasingly absurd and demonic. And then we get secularized versions of that. And so that's why, and these two vacillate from each other. So, for example, we are constantly being promised from the Enlightenment on autonomy, and we are giving ourselves over to technology and institutions that promise autonomy while actually are heteronymous and putting us into deep, deep service.

59:01Dr. John Vervaeke:And so this is a radical thing we're trying to wrestle with here. and I think we have that I when Bishop Maximus gave me his you know his lecture on what he think what Clement meant by faith and I said I think what Clement's talking about is this voluntary necessity that's at the core of all these things and he turned to me and he said John that's a perfect argument okay good I obviously landed somewhere I think that's what faith is it's not believing without evidence it's It's that sense that keys us into theonomous communal being, because that's what reality is fundamentally like. And so that, I think, is why we want to recognize the irremovability of difference.

59:54Dr. John Vervaeke:Because the thing that distinguishes theonomy from autonomy and heteronomy is the preservation. And this is Desmond's point, the preservation of difference. The two other ones are trying to destroy difference. Yeah. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense to me. The phrase that is used a lot in my world is right relationship. Yes.

1:00:21That if you cash out, I don't like that economic phrasing. If you follow through on the...

1:00:30Dr. John Vervaeke:Flash out is good because it's embodied and alive, right? Yeah, flesh out, exactly. I'm trying to avoid too many unnecessary economic and machine metaphors. Flesh out, follow the thread of a Trinitarian anthropology, which, as you say, doesn't make any sense in, like,

1:00:51the thin definition we have of logic and reason.

1:00:55Dr. John Vervaeke:Like, the both three and one, the relationship as defining reality with difference within it you know that that who is god god is a relationship you have to sit with the mystery and and in sort of ceasing to resist that mystery and allowing it to work on you it it begins to i think illuminate the structure of so many things that the the desire to run away from difference or sub yeah subdued difference to step because it's like and this is you know again very on brand but i've always had to talk about sin in some form this is my this is my this is my understanding of the sin of pride is is the desire for autonomy which uh dislocates us from the body that we are a member of of of each other, right?

1:01:57That seeks to fracture the relationships that we are made for because we don't want to need each other. We don't want to be made for each other and made by each other. We want to resist that and turn it on ourselves. And we are in a time and we're repeatedly affirmed in that and encouraged in it and told that that's efficient and righteous and all these things. And it is one of the notes that resonates across a lot of different traditions that I think we can, if we could sing together whilst holding the slight discordance and the difference, that something deeply true that we need to understand about what human beings are like could be perhaps heard more strongly.

1:02:45Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, I want to pick up on that. You said, you know, the mystery of God's communal nature. And again, I'll quote Tillich, he says, look, when God, when there's the self-disclosure of the mystery, it doesn't cease to be a mystery, because then it wasn't a mystery, it was just a puzzle, right? Oh, here's the key. That's not what it is. And what I want to say is, but being in ratio religio, rightly proportioned connectedness to that reality. And I don't think this is instrumentalizing God because I don't want to do that. But what that means is we get an arena for practicing because everybody ultimately has a mystery in them.

1:03:35Dr. John Vervaeke:Right. Right. That's what difference actually is. That's its ontological grounding. If I ever think I completely get you. I have made a deep, fundamental ontological mistake. You and I both know this. We're in long term relationships. And if you ever come to, I get him, I get her, you're in deep, deep trouble. You have to have beginner's mind every single day of a relationship. That's what keeps us interesting. Well, of course, of course. But what I'm saying is, I'm saying the mystery of God actually gives us something into which we can enter into proper resonance. It rings true for us, and that continually teaches us how to recognize the mystery in other people, which preserves the difference in the connection.

1:04:27Dr. John Vervaeke:It preserves it as community rather than heteronymous or autonomous or just homogeneous kind of existence. that this is what there's one of the things i i'm seeing is like that again i i'm i'm i'm there's something about this language that i've got to get better because it sounds like i'm instrumentalizing and i'm not trying to do that because if i'm instrumentalizing a mystery it's not a mystery but i'm saying if we're in ratio religio with it right it properly tutors us it properly educates us draws from us the ability to recognize mystery imagine if you could do that with your partner with your kids with the natural environment imagine what that yes exactly so i want to ask you something because i'm thinking a lot about this and one of the things i'm interested in is polarization and and just the sort of fraying of civil society and i think one of the like cognitive elements of this is and from my very amateur understanding is how deeply the brain dislikes uncertainty yes how we would rather be right than almost anything else even if we're right about something that's horrible we'd rather like be certain that something bad is going to happen then stay in the discomfort of not knowing what's going to happen and i read this thing today someone saying you know we we would rather deal with terrible systems than live through the uncertainty of something new emerging because it like what is it the brain takes a huge amount of energy one explain that to me but i think that i relate that to the thing you said about religious practice helping you grow in virtues is one of the things it teaches you if it's healthy is that now we see through a glass darkly, right?

1:06:23It should teach you epistemic humility because you are not God. And there is so much you don't know and you get stuff wrong and it should allow you to, and I have found this in my own life, I can tolerate uncertainty better. The more time I spend in centering prayer, the more time I spend in contemplative practices. So I'd love to hear if you think those two things are related.

1:06:52Dr. John Vervaeke:They are. So part of my scientific work, work I'm doing with Mark Miller and a bunch of other people, is to integrate Carl Friston's predictive processing framework. That's my preferred name for it. It has seven different names because we have to do that in psychology. Everyone has to claim originality. Yeah. Predictive processing, which is that the brain has a common currency. In everything the brain is doing, it is trying to reduce being surprised. So it's got bottom-down expectations, bottom-up error. And what it's doing is trying to give you the meta ability to anticipate your environment.

1:07:33Dr. John Vervaeke:Because ceteris paribus, all else being equal, if I can anticipate better than you, I'm more intelligent than you. However, and this is part of where the work comes in, that's the more I open up predictive processing, the more I have to do, I confront a problem. Sorry, this will take a minute or two. Is that okay? I love it. Yeah. Okay. So the problem is you're trying to reduce surprise and yet reality is set up with all these horrible tradeoff relationships. If I explore, I can't exploit. And if I exploit, I can't explore. If I try to reduce bias, if I try to reduce underfitting, I'll overfit.

1:08:13Dr. John Vervaeke:If I try to reduce overfitting, I'll underfit, which I'm always doing when I'm trying to make predictions. right do i want to be a general purpose or do i want to be a special purpose do i want to mutually sensitive or do i want to this is relevance realization you get these trade-off relationships and so it has to build in this opponent processing so an analogy i use for people is predictive processing is like genetics it is how the brain is reproducing your sensory motor loop relevance realization is the natural selection the darwinian evolution on that that's constantly reshaping it top down so it's getting better and better at dealing with all of these unavoidable trade-offs now that means that you're right all else being equal the brain prefers predictable unhappiness over surprising joy what we like now but but the problem is this is the dark room problem.

1:09:15Dr. John Vervaeke:And for those of you who know predictive processing, the problem is if predictive processing is welded with relevance realization, like I've just argued, the problem with relevance realization, it makes you perpetually prone to self-deception. So you also have to be seeking self-correction because the very processes that make you adaptive by getting you to ignore so much information make you self-deceptive by having you ignore so much information. And so the system also has to be self-corrective. So now it actually has these two things, which is try to, you know, try to keep things the same, but you better correct yourself.

1:09:52Dr. John Vervaeke:Now, there's two strategies for dealing with that sort of meta trade-off, which is, one is, I'll try and find a very stable world. And then what I can do is evolve. I mean, cognitively evolve traits that fit me very well to that world. That works. Yes, that works. And but it works if you can create, if you can do what Bronze Age civilizations were able to do, creating long periods of very stable, social, environmental structure that works and that gets ingrained right but it doesn't work in a situation even biologically by analogy where their environment is radically changing they're what and then what the strategy changes and this is this is a biology is the science of the paradigm shift it's not physics i keep saying that look at the work of michael levin look at the work uh i'll just read philip ball's book how life works.

1:10:54Dr. John Vervaeke:When biologists, evolutionary biologists now talk about the evolution of evolvability, which is not to evolve a trait that's plugging into how things are the same. It's evolving your ability to evolve because you're plugging into how things are constantly changing. Because if I can keep up with the change better than you, I'll survive better than you. And so I think part of the advent of the sacred is the sacred is shouting to us, you got to move from evolving traits of your religiosity into evolving your evolvability of your religiosity. And so I don't think we have to be locked into, like you said, right, pursuing the same.

1:11:45I think there are people who foreshadowed, is that the right word?

1:11:53Dr. John Vervaeke:It sounds dark and I don't mean it. I think the Buddha, the Jesus, these people unlocked what the evolution of evolvability cognitively, biologically looks like for us. Stephen Batchelor, when he was talking about, along with others, about the Buddha, he said the Buddha was, I think what saying the Buddha was enlightened was that the Buddha was in a continual flow state. That's exactly what I'm talking about. The flow state demands that the environment is constantly changing and you're constantly in sight and self-transcending in order to deal with it. I think what I'm proposing, so I'm not saying I can establish this, I'm proposing that these people act as models of where virtuosity meets virtue in this new notion that what we're being called to.

1:12:39Dr. John Vervaeke:And that's what I was trying to say, and it got misrepresented as fundamental as a westiary that right we are confronting new ontology new ontologies the cyborg social media right agi these are new ontologies for us and we have and they are and they're not going at right they're going non-linear we have to evolve our evolve evolvability sorry that's a long answer but that's that's my answer to you we are we have that proclivity but we have to remember that the predictive found up with relevance realization and relevance realization is the machinery of insight it's the machinery of aha it's the machinery of that moment of cognitive evolution yeah so one thing i'm thinking is i i'm beginning to be familiar with your work but i wish we could have a glossary afterwards for people this come because i've tweeted about it and they're like it's the first time i've heard john and there's nine phrases in there i don't understand but i will maybe figure out ways to glossary because it's all incredibly rich but honestly i have an orthogonal question if that's okay i i so on the podcast i host where i'm trying to model uh curious empathetic conversations with people, some of whom are very similar to me, but many of whom are very, very different from me.

1:14:06And I'm kind of dropping in some like New Testament, nonviolent ethic and some behavioral psychology and everything I've learned about what does it take for us to be people who can do this work. And one of the things I do is I talk about predictive processing. And I talk about when you come to the conversation and you see the name or you see what someone looks like, or you see their bio, you already have a working model, right? You have, your brain is guessing who this person is going to be. And we have reward systems, which mean, because we really like to be right, as soon as they say something that you are expecting them to say, you'll go, huh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:14:41I knew that. And that reward mechanism can be okay, but it generally shrinks us. And what I'm trying to invite people into is this hunch that I have based on almost no research into the cognitive psychology of it, that there is a reward mechanism around surprise because I feel it there is it's called when I it is insight insights are some of

1:15:06Dr. John Vervaeke:the most rewarding experiences people have and part of the the core of an insight moment is yeah you realize that your expectations were wrong yes I mean it feels like when I have a working model with someone and they say something completely unexpected sometimes i call it a brain gasm i'm like yeah oh yes that is not what i was expecting i learned something my horizons expanded i love it and what i'm the project that i'm doing is i'm trying to say there is this loop we can get into and it's constantly being reinforced but there is and what i'm saying is like be someone prepared to listen to people different from ourselves not because it's like earnest homework we should do it to be good citizens that is true yeah but no one's going to be motivated to do that that's not how to work do it because it's really fun and it's really interesting so this is the whole dialectic into dialogos where people are given a structured practice such that they make They will propose what they want.

1:16:18Dr. John Vervaeke:They're allowed to revise. But they have to catch insights from other people. And then that has to be passed on and caught. And you get into this shared flow state around how the logos is taking on a life of its own. And what people say is, first of all, about reward, the flow state is the single most rewarding experience people have. It's optimal experience. And the flow state is just a cascade of insights. It's that I gave up how I think about rock climbing. I gave up how I gave up my, literally, I gave up my position. I had to reorient myself. And then I saw a new way forward. Yeah. Okay. Yes.

1:17:01Dr. John Vervaeke:We have to pilgrimage. Yes. Yes. Flow state. And the flow state is optimal. It's the optimal experience. People prefer it over pleasure. They prefer it over markers of self-esteem or like it's, it's, it's, it is, it is preferred over awards because read my 2018 chapter, uh, work on flow with, uh, with Ferraro and Hera Bennett, because it is so, it is the evolution of evolvability. It is you're training your insight machinery, you're training your intuition, and your brain is going, you're picking, you're in a, it's very plausible that you are picking up on the real causal connectedness to reality in a powerful way.

1:17:43Dr. John Vervaeke:This is highly rewarding and people can learn to do it and generate it within a dialogic practice. That's what dialectic into dialogos does for people. And people say - Could you just give us a very short definition of what dialectic into dialogos is? So the reason why I use these two things is Plato talked about dialectic, but then there was Hegel, Hegel, Hegel, Hegel, Hegel, Hegel, Hegel, and Marx, Marx, Marx, Marx, Marx. So, okay, so we have to get back to what Plato was talking about. There are practices that we can do that set up the conditions, but we can't manufacture the logo showing up when that conversation catches fire between us.

1:18:21Dr. John Vervaeke:But we can set up conditions within and without and between us that make us more prone to catching that fire. And that's when dialectic moves into dialogo. So it's basically because, you know, Kierkegaard has this great line, you know, the world thinks it needs a new religion or new politics or new this. But maybe in all this knowledge, what it needs is a Socrates. And I thought, that's a great quote. The problem is, you know, where is he? And then I realized from all the work we do on extended cognition, groups of people can act as Socrates for each other. So one person is the proposer. And then there's one person that's acting as the midwife.

1:19:01Dr. John Vervaeke:There's another person that's picking up on the vibe of the situation. And there's another person that's a scribe that's writing down different points. And they're all helping draw out the proposer. I propose that honesty is. You do this for a while, then you get to a certain stage, and then it passes to the midwife. The midwife becomes the proposer, and the whole cycle, and you do it through four people. Why four? Because you know how many chunks you can hold in working memory? Four. That's why we picked four. Okay? So four, and once it's gone around, you go into what's called free dialogue, because almost always it catches fire and starts to flow.

1:19:37Dr. John Vervaeke:and people say, I had one woman after we did dialectic and did dialogue at a retreat, she said, I'm going to take up the life of virtue. She didn't say, I understand honesty better. She said, many people say that, I sense the presence of the virtue. I don't just have it as a concept. And I feel how it's calling on it. And it's beyond my grasp. It becomes properly mysterious. That's what's happened. And when people have this, And they experience a kind of eros, a kind of intimacy that is not sexual. And so all of this is happening, right? And then they say this very reliably, I've always been looking for this, although I didn't realize it.

1:20:22Dr. John Vervaeke:Like platonic anamnesis. That's dialectic into dialogos. And it shows people, no, no, you actually find this way more rewarding, right? And there's so much unpredictability in this practice because it's creating resonance and resonance requires unpredictability, uncontrollability. And you don't overwhelm people because that's horror. Now, Carl Friston would say, and I would agree with him, although I would say, Carl, am I going to be talking to him in October? You need relevance realization theory. I think he'll probably agree with me, by the way. but he'll say yeah but what happening is predictive processing is going from local reduction of surprise and it's trying to get global reduction yes and that's what i mean by the evolution of evolvability rather than you know specific fixed traits so it's a malleable mindset rather than a fixed mindset thank you that makes sense to me and i'm gonna say to try to invite people into how pleasurable insight is and i think we know we know it right people know that learning something feels good so this is the number one reason people give for podcasts they like learning something but it has to be it has to be in deep learning yeah because if it's incremental people won't get this insight has an element of self-correction in it that regular incremental learning doesn't have it doesn't have the sense of aha reframing reorientation that's what is particularly rewarding for people that um so it's like the distinction between curiosity and wonder curiosity is you have a gap and you want it filled wonder is you want to call yourself and your world into question insight is a wonder experience wisdom begins in wonder it's not a curiosity experience um and this is why i think it all goes back to well it all connects back to humility because oh yes the the the control impulse the cslow stuff i was talking about midwestry like to go out from the self to as you said like let go of your position on the rock in order to find the next position is a form of surrender of the self right cslow talks about self-annihilation we have to be somehow trust that we are held enough to go if i change my mind i won't die which it's not something you encourage to do that much well i'll tell you when you're sparring with people one of the things you can do and it's kind of mischievous you can compliment them on something they just did because then what they do is they become focused and they're trying to control and repeat it and then you have them then you have them master manipulator behind the scenes well i was taught like when you're fighting uh and you never fight if you can avoid it because even when you win you lose but sometimes there is no alternative lives at stake right um but like you don't just fight with the person's body you're actually fighting also with their mind um The point I was trying to make, though, before getting into the martial arts, but the idea that when people like you have to be able to trust the flow state, you have to be able to like Socrates.

1:23:47Dr. John Vervaeke:He says this and it's easy to say, but really try it. We have to follow the logos no matter where it goes. and I for me that's that's that's just that that that to me it is like a motto for me yeah I mean I think it rhymes this my version of that will be like the spirit the spirit blows where it will exactly I have to pair those two together

1:24:36Dr. John Vervaeke:Feel your best and amplify your everyday look with Thrive Cosmetics. Go to thrivecosmetics.com slash shine26 for an exclusive offer of 20 % off your first order. That's Thrive Cosmetics, C-A-U-S-E-M-E-T-I-C-S dot com slash shine26.