Dreams, Stories, Psychedelics & Consciousness | Tor Nørretranders | EP 441

The problem with modern civilization, in many ways, is that we are so obsessed with predicting everything and making everything straight-lined and dependable and not being irritated by anything that our mind sort of falls asleep, in a sense. Everything is like the prediction we come with, and we need somehow to sort of refresh our sensory input from time to time.

I think, in many ways, the best way to get around your everyday reduction of the world. Hello everybody! I'm speaking today with Tor Nørretranders, who's a Danish author. I'm primarily interested in his work; he's written about 30 books. The book I know best is probably his most famous book called "The User Illusion."

I've been thinking a lot about consciousness lately—it's a preoccupation of mine. A few decades ago, I spent a lot of time reading books on consciousness. "The User Illusion," Tor Nørretranders' book, was the best one of the lot, as far as I was concerned, and it taught me a lot. So I figured the other day that I'd reach out to him. We haven't talked before, and so that was what happened, and I got a chance to investigate his thoughts more elaborately.

We talked a lot about consciousness as a reducing function, which is a very interesting way of conceptualizing it. It's something akin to Aldous Huxley's speculations, although he elaborated it in much more detail and very usefully. He also associated that with our ability to communicate verbally, in a way that I think was in keeping with the relevant neuropsychological literature and what we know about perception.

Nørretranders hit the target very specifically, and I thought it would be fun to talk to him about that and to share that with all of you. So that's exactly what's going to happen. Mr. Nørretranders, I really became interested in your work because of "The User Illusion," which I read quite a long time ago, probably about 10 years after you published it. I believe it was published in 1991.

Yes, I was 98.

Oh, okay, okay. So I see. Alright, so it probably would have been around 98 when I read it. I was quite interested in the psychology of consciousness, but I had a hard time finding any books that I thought were really credible. You know, I read Daniel Dennett's book, and I also read Jeffrey Gray's book, and Gray is a real genius. He wrote a book called "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety," which I think is one of the best neuroscience books ever written—maybe the best—but I didn't think his work on consciousness hit the mark the same way your book did.

However, I thought it was unbelievably helpful. I want to focus on one element of it. Maybe you can tell me how your thinking has developed. I really liked your idea of—I want to make sure that I actually get this right—you talked about linguistic communication as a form of unpacking, right? It was like a sequence of compressions.

Okay, so I want to walk through that because I don't know how much of this now is my idea and how much of it is yours, because it's been so long since I read your book. But this is how it seems to me, and then I'll have you comment on it. I've been trying to understand what it means to understand something. We use that word "understand." It's an interesting metaphor.

So I'm thinking about consciousness as a multi-tiered phenomenon. I'll start with a description of the world. You could imagine the material realm as a place of patterns—complex patterns. Some of them last for a long time; some of them are short-term. They differ in scale, but the material world is a place of patterns.

Then, on top of that, living creatures have a behavioral realm, and they interact with one another, but their behavior also codes the material world. Because we have to—just like if you're walking across a field, your pathway is going to map the terrain. The behavior of living creatures maps the physical patterns, and it maps the interactions, mostly between members of their own species.

In the human case, you have two additional layers of what's real. You have an imaginative realm, which seems to me to be where we capture patterns. We primarily capture the patterns of behavior in the imaginal realm. That's what a dream does because dreams have characters, and the characters act out a drama of sorts—more or less coherent. We make that more coherent in literature and in drama and fiction, and so that’s the imaginal realm.

Then, on top of that, we have the linguistic realm. It seems to me—and I think this is in keeping with your ideas—that the linguistic maps the imaginal, and it can be unpacked into the imaginal, and the imaginal can transform the behavioral, but all of that—there's a harmony between all of that that constitutes something like understanding.

So the first thing I’d like to know is: does that bear any resemblance to your ideas? And then what do you think of that conceptualization?

I think it's very complicated in a sense. I would like to start with a more basic sort of observation, which is the observation that, if you look at our sensory system, our eyes, our skin, our hearing, and smell and taste and all that, there’s an enormous amount of information that goes into us in every second, and you can measure that. In fact, that has been measured since the mid-last century, and people didn't really know what to do with that information because it's a pretty high number. Nowadays, people are acquainted with the concept of “bit” of information, and it turns out that it’s something of the order of 11 million bits per second entering our sensory apparatus.

On the other hand, you could ask yourself how much we can be consciously aware of. Again, you can measure this. There have been measurements of this since the 60s of the last century, and the interesting thing about this number for how much you could be aware of is that it’s so much smaller than what we actually take in from the world around us. We take, on the order of 16 bits per second, from the outside world into our awareness, but we take 11 million bits from the outside world into our system—whatever that is.

So the problem, or the difficult thing to understand, is that there’s a reduction of a factor of 1 million from the sensory intake to what we are actually aware of. Right? And that seems immediately very surprising. Somehow, conscious awareness is very different from sensing the world.

When you talk about patterns and recognizing patterns, that will be the sensing of the world that every animal would have to do, and we do, of course, also to survive. But what is that which we are conscious about? It’s a tiny little part of what we take in, and of course, most of the information we take in at every second is not really worth contemplating in that second. Like, I see behind you windows, and it’s obvious that these windows are not falling down on you, and you don’t have to reassure yourself every second, “They're not falling down, they're not falling down,” that wouldn't be very helpful.

So you have to select what you are aware of, and the point about consciousness then is—and this is where the linguistic part enters the equation—the point about consciousness is that if you take the origin of the word "consciousness," it’s from Latin, "consciere," which means "to know together."

So when I take in a lot of information from the outside world, and I'm aware of a little of it, it's very much so that what I’m aware of is what I share with other people. I point to something and say it’s red, and you have a concept of red, I have a concept of red, and somehow we sort of calibrate our way of seeing stuff. But there’s more to the quality of red that I actually see.

So consciousness is about sharing awareness of the outer world or the inner world in a very, very compact fashion compared to what we actually take in. Therefore, language is very important, social relationships are very important, and co-awareness is very important. You could say that the whole show starts with pointing. When you have infants, you point, and when they're old enough, they actually understand that.

The interesting thing about pointing is not the finger but what it is pointing at. Some animals understand that also, but sort of directed shared attention is very much the stuff of consciousness. So, in a way, it’s a social thing—it’s something you share with other people. But of course, you can have consciousness on your own, and most of us have a lot of conscious awareness without other people being involved. But that’s sort of the collective mind that we have internalized so that we can share our experience with other people without actually talking to them or being present together with them.

So that was a major theme of this book—trying to sort out this thing that we are doing an enormous selection in what we are aware of in conscious awareness.

Okay, so I have three or four things to elaborate on from that. I want to lay out another schema. Here’s what I’m going to dig into: you talked about pointing, you talked about the consciousness we have when other people aren't around, and you talked about sharing and trade. So let’s dig into each of those.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what a story is and how stories shape what we point our attention to. I understand that relationship between pointing and verbalization, but also pointing and specification of attention.

Okay, so I’m going to bring in some other ideas, and I’ll get you to comment on them. I was quite taken by my studies of J.J. Gibson. Gibson wrote a great book called "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception," and I think there are some brilliant things in it. I’ve been elaborating on Gibson's ideas in the context of narrative, and I guess narrative is relevant to the idea of sharing because a lot of what we share are stories. I think stories are pointers to value—that's a way of thinking about it.

So let me lay out a phenomenological world for you and tell me what you think about this. Imagine you specify a point with your aim. Now you’re determining a destination. This is what bees do when they communicate about where the pollen and the nectar is in flowers—they specify a treasure house of value.

Okay, so that’s the point, that’s the destination. So from Gibson's perspective, once you establish a point, then the world lays itself out as perceptible objects. Some of those are tools—they're all what he called affordances—they're all the phenomena that are now relevant to that goal. You can break them into roughly two classes: tools and obstacles.

So a tool is something you can use to move yourself along your pathway, and obstacles are like material entities. But then I think there’s a parallel in the social domain: friends and foes. Friends share your aim and accompany you along the way and they can be helpful, and foes are human obstacles but also can obscure or interfere with your aim.

So tools, friends, obstacles: T, F, O. And then there’s one other element, which I think is very cool. I just figured this out. I think the other thing that we perceive are agents of transformation, and those would be like magical creatures in a fairy tale. An agent of transformation changes your aim, and the reason they’re magic is because the world of the aim that they specify doesn’t play by the same rules as the rule of the aim that you inhabit.

Right? So okay, now the reason I'm telling you this is that it’s relevant to the pointing idea because that’s the landscape that emerges as a consequence of pointing, but it also is relevant to the sharing idea. I’ve been thinking that, you know, when we speak with each other, we are offering each the fruits of our imagination—that’s a way of thinking about it. Each word is actually a storehouse of value or a pointer to value.

So you could say the reason consciousness D—and this seems to be very much in keeping with your thinking—is that we can offer people pointers to a destination or specify a destination. And again, that’s not much different than bees do when they're doing a dance to specify where the honey is.

It’s the fruits of our imagination that we can encapsulate in words, and maybe we have that private consciousness, our ability to think on our own, so that we can build up a storehouse of value so that we actually have some to trade with other people.

Okay, so well, that’s a take on the things that you just described. So I’d like to know what you think about that.

I come to think of the paradigm of predictive processing, which has been very influential in the past 10 years in understanding how we perceive the world. Carl Friston, a British guy, is one of the leaders of the field. The basic idea there was a philosopher, very much in explaining this paradigm of predictive processing, who was kind enough to say that the deep idea behind it actually was in this book, "The User Illusion."

Oh, that’s cool, that’s cool. It’s nice of him to say so.

Yeah, yeah. But the point is that what "The User Illusion" tries to say is that first we take in information and then we create a sort of simulation of what that information is, and then only then do we experience—we don’t experience the raw intake; we experience our own retelling of what we take in.

The predictive processing paradigm is basically saying that all we experience when we go about in our stuff in the world is our predictions of what will happen next: what will this guy do? What will this monkey do? Will there be a fault in the terrain when I walk there? So it’s all about predicting.

In that sense, it’s all about storytelling; everything we know about the world is storytelling. And then, of course, it turns out very often that our stories are wrong. We are corrected—we understand that there was something wrong, and so we correct our storytelling. We make it more and more qualified, and when we get to know people, we have a better ability to know what to expect from them and so on. But it’s all a question of creating a story that is not inconsistent with the information we take in.

There’s one thing here that I think is very deep, and that is if you take children, they’re afraid of the dark. You go into the forest in the evening as a kid, and you are scared because of what could be in the dark. If you go there in the daytime, you’re not scared at all. Why is that? That’s because there’s nothing that contradicts the inner fantasies of the kid.

When it’s dark, there’s no information that runs counter to the idea of many weird trolls and demons out there, but in the daylight, there’s so much information that contradicts your ideas. So in a way, all of our perception of the world is a hallucination we create under the condition that it does not contradict the sensory data we take in. So we are constantly, constantly telling stories.

So telling stories is what perception is all about. Of course, human beings have taken this to a higher level than we expect a mouse to take it to, but it’s basically the same phenomenon that we try to create a consistent idea of what the world is like. But what we experience is our own dream, if you like, or our own fantasy, or better said, our own hallucination.

And it explains all the things we see when the light falls and you enter into the twilight zone, and then suddenly there’s not enough information to contradict all the weird ideas you have in your head.

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Yeah, yeah. So you talked about Friston, so okay, so I’m going to go down that rabbit hole for a while. First of all, I interviewed him for this podcast. Second of all, with two students of mine, Jacob Hirsh and Raymond Maher, we wrote a paper about the same time Friston was working on his entropy theories on anxiety as an index of entropy.

This is partly what I talked to Friston about.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and it ties in with this idea of root specification to a treasure.

Friston pointed out that, and this was in keeping with the work that we were doing, that if you imagine you’ve specified a route to a given valuable destination, you’re proceeding along it, and all of a sudden there's an obstacle that arises that makes the path more complicated and maybe infinitely more complicated.

So you’re driving to work, and your car quits. Well, you’re not going to get to work, and that means the complexity of your day has radically increased, especially maybe if you’re on the outs with your boss. Plus all the other routes that are dependent on the functionality of your car have all been thrown into disarray—that’s an entropy problem marked by anxiety.

So a lot of negative emotion is an entropy increase marker. But Friston pointed out something fascinating. I hadn’t figured this out, which was that if you move forward to a specified destination—let’s say a specified treasure house—each step you take that works decreases entropy because the path to the treasure house is now shorter and requires less energy expenditure.

So he could actually relate both positive and negative emotion to the concept of entropy. This maps really nicely onto this Gibsontian view because if you have, let’s say, obstacles and foes, well, they elicit negative emotion and they tell you that your path is in danger—your pathway or the aim is in danger. On the positive emotion side, you have tools and friends, and they indicate that the pathway to your destination is clear and maybe even more efficient than you’d hoped.

So, okay, so there’s that. So that’s cool because it ties emotion all the way down to entropy, which is a very fundamental grounding, and it also includes emotion now inside the narrative frame.

And so then you mentioned prediction. You know, I mentioned Jeffrey Gray. Gray’s work on anxiety is based on a prediction model, but I found that that was inadequate, and I’ll tell you why, and you tell me what you think about this. See, the prediction model, the expectation model, has kind of a cold cognitive element to it. It’s like you’re a calculating machine, and what you’re trying to do is minimize discrepancy between what you expect and what plays out in the world.

But if you can tweak that slightly and substitute desire for expectation, that way you can pull in all the motivational systems. So one good way of conceptualizing motivation as opposed to emotion—it’s a rough split—is that a motivation system sets a goal. Obviously, lust does that, thirst does that, hunger does that, anger does that, and so it specifies an aim.

Then the emotions, the negative and positive emotions, calibrate in relationship to that aim. So what you’re contrasting is actually desire specified by motivation rather than like a rationalistic expectation.

I like that because otherwise you’re in the expectation models or the prediction models, motivation doesn’t have a place, and that’s a big problem because obviously there are multiple instinctual motivational systems. A lot of the stories we tell are predicated on those: jealousy stories, quest stories, rage stories—they’re predicated on the operation of these fundamental motivational systems.

Okay, so there was that—I tossed at you the entropy issue from Friston, and then also the issue of motivation. So I’d like your thoughts on those ideas.

I think you are very right in saying that it easily becomes too technical if you think about prediction and testing your predictions. But emotions are basically all about testing your predictions. So the emotional language is another way of expressing the same mechanism. You feel fondness for someone because you expect good stuff to come out of your interaction, or you fear someone because you fear that bad things will come out.

These are emotions. So basically, what you see when you perceive something is already packed with emotions. There’s an example of if you go into a forest, and there’s a small tree trunk there—the lowest part of a tree—it’s fallen over in a storm, but there’s only a small part of the tree trunk left in the forest.

And you come there in bad lighting, and you see that thing, and it looks to you like a troll—like some alien weird creature. Now what would be the rational thing to do here for a perception system? Would it be to analyze closely the thing and then decide, “No, it’s the tree; it’s the bottom of a tree; it’s not a troll”? Or would it be to say, “Oops, it’s a troll. I better react on that.”

Of course, the meaningful thing is to start with the worst hypothesis in that situation—it’s a troll. Right? And then, because if it is in fact the remnants of a tree, well, it will stay that way, so you have time to find out.

So the way we perceive—of course you’re familiar with this Gestalt psychology, the idea that it’s a whole sort of creature; it’s a whole body of the creature you see rather than details. We don’t sort of analyze the image of a person from one end to the other; we immediately see something, and we immediately have an emotional response to that.

And we all know that we meet people in life that in the split second we know, “I like this; I don’t like this guy. I like this woman; I don’t like this woman.” We are very fast in our emotional response to what we take in.

So yes, it certainly is a very emotional process. I think part of the reason that when people analyze this prediction processing model as very intellectual is that it was inspired very much by the training of robots. Because to train robots, you had to use the same idea of moving towards something that you liked rather than that you—AI systems do that, right? They’re all goal-trained—all of them. That’s why they can now mimic human cognition even linguistically.

Right, it’s very interesting.

That’s right. It’s all reinforcement learning towards a goal.

Exactly, yes, we do that. But I want to say on the pointing—that what you were saying about pointing reminds me of something I read in a book many years ago by Lyall Watson, a British biologist, who is most famous for his book "Supernature" that he wrote in the late 70s, I think. He was very interested in supernatural phenomenon; that’s what I find personally most interesting, but he’s very interested in that.

And he has one fantastic example in that book, and that is if you have the egg of a frog, and the egg to become a new frog needs the sperm from the male frog, it turns out it doesn’t really need the DNA from the sperm. What it needs is the asymmetry introduced by the sperm moving towards the egg.

It’s more like the moment you introduce the asymmetry into the spherical egg, this is the point, then the egg will reorganize and become a very small embryo for a frog.

So the idea is—I’m not trying to say that sperm is not relevant to frogs or to humans—not that at all—but it’s more that the symmetry breaking—you have a sphere and you introduce this is the difference, this is a point—and all that’s like the reduction that consciousness consists of.

So that’s a point.

So okay, so a couple of things I want to talk about: your idea that children hallucinate terror in the face of lack of sensory information. Well that’s a good definition of the negativity bias, right? And the idea would be, if you can’t tell what’s going on, the worst-case scenario is you die painfully and immediately, and since that ends the whole game, you should be very attuned to that.

And so, as you pointed out, to misapprehend a tree stump as a troll is almost a zero-cost mistake—misapprehend a troll as a tree stump, that means you’re dead, right?

And so that’s really relevant because people have this pronounced negativity bias, and you could imagine too that in a landscape where the sensory information is poorly specified, the mapping faculty of the imagination has free reign, and the fact of that free reign—that’s a high entropy state in and of itself, right? Because if you don’t know where you are or what’s going on, anything could be happening, and anything isn’t emotionally neutral; it’s terrifying as story—that’s pertinent to that.

And also to your interest in anxiety is a concept from Danish doctors in the 17th and 1800s in Greenland. You know Greenland, part of the Danish kingdom? We had doctors going up there to help people there, and they observed a weird phenomenon they called "kayak angst." That’s Danish for "kayak anxiety."

The Greenlandic people went out in kayaks to hunt seals and other stuff, and they were very skilled and able and clever people. But sometimes they suddenly had a very strong anxiety episode and they refused to go ever again out in a kayak, which is pretty bad if that’s your living—going out in the kayak hunting for seals and other stuff. The Danish doctors said, “Ah, that’s just because they drink too much or they have too much coffee or whatever.”

But it turned out that it’s a true phenomenon in the sense it has no simple explanation other than the fact that if you sit in a kayak and the sky is blue and the ocean is blue and everything is blue—yeah, yeah—you suddenly lose your orientation.

And you see weird things happening. Pilots report the same thing when they fly into clouds—they lose orientation and they suddenly see weird stuff. You have John Lilly putting people in the 60s in these isolation tanks with body-war water and no sound, no vision, no anything, and after a few hours, they start hallucinating weird stuff. You don’t have to have LSD; they will hallucinate just if you take away their sensory experience.

Yeah, well, you’re pointing to something very important there, which is that pointlessness is chaotic and anxiety-provoking.

Well, this is a really useful thing to know ethically and psychologically because part of what it means is that the point constrains terror. Like, it’s better than that—if Friston’s model is right, not only does the point constrain existential terror, but it also elicits hope.

And so that would mean to some degree that the sharper the point—this is sort of analogous to the sperm idea—the sharper the point, the more, what would you say, the more promising and the less threatening the terrain.

Right? So I don’t know if you know this; you probably do. But you know the word "sin" is derived from an archery term, and the archery term is Greek. Actually, the derivation is the same in three languages. Three separate languages came to the same conclusion: Aramaic if I remember correctly, Hebrew and Greek. The Greek term is "hamartia," and "hamartia" means to miss the target.

So to sin is to misspecify your aim, and the worst sin, of course, would be to aim in the opposite direction or perhaps not to aim at all. There’s some ambiguity there—both of those are very bad.

But I think we actually understand this neurophysiologically; it’s much in keeping with what you just said. That kayak anxiety my wife experienced that once when she was swimming. She had the sense that she became suddenly aware of the cavernous volume of the lake that she was in, and it didn’t scare her so much that she never swam again, but it scared her enough that she talked about it for a couple of years when she went swimming.

But it sounds so interesting; it’s that sudden realization of the expansiveness of everything. You know, here’s a weird side note from that: in the story of Exodus, when the Israelites are lost and aimless in the desert, they get all fractious and continually rebel and behave very badly. They misaim constantly, and at one point, Moses, their leader, is very upset with them.

He retreats away from them, along with God, but keeps his faith and his point—his direction—and as a reward, God decides to show himself a little bit more to Moses. But he does something odd when he does that: he puts Moses in the cliff of a rock so he can hardly see anything.

When he walks by, he just lets Moses see his back. Part of that—the reason I'm bringing that up—is because that’s protection against kayak anxiety, right? You can well imagine what would happen if we all of a sudden became aware of the 11 million bits per second instead of the 16, and even that 11 million is a compressed version of what’s actually there.

Right? Because even that itself is highly screened. So have you looked at the psychedelic research pertaining to perception?

Okay, tell me what. Because it sounds similar, right? It sounds like what’s happening with psychedelic experience is that the domain of the narrowed consciousness expands, and you get a massive increase in positive emotion because of that—but also a potential massive increase in negative emotion.

The whole emotional landscape multiplies; does it seem logical to you that that is a movement that’s neurologically induced—like, away from the 16 bits per second and more to the 11 million?

Yes, I think Aldous Huxley, in his book “Doors of Perception” from the 50s or 60s that I quote in “The User Illusion” book, he used mescaline, I think it was, and talked about this opening of the mind. Many, of course, have seen it as sort of very early on what’s happening now these years with the psychedelics and the studies of how psychedelics will change the outlook of human beings on the world and allow them to take in different kinds of information.

Perhaps very much—and Carl Friston, by the way, is involved in some of that work also.

Yeah, yeah. People talk about this psychedelic revolution going on right now, which will have a huge impact on many of the problems people have with their anxiety and with depression and so on because it will open the mind and it gives sort of a direct attention.

I think the problem with modern civilization, in many ways, is that we are so obsessed with predicting everything and making everything straight-lined and dependable and not being irritated by anything—no rain, no wind, no interruptions—that our mind sort of falls asleep, in a sense. Everything is like the prediction we come with.

We need somehow to sort of refresh our sensory input from time to time, and I think there are many ways to do that. Psychedelics is certainly one; physical exercise is another; meditation is another. There are many ways to sort of get around your everyday reduction of the world.

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So some of Friston’s co-workers have been making the psychophysiological claim that what the psychedelics are doing is akin to a stress response—like it’s a highly magnified stress response. The logic there is something—this is relevant to the issue of point—so imagine that you’re reducing the 11 million bits to 16.

Okay, now then, imagine all the ways that that reduction could conceivably occur—like all the different ways 11 million bits could be reduced to 16. There’s a lot of them.

Okay, now the advantage to the reduction is you only have to deal with 16. But the disadvantage is, well, what if you’re pointing in the wrong direction? Okay, so let me tell you a story, and you tell me what you think about this. So I think that’s what the Tower of Babel story is about.

Okay, so let me outline it. So the Babylonian towers that that story refers to were generally ziggurats, and a ziggurat is a structure that has a point at the top. It’s essentially a stepped pyramid, and at the top, that story emerged—the Babylonian kings, and there were many of them, were engaged in the same kind of competition you see in modern cities, right?

They were going to build the highest tower, and that would announce the builder of the tower as something akin to a god—like a god emperor. And so these were god-emperors of the technological enterprise.

The people who build the Towers of Babel in the biblical story are the descendants of Cain. So they’re resentful and miserable and genocidal—they’re a bad lot, and they’re the first builders of cities. It’s those people that build the Towers of Babel.

And so these are points in the wrong direction, right? Because what the—what the—far as I can tell what the biblical corpus is attempting to do is to specify a point. It’s the point of the cross, actually, but it’s trying to specify a point as an antidote to the pathological points that might otherwise emerge.

What happens in the Tower of Babel story is that as the tower increases in presumptuousness—that’s a good way of thinking about it—and sort of a bitter and prideful rigidity—even the ability of the people who inhabit the tower to communicate becomes impaired.

Right, and this ties into our discussion because we’ve already made the case that words themselves are something like pointers of value. They’re compressed points as a value, and if the value hierarchy itself is pathologized, if the point is wrong, well then the words are going to become not only meaningless but in some ways counter to meaning itself.

That seems to me also relevant to the point of—let me see, there was another element that you brought in that was… Oh, yes, I know what it is. When the psychedelics hit—let’s say if that’s a magnified stress response—imagine if your point is very misaligned. Well, what you could do is reduce the intensity of the point and broaden the attentional horizon.

The danger there is now you’re in the desert, but there are many possible directions now that you could go, right? So it could snap you out of a false point, and I think that’s why people find these experiences—or can find them transforming and illuminating, right?

Is because they allow people to replace that pathologically narrowed point that has depressed them or left them nihilistic with a reintroduction into the richer sensory realm with the possibility of a reorientation.

I think that’s very true in the sense that what we basically did when we moved from being hunter-gatherers to cultivating the land and taming the wild animals—this is the story that the Bible is about—that most monolithic monotheistic religions are about this transformation from gatherers to farmers.

The farmer believes that everything comes from his work, from his little piece of land and from what he puts into it. The gatherer thinks that everything around him brings him something—either good stuff, evil stuff, nice stuff or not nice stuff, edible or not edible stuff.

But the world is open, and you go into it and you find something you would like to eat. The farmer believes that he controls and creates everything.

So I think it’s very much—also, that’s interesting—it’s about sort of contracting yourself to the city and building up in the city rather than going out into the open land and finding something to eat. I think much of the way we have evolved in social terms in the past, actually 10,000 years since we introduced agriculture, has been more and more contracting ourselves to a small space, controlling everything, and forgetting about the wide open space out there.

Even if you look at this, what you see when you’re going into a landscape controlled by agriculture—you see concepts; you see wheat, or you see rice, or you see maize, or you see very basic stuff, but it’s all the same.

It’s like a concept that has been transformed into a field rather than if you go into the wilderness—there are so many different things at the same time. We have compressed enormously this information, and we live in a simplified world that we created ourselves.

We found it efficient—that’s why we did it—but it also takes away from our mind the ability to see multitudes. And I think what happens, then, you could say, we take out entropy from our life.

And what happens with—I think with people who experiment with the psychedelics is that they experience, suddenly, this multitude coming back—they open up their minds to multitudes.

So that’s interesting. So there’s another biblical illusion there, possibly. You know, in the story of Cain and Abel, so the builders of the Tower of Babel are Cain’s descendants. But Cain is an agriculturalist, right?

And so you could imagine—so tell me what you think of this hypothesis. So that as the agricultural endeavor got underway—you pointed out that one of the consequences of that was that people started to believe that the world was a place where the fruits made themselves available as a consequence of direct human labor and effort.

And that could be contrasted with the hunter-gatherer, maybe even with the herder, that would be able with a herder mentality, which is more like—it’s a more wandering and diverse way of looking at the world. Now you could imagine that as agriculture got established, that did enable the aggregation of more and more people, right?

The builders of the building of larger and larger and more integrated civilizations. You could imagine that as well pointing to exactly the outcome you described, which would be the presumption of civilization.

Right? I mean, the prideful presumption in a sense. Now you’re talking about a very strange sort of complex compression because your point is that once we transform the world into a linguistic matrix and conceptualize it, we can then transform the world itself into an analog of that matrix.

So is that partly what accounts for your interest in agriculture? Because I know you’ve written books that are relevant to that endeavor as well.

I was wondering what the connection was, right? Because it’s not obvious.

No, it’s not obvious at all. And in many ways, it was an accidental event in my life that I became interested in nutrition and the way we produce food and how it influences our body.

But what really changed my attitude to all this—and it was a fantastic experience for many years—was that it dawned on me suddenly that the real problem in the way we produce food these days is that it’s so over-agriculturalized, it’s over-abstract, it’s over-civilized, in a sense, and that we’ve forgotten all about what nature itself provides and offers us in the form of wild food.

You can measure generation after generation that people lose knowledge of the richness of the real world, of what’s out there on its own. Wild means of its own will—it’s having—it’s not our will; it’s the nature’s will.

In studying that, I came across a trend in cooking, in gastronomy in restaurants, that happened also to have its leading force in my own country of Denmark, in the—maybe you’ve heard about the restaurant Noma, which was started like 20 years ago and became, after ten years, the leading restaurant in the world—which was absurd because Denmark, in terms of gastronomy, has always been sort of a joke. Nobody would ever consider Denmark to be a country where you would go for fine dining.

People would fly in; in England it was worse than England. Yes, that’s not good! We sold the good bacon to the British and had the bad bacon ourselves.

So yeah, yeah, Denmark was a mud pile of shitty gastronomy, but suddenly you had the best restaurant in the world, and why was that? That was because the chief chef of Noma, a good friend, he became a friend—René said we only want to serve stuff that grows where we are and grows at the time we serve it—the seasons in which we serve it.

So we will forget about all imported foods, we will forget about all the agricultural foods, and we will serve the wild foods for people on the plate. That was a radical idea that turned out to be fantastic in terms of taste and smell and all that stuff.

But it was also a fantastic idea because when he then gathered chefs from all over the world who were interested in his way of thinking in a number of big events he called “mad,” which is the Danish word for food—where you had all these people—and I was so lucky that he asked me to give the opening lecture for these events.

My basic point was that we moved from wild to tame, and now we’ll be moving back again. We moved away from wild food—all that nature offers—we wanted to control everything, and we ended up as a species eating almost only four crops.

It’s really surprising if you count the number of calories that human beings eat, more than 50% of these calories come from just four crops, like wheat, and rice, and potato, and lace—and so on, corn, I think you call it.

No monkey would accept that; monkeys eat 300 different kinds of vegetables, but we eat only four. And all the brain power of the chefs is used to make four very boring things to eat—edible all year around.

So you have chefs that come in and can take a potato or a steak or whatever and make that interesting in interesting in 500 different ways. So gastronomy and fine dining has sort of collapsed into taking a few very poor raw materials and making them interesting, even though they’re poor.

And the new trend is to use the skills and the intelligence of the chef to go out into the wild, nature, and say, “What is edible here?”

It takes a lot of skill and a lot of knowledge and a lot of care to bring it to the plate and to make it taste good, but then it’s much, much richer than anything you get out of a controlled, civilized agriculture.

So the revolution or the renaissance in fine dining was to understand that chefs should go out and study the edibility of planet Earth rather than to create fantastic recipes with their gastronomy skills.

Right, right. So that’s a return. Oh, that’s so interesting because that’s a return—that’s a return to the garden with multiple—what would you say? To the abundant garden.

It seems to me that there’s a powerful analogy there—that if we think of what the chefs are doing as a form of art that you’re—tell me if I’ve got this right—it's in keeping with what we've been discussing that that civilizational hyperfocus on four crops has abstracted us away from the underlying entropy.

So that’s good because we don’t die, but also from the immense quality that’s associated with that richness.

And so a fine dining experience like the one you’re describing is a reintroduction back into that plenitude. I’m wondering if beauty itself can be conceptualized that way. You know, because modern architects built these buildings that are extremely pointed, right? They call them machines for living—that was the Germans' contribution to the blight that constitutes our cities—right? Machines for living, hyper-efficient pointers in a single direction, and they got rid of all excess ornamentation.

But we could say that the excess ornamentation is actually a pointer to the plenitude beyond that merely efficient point.

Like here’s something I figured out about the difference between Japan and the United States back in the 1980s. I did a lot of different reports on the Japanese economic miracle back in the 1980s, and one of the things I learned about the Japanese is that if they get the point right, they’re unbeatably efficient.

But sometimes they get the point wrong; in which case, they’re moving like mad in the wrong direction—which is an engineering problem.

Right? You can imagine hyper-efficient engineers pointed in the wrong direction, like they are in China with the surveillance state. Well, in the United States, which is a way more diverse society, which also has a much higher tolerance for eccentricity and criminality, the Americans are incredibly robust because there’s always something crazy going on somewhere in the United States where the new point might be established.

You know, when you get that homogeneous society that’s pointed to a single pinpoint, if that becomes the wrong direction, which it tends to across time anyways, then it’s pathological efficiency in precisely the wrong direction.

So there’s this, you know in the Dao De Jing, the Dao itself—which is the proper pathway through life, the proper journey—is a balance between chaotic plenitude and pointed order.

Right? It’s not order itself; it’s not the narrowing of the plenitude to a single point; it’s the dynamic balance between them.

And okay, so one of the things I’ve been thinking about is that the sense of meaning—the instinct of meaning—you could think about that as a kind of meta-motivation. It’s like an amalgam of motivations that have become unified, and that’s what lends your life the sense of meaning, right?

The sense of meaningful pursuit, that seems to be a marker to me; it’s a biological marker for the optimized balance of plenitude and focus, right? So it retains the focus that enables you to be efficient enough to get to where you need to go because that’s obviously relevant.

If everyone was walking around on LSD all the time, nothing would ever get done because you can’t focus; there’s just everything is amazing.

And of course, that’s amazing, but you know what are you going to do if you have to eat? So—then, if you narrow too much, you get the problem that you’re describing, and you’re seeing that reflected in the agricultural enterprise, right?

It’s this hyper—so it’s a focus on four crops, but it’s also a reduction of the plenitude of the material world itself in accordance with that mapping, with that initial mapping. See, I think we do this to each other too.

You know, there’s something very dangerous in relationships—that you build a model of the person you’re with because you want to predict them and control them. That would be the cognitive explanation.

And then what people do is they punish each other for deviating from that expectancy set, and that keeps them narrowed and boxed in. But over time, it turns your relationship into—well, people get bored because they’ve—they—people get bored with their spouse often because they’ve turned them into a simulacrum of their imagination.

They interact with the idea of the other person rather than with the person. An analogy I think for all this kind of discussion is is a raindrop running down the hillside or the mountainside. If you had an engineer to solve this problem, we have this raindrop at the top of the mountain and we want it to get to the bottom, he would take his ruler and he would draw a straight line and say, “That’s the way to go.”

The raindrop would say, “No, I can’t do that,” and he would come with some kind of machine and dig a channel for it to run down, and now what the raindrop does, of course, is to go a little this way, a little that way, around obstacles and zigzag motion all the way down.

And what it does all the time is move downwards, but downwards is not the same all the way along.

So it becomes a very rich thing rather than a straight line.

I think William Blake, the British poet and painter, some hundred years ago, said that the straight—the straight road is the road of—of the intellectual road is the road of genius.

Yeah, the straight road can become the road of the luciferian intellect, right? That’s really attempting—but so—and also in the Dao De Jing, you know that—that raindrop analogy is used quite frequently in the Dao De Jing to refer to the Dao because the Dao is exactly the course that water takes when it finds its way downhill.

And you might say, well, why not make it hyper-efficient? And the answer is, well, what richness do you sacrifice in that single-minded efficient pursuit? Right?

And it’s a tricky business because you could imagine, you know, in a relationship, you’re trying to negotiate two things: you obviously have to come to terms with one another so that there’s some mutual understanding and some prediction and some control.

But then at the same time, you want to have the person develop and transform if you have any sense, and you want to have enough variability in their behavior so that they’re still, well, interesting, which is a good indication of the relationship between meaning and that balance between order and chaos.

It’s like if you sterilize your relationship with an excess of predictability, you just—your fantasy will start taking you into other relationships; that’s what’ll happen, right?

Everything that you’ve sacrificed to that single-minded aim will make itself manifest in the imagination that’s pulling you to a richer experience.

So, you know, one of the things that I did when I was doing marital counseling for my clients was if they were dissatisfied with their spouse, let’s say, I’d say, “Well, what do you fantasize about in relationship to a new relationship?”

Right? What fantasies spontaneously enter the theater of your imagination? And they would tell me, you know, in as much detail as was necessary. And I would say, well, why is it impossible for you to seek that within the confines of this relationship?

You know, it might be, well, she’s not like that or he’s not like that, or she would never do that, or he would never act that way. It’s like, well, people are pretty damn strange, and there’s a lot of mystery in them.

And if you’re a dancer, you can get a lot of interesting possibility out of people where you thought there was only a stultified actuality.

One of the things I noticed as a therapist and as an interviewer, you know, if my clinical session got boring, it was because I wasn’t paying enough attention; I was substituting my presumption for the person.

And so if I paid more attention, they would start revealing more of themselves, and then they’d become like—and this was even true for so-called simple—there are no simple people, but I had lots of clients who were—they weren’t intellectually gifted, put it that way. You know, they were people who would have been struggling.

You know, often they didn’t have a high school education; some of them weren’t even literate. But if you got them out of the box that maybe you wanted to put them in, they were just as unbearably interesting as anyone else.

And there’s a Norwegian writer, a fiction writer called Axel Simmus, who wrote in one of his books that man who does not understand that any woman contains every woman in him—is an idiot.

I mean, the way you approach your spouse is to understand she is every woman in this universe, and that could be someone you don’t like or someone you like or aspects of being a human being as present in that other human being. And the same, of course, goes for me as a man in that same relationship, that I’m the best of men and I’m the worst of men.

And one of the reasons that it’s a good thing to stick to your relationship, to be faithful to your relationship, is then you allow this multitude of possible persons to be there.

The moment you start thinking, “Oh, I would like rather to go over here or there or I would like to change things in that and that way and have another object of my love,” then you reduce that person, and you don’t see the depth, the richness inside that other person.

And I think that’s what a strong and good relationship is about. That is what love and openness is about—to allow the other person to be fully rich, fully wonder.

My wife just about died a couple of years ago, and so did I. It was a narrow pathway. You know, and I had a pretty good relationship with her before that—very good, I would say. I’ve known her since she was like 8 years old, so we’ve known each other mostly our whole life, you know.

And she changed quite a bit after she was ill, and really for the better. Once she started to recover, I was much more, I would say, grateful to have her around.

I mean, not that that wasn’t there to begin with; it was already there; I loved my wife. But the demonstrative, like a true demonstration of the possibility of her absence woke me up a bit more.

And one of the things that’s happened is that now when I see her, I can see her at every stage of her life at the same time. It’s really something. And also what’s happened—like she shed a lot of her self-imposed constraints in the aftermath of her brush with mortality.

It lasted like nine months; it was a very torturous experience, so she changed a lot. It’s taken multiple years for the full manifestation of that change, and it still hasn’t happened, but it’s a wonderful thing to see her.

And maybe it’s also a reflection of my change in attitude. Like, she’s taken off a lot of self-imposed constraints. I think we’re afraid of our own entropy and our own possibility, and in doing that, I would say she’s become more like a child again.

You know, and there’s insistence in that in Wordsworth, for example, and also biblical insistence, you know, that unless you become as little children, you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven. And it has something to do with that imaginative plurality that you described, right?

Because one of the things that’s magical about children is their capacity to magically transform and to enchant the world. And they do that because they’re going in many directions—they’re not narrowed.

And you know, that makes them in need of discipline and civilization, but there’s something wonderful about that. So I’d like you to comment on that, but I’d also like to ask you, you know, what you just said about relationships—that’s not something that everybody knows. So I’d like to know how you figure that out.

Hard work.

How did I figure that out? Yeah, that—well, and you can say it—not only did you figure it out, but you can articulate it.

So, yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to it, actually. But I think that it’s—I’ve always had a tendency to be very monogamous, is that how you say the word in English?

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

And faithful. But in the modern world, I mean, you’re certainly monogamous; you have more than one relationship, but one after the other. As a young person, you have several girlfriends, but you’re faithful to each of them all the time.

Is that understandable?

Absolutely!

Yeah, and that was unusual in the circles I lived in where people were sort of all over the place. I was like—I had this instinct for monogamy and I was sort of wondering why is that so?

And I realized that it made me discover and explore the richness of the other person instead of just comparing to someone else and wanting to change someone else. And then, of course, I’ve been cultivating that emotion and that way of living for quite some decades now.

And it’s very obvious that the moment you start comparing people—yeah, that’s a commodification!

Yeah, and you see the label—this guy I’m talking to has these opinions and this track record and so on, and you confuse the person for the label. And life becomes very boring.

And of course, what I’ve been doing with food and agriculture and—I’ve been doing a lot of work also with environmental issues and so on—it’s the same basic story all the time: that we confuse the label for the real thing.

We confuse the terrain for the map, yeah, the concept for the real stuff. And I think what we do when we are not sort of faithful in our love relationship is that we do comparisons all the time instead of saying, “Okay, this is it—I'm not a perfect man in any sense, but all aspects of masculinity and many aspects of femininity are in me.”

And that’s—every person is a universe.

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Right, right! Well, this is certainly something that I learned in—this is why I love doing psychotherapy; because that—the art of psychotherapy is to have that realization making itself manifest constantly during the conversation, right?

Because that—and that means the person is on the cusp of optimized transformation. So I’ve been thinking about this. Tell me what you think about this; I think this is extra cool.

So I spent a lot of time looking at the misalignment of aim. I spent a lot of time investigating evil; a lot. And evil is actually something you can point to quite simply in some ways—it’s a rare person who wouldn’t think that a sadistic Auschwitz guard who enjoyed his job was evil.

And people will dispute that, but you don’t have to talk to the people who will dispute that; it’s not—it’s not useful—it’s fairly easy to point to.

But the antithesis of that is not easy to specify: like, good as such is harder to specify as a point than evil is. But I think you, tell me what you think about this.

So I spent a lot of time studying play—especially in children—and he was the first person to identify the play circuit in mammals. That it was actually a specialized circuit and to differentiate it from the exploratory circuit because a lot of neurophysiologists had presumed that exploration and play were identical.

They’re aligned because they’re both in the positive emotion space, but there is a separate circuitry for play. And I think that play, I think play is the antithesis of tyranny.

And I think that play is the place where that plenitude makes itself manifest in a manner that doesn’t blow the frame badly enough to terrify.

Right? So—yeah, right, exactly! So you can see that, right? I mean, that’s why children are driven to play. But that’s also—so in your relationship, you said that you’ve been able to discover, let’s say, a multitude within yourself and within your partner.

And that you’ve also practiced that, which I would like to also ask you about. Like my sense with my wife is that when we’re doing things—when things are optimized—we’re playing house.

That’s a good way of thinking about it—that sense is replicated in our adult life, and it’s what children are aiming at when of course they do that kind of pretense play when they're young.

So I want to know what you think about that idea of play because play also has to be voluntary, right? It can’t be compelled—no force in play.

You know, unless you’re playing force, which you know is a special case—you can do that, but it’s still voluntary. So I’d like you to tell me what you think about the play idea, and then I’d also like to— you said you’ve practiced this way of looking at things, so I’d like to know about that because people don’t understand what a practice like that is.

You know, we practice all sorts of things, like basketball skills, but we don’t practice perceiving other people as a multitude, let’s say. That’s not a standard practice.

So play—and then that practice.

I play, I agree—is beautiful and wonderful, and I think it also—it’s a wonderful example. The two concepts I would put up against each other would be evil and love rather than evil and good.

That’s because I see everything as relational in my worldview; I don’t have sort of entities out there apart from human interaction. There’s something evil in itself. There’s evilness—a lot of it in human interaction—and love is in a lot of it.

I see evil as closing the barrier to the other person; ignoring their pain, ignoring their problem, ignoring that you do bad stuff for them. I see love as the total openness: I exchange everything with you; I don’t withhold anything; I don’t reject anything; I just take it because it comes from you, and I love you.

In that sense, I say play is a wonderful example of exercising the ability to exchange fully with the other person.

While evil is, “I don’t want to play with you; I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

I have done with many audiences a little game that I call the tickling game. It was inspired, actually, by a new psychological experiment done many years ago in England by a group of scientists who were studying whether you could tickle yourself.

Right, which you can if you’re schizophrenic, apparently!

Exactly! And Chris H. who made that discovery was part of this group. Oh, okay.

So they made a tickling machine, so you could move—you know, sticks that in a complicated way would actually tickle your skin, and then could tickle yourself even if you're not a schizophrenic because you know when and how the tickling would be.

But basically, when you tickle yourself, your brain already knows what your hand is doing, so there’s no tickling sensation. But if you tickle the person next to you, he or she will giggle and it will tickle, and sometimes I do—do this with audiences. I ask people to experiment.

First round, tickle yourself; doesn’t tickle—very basic.

Second round, you tickle the person sitting next to you on the left, and you have these 800 people going from just sitting there to yelling and screaming, and in two seconds it’s a dramatic effect, and then you say, “Oh, somebody didn’t get any fun here. So now you tickle to your right!”

People scream and yell again, and this is a beautiful example of, in my view, of the only thing that’s interesting about other human beings is that they’re surprising or they surprise us. They do things that we cannot control; that’s why they’re so interesting and so nice to us.

We like being surprised.

Yeah, yeah. But of course, if you went into the subway—the metro train, the urban—the train in the city, and suddenly somebody would tickle you, that wouldn’t be fun; that would be scary.

So you don’t want no control like in the train, and you don’t want full control like when you tickle yourself. What you like is sort of the in-between of control and predictability on the one hand and a lot of control on the other hand.

And that’s the nice thing—that’s the do you suppose that—okay, so you contrasted evil with love. And so one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking about this game was that like it seems to me that love is manifest most clearly in a state of play.

One of the things I’ve noticed with my wife, for example, is that if there’s anything between us—you know, an obstacle, conceptual obstacle, a disagreement about something—it’s much more difficult to enter into that state of play.

That has to be cleared away before that can really happen. And so that’s in keeping with PP’s findings because PP found that play was very easily suppressed by virtually any other motivational state, right?

So things have to be optimized. Okay? And then I wonder if that play—like, is play a reflection of the love that puts someone on the border between the predictable and the unpredictable in that opiated way? You know, because you see people doing that.

If you’re playing one-on-one basketball with someone, you want a competitor who pushes you, right? You don’t want to be exactly in your zone of comfort; you want to be a little bit outside that.

Right?

You want to have that—it’s a glimmer of what’s being suppressed by your aim; you want to have that still around. It’s like a halo—that’s another way of thinking—or a penumbra, something like that, right?

Something that’s glowing that reminds you of everything that you’re not attending to at the moment. There’s something very rich about that.

And you know, your thoughts about monoculture agriculture, for example, are an indication of—the you know, there’s an insistence in the Old Testament.

This is very relevant; this is something I’ve been discussing with some of my friends a lot. When the Old Testament people set out their fields, you know, there’s always some uncertainty about borders, so there was an insistence in those societies that the margins were for gleaners, right?

That’s where the poor could find their sustenance. And the idea under that was that your boundaries, although necessary, shouldn’t be so tight that there’s no room for experimentation and the marginal, right?

Which I think—and also I found out—in keeping with this, by the way, you know, there’s a hierarchy of DNA repair as a consequence of mutation.

So there are core DNA structures that if they mutate, they’re repaired with 100% accuracy. Right?

And then there’s a hierarchy so that peripheral—there are peripheral genetic codes that are allowed to mutate because experimentation can take place there on the fringe without demolishing the whole.

So that echoes that idea of the center, you know, the focal center with the experimental fringe; that seems to echo everywhere. And that’s something like the antidote to that narrow-minded technological efficiency.

When did you start to become concerned with that specifically? Was that associated with your investigation into consciousness or with the agricultural problem?

Yeah, yeah, the idea of this pathological narrowing. Yeah, I think it’s already in the—it's very much in the consciousness thing—not, of course, as fully developed as it became later, but this worry that if you exchange the terrain with a map, the world with a concept, the person with the idea of a person—which is very much what consciousness does—then you’re on the wrong way.

There’s a thing about our language, which I think was pointed out about 100 years ago, which is a very basic thing about language. We say, “This flower is red.” But no, this flower is many things—one of them having the color red.

This man is angry—yes, but this man is also many other things than angry. This man—that’s why I don’t like to make evil an objective thing in the world because I think this man is evil, yes, but he’s also other stuff.

This man is good; he’s caring. And so we are not—the mental states, the emotional states, the trait states that we have—we are more than that; we are much richer.

And we have a language that all the time—we say, “He is happy.” Yes, but he also needs to go through the twilight at a moment. You know, you understand?

So I think studying consciousness very much brought my attention to this very, very simple fact that we tend to reduce everything. And it’s practical in the sense that I can point to the flower and say it’s red; you can say it’s red, and we are in correspondence here, and it’s good.

But we also lose—each of us lose a lot of the experience and the sensing of the flower if we reduce it to being red.

Have you talked to Ian McGilchrist?

No, I’ve heard his name, yes.

Okay, well, so I just—I know I—and then we just did another podcast, which will be released soon. His sense—he’s done a lot of investigation into hemispheric function, right?

And his work is very much in keeping, I would say, with the main thrust of your work. The—and I think he’s got the neuropsychological terrain mapped quite nicely. Is that the right hemisphere seems to be, I would say, more comfortable in the domain of plenitude, and the left hemisphere is the reducer.

And you know, it’s possible—tell me what you think about this on an ethical side because we’ve talked about—I talked about this with Ian.

Because people with right hemisphere damage get kind of tyrannical and authoritarian, and they get very reductionistic. And much more than someone who’s neurologically intact.

And I asked him, “Well, is that worse among people who were already that way before the brain damage?”

Right? Is there individual variation? So if you were a narrowing intellect with an authoritarian bent, were you more like that if you damaged your right hemisphere?

And of course, there isn’t enough case history to know that. But I’m wondering, there’s an insistence in archaic literature.

I’ve really seen this in the biblical corpus. I just wrote a book about this, which is going to come out in November. I’m lecturing about it now, so it’s very much on my mind that that narrowing proclivity is like the sin of Adam’s job in the Garden of Eden.

His job is to name and subdue, right? To name and put in place. But pride—that's the pride element that seems to warp that; it isn’t even so much that we narrow; it's that we narrow and then we fall in love with our own narrowing.

And that’s the pride. And then we want to substitute that narrowing for reality itself. This is what God warns against, by the way, in the story of Adam and Eve when he tells both of them that they can’t eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

This idea is lurking at the bottom of that—it’s like you can do what you want, but you can’t—you can’t replace the moral order with your own set of preconceptual.

And that’s what you’re pointing to, right? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that’s what’s lurking underneath this. It’s not merely—it’s not the reduction per se because that’s necessary to have a point.

It’s something like—is it the totalitarian insistence that we got the reduction right, and that’s that?

Yes, we confuse the world with our image or our concept of the world.

We confuse the person with the idea of the person. Yeah.

So you can see it’s—my sense is that that’s allied with the totalitarian proclivity because I think that becomes pathologized when it’s allied with force.

Right, it’s that—not only do I want you to be in the box I put you in plus everything else, but if you’re not, then look the hell out from me because I can oppose that.

So here’s a cool thing. In the story of Moses, Moses is leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, right? So it’s a—it’s a quest story, and that’s the land of milk and honey, right?

It’s the land of eternal promise, and so that’s always what we’re doing, and that’s what a leader is always doing if he’s any sort of leader at all.

Now Moses’ fundamental temptation is to use force, which is the temptation of a leader. And he uses force a number of times in the story, but when he’s on the verge of leading the Israelites into the promised land, God tells Moses the Israelites run out of water.

And God tells Moses to use his words to elicit water from the rocks, and Moses doesn’t. He hits the rocks with his rod of authority; he strikes them twice.

And God tells him that he won’t enter the Promised Land as a consequence of that.

And I think that’s a story of the—that's the—and narrowing and force, right? It’s that, well, a leader has to specify a direction, and that does mean the sacrifice of all other potential directions, obviously.

And then you might say, well, when does that go too far? And it’s something like, well, when it’s no longer invitational, when it’s imposed, it crosses the line.

When you don’t listen to the rock, the only way you will get water out of the rock is if you listen to the rock and interact with the rock.

If you just punish the rock or hit the rock, you’re not having a fair interaction with the rock.

And so what power is, is about—what power is about not listening—doing stuff to people without listening to their cries and their sorrows.

Yeah, well, of course, if you’re the president and you can hit that button, and you can kill 100,000 people, there’s no way you could know about the screaming you produce, and that’s power.

So okay, so that ties into your—now earlier you juxtaposed love against evil, and you assimilated love to relation.

And you said that your interaction with the world is relational at every level.

Okay, so what do you mean by that, and how did you come to that understanding?

On several levels. One thing that I’ve been dealing a lot with in the past year has been the quantum physics—that seems very different from all of what we are talking about here—but there’s—in this quantum physics, a strong tradition of interpreting it as all relations.

Relationships. And all the problems you get in interpreting quantum mechanics is when you say it’s out there, it’s an object, it’s independent of me.

And when you start thinking that way, you have all these dilemmas and paradoxes of quantum mechanics. If you think of it all as relationships you enter into, and that it’s not meaningful