The 4 Horsemen of Meaning | Bishop Barron, John Vervaeke, and Jonathan Pageau | EP 204

There’s also something important, Jordan, in understanding that at least that the traditional churches, at least the liturgical churches, that you don’t—you don’t them. Like for example, in the Orthodox Church, they always say if the sermon is more than 15 minutes, it’s pride. It’s like keep your sermons as short as possible because you’re not there to—obviously, obviously guilty of that—you're not—you’re not there. I mean it’s propositional understanding is fine but it’s participatory. Like, church is participatory. So you enter into the church, you say—like you imagine an Orthodox church, even a traditional Catholic church, you have a space which is structured as the hierarchy, ontological hierarchy of being. And then you see these images which are patterned and are revealing to you these mysteries that are beyond words. And then you participate in the singing, these processions. And it is a participative thing. And so if you go there to kind of get knowledge, it’s not the same type of practice. And as you’re singing these songs and as you’re hearing these hymns, all of a sudden two images connect together and all of a sudden, you know, these things start to connect inside you in somewhat in almost a kind of super rational way. And the insights you get sometimes your heart, you have difficulty explaining them, but they’re very deep and they’re embodied as you bow down, as you kneel, as you eat the body and blood of Christ. These are different types of participation than just—and, Jonathan, I’m totally in agreement with you. And what did we do in our Catholic churches in the West? The same time we were presenting the Bible in this flattened-out historical-critical way, we also were flattening out our churches, emptying out our churches of just that mystical cosmic symbolism—the angels, the saints, color, the cosmic dimension—and we flattened them out and we made them like, you know, empty meeting spaces.

Hello everybody! I’m pleased today to have the opportunity to speak with people that some of you will be familiar with. They’ve been guests on my podcast and YouTube channel, sometimes multiple times. It’s always been interesting to me and to some of you at least, according to the comments, I thought it would be very interesting to get these three gentlemen together with me and talk about meaning—what meaning means, what religious meaning means more specifically—and we’re hoping to have a free-flowing conversation to investigate that question from psychological, theological, and personal perspectives. And so I’m happy to have John Verveike, professor at the University of Toronto; Bishop Barron, who’s a bishop, Bishop Robert Barron; and Jonathan Pajo, who’s an Orthodox Christian icon carver, and now as well a frequent YouTube commentator and public speaker. And these men, I’ve found my conversations with them always stretched my mind, taught me new things, and made me think, and so I thought we’d see what we could all do together. So welcome, gentlemen! It’s a pleasure to have you here. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. Thank you very much.

Yeah, John, I’ll start with you. So I’m going to ask you two questions. I’m going to ask you what you think meaning means. What does the term mean? What does it signify? And then there’s some implicit idea I suppose that meaning has different depths and that religious meaning is among the deepest of depths. And I’d like you to riff on that. We’ll go from man to man to do that; then we’ll start talking as if it’s a conversation.

Great, thanks again for inviting me and it’s a great pleasure to be here. It’s great to see you again, Jonathan, and it’s a pleasure meeting you, Bishop. So there’s a question and as you said quite correctly, that’s at the center of a lot of my work and also I guess my own personal project. I take it when we’re talking about meaning in this context, we’re using meaning as a metaphor. We’re talking about something similar to the way a sentence works. It has an intelligibility to it that connects us to the world in some important ways so that we can interact with the world and so we can be informed by the world. And that what we’re talking about when we’re talking about meaning, when in the sense of meaning in life, not just the meaning of a sentence, the question to ask is what is that metaphor pointing to? So I’ve put forth the proposal that what that metaphor is pointing to is something that’s fundamental to our cognitive agency.

And Jordan, this is something you and I have talked about before in other contexts, which is the problem of relevance realization, which is this deep, profound problem at the heart of cognitive science you find at the heart of AI mania issues within cognitive psychology. Categorization, communication—and this is of all of the information available to me, how do I zero in on the relevant information? Of all of the information available in my long-term memory and all the potential ways I could combine them, how do I connect and zero in on the relevant information out of all the possible courses of actions I could undertake? The way I could sequence various things together, how do I select the appropriate sequence of actions? How do I do that? And the thing that’s mysterious and wonderful and perplexing and intriguing and I’m obsessed about is we’re doing it all right now. And we’re doing it like this. And it’s not a cold calculation. You know, I’m standing out, I’m salient. There’s an element of arousal, there’s affect. You’re caring about some information and you’re backgrounding and ignoring other information. So it’s this very affectively laden connectedness because the idea of relevance realization is it’s not relevance, it isn’t in the head; it isn’t in the world. It’s in a proper real relation between the embodied brain and the world. This is what’s known as embodied cognition. This is the kind of cognitive science I’m involved in.

So the idea is this is a dynamical self-organizing process and you can feel it a little bit at work right now as I’m talking. Part of your attention wants to drift away and think about other things, right? This is like variation in evolution. Another part of your attention is focusing in and selecting, and you’re constantly varying and selecting and you’re evolving in this dynamically coupled fashion, a salience landscape that makes you feel that you’re here now in this particular state of consciousness, in this situational awareness. So you’re deeply fundamentally connected, and that is deeply central to your cognitive agency. If you don’t have that, you’re not a cognitive agent. And this is of course one of the things that has—the whole project of artificial intelligence has disclosed. We thought that intelligence was mostly about propositional manipulation, right? Getting, you know, sort of coherence. And instead, no! This dynamical, embodied, evolving connectedness is very central to our cognitive agency. So much so that it stands to good reason that it is a core motivational feature and dimension of our whole agency.

So I talk about meaning in life and I use the word, and I use it deliberately, but I hope it’s not offensively—I use the word religio to discuss, to describe this connection because that’s one of the—that's the meaning of religio: to bind together. It’s one of the purported etymological origins of the word “religion.” And that allows me to now segue into what I would want to say religious meaning is. So I think when we are—here’s a metaphor, and I often use this—a lot of the time our mental framing is transparent to us like my glasses. We’re looking through it and by means of it, but there are times when I need to step back and consider this. This is what you do in mindfulness practices. I need to consider that mental framing, and I might want to not only consider it; I might want to educate it. I want—I might want to celebrate it.

So normally, religio is transparent to us, and therefore, we are—it affords our agency. But there are things we do where we step back and we try to become more directly aware of religio in order to educate it, perhaps correct it, improve it, celebrate it. And when we’re doing that in a way that creates what I call a reciprocal opening—the opposite of what happens in addiction—reciprocal opening is my agency is opening up, the world is opening up, and I’m experiencing this inexhaustible fount of emerging intelligibility that’s not just conceptual but is about this religio. For me, that’s the experience of sacredness. And so when religio—when we focus upon religio rather than focus through it in order to accentuate it and accelerate it so that we can come into the deepest mutual resonance between ourselves and the depths of reality—that for me is what religious meaning would be: the religio about the sacred. So that would be my initial answer. I hope that was helpful.

Okay, so I’m going to comment on that, and I’ll make my comments about this question because I’m also a psychologist, and then we’ll move to you guys— to Jonathan and to Bishop Barron. So if you think you’re—when you look at the world, there’s a central point of focus, and that’s mediated by your fovea. And that’s at the back of your—that’s on your retina in the center, essentially. And you’ll notice that when you zoom your eyes on inside on something, that becomes very clear. It’s a very small area that becomes very clear, and then you’ll notice that around that area, it’s less and less and less clear until it fades out into nothingness. And the nothingness you don’t even perceive. It’s just not there. And so it’s high resolution in the center, lower, lower, lower, lower way out here in the periphery. You actually don’t even see color. You can’t tell that. But you don’t, and you’re better at detecting motion because maybe you should look at moving things. And then the world vanishes. So that’s sort of what—that’s very much like what consciousness is and also it’s associated with meaning because you focus your fovea on what’s most meaningful, and those foveal cells are tremendously connected into the visual cortex. That takes a lot of brain to make that fovea work, and that’s why it’s such a small area and we move it around instead of just having a retina that’s all fovea. We’d have to have a brain like this big to manage that. So that’s sort of like a metaphor for consciousness and meaning.

And then I want to layer something on top of that metaphor. So, and this is something like the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious and also the relationship between narratives and consciousness and consciousness and unconsciousness. So I’m looking at, say, John right now. I’m looking at his eyes because that’s what you do when you converse with someone, and I’m doing that because we’re having a conversation. And so I have this little frame of reference that helps me realize what’s relevant right now. My goal is to have an interesting conversation and I’m picking out the targets that I presume are relevant to that goal. And then, but then you might ask yourself, well why that goal? And then, so that net— that story that’s guiding me is nested in a larger story which is, well maybe I’m an educator and a communicator and I’d like to bring this knowledge to myself but also to other people. And then outside of that is another story, which is, well why am I doing that? Well, it’s because I think that it’s an interesting thing to do and it’s a meaningful and useful thing to do, but it’ll help educate people, and maybe that’ll make the world a slightly better place in some manner. And then outside of that, there’s another presumption which is, well—and that’s where you start to shade into the religious. It’s like who exactly am I imitating when I enact that morality? And I think that’s where we can have a particularly interesting discussion because I would say psychologically that implicit figure at the outer edge of the narrative structuring of my consciousness and meaning realization, that would be something that’s psychologically equivalent to the hero of heroes in some sense that would be culture free, but in our culture, in the Judeo-Christian culture, that figure is Christ.

And so then there’s a—then there’s a—this is independent of religious belief as far as I’m concerned. Now, there’s an interesting relationship with formal religious belief, but I think this is the way it works psychologically. And I got some of this from studying neuroscience—the same sorts of things John is studying, but some of it from studying you. And you proposed that at the very least, speaking psychologically, Christ is the symbol of the self. And what he meant by that is that Christ is the symbolic realization of our culture’s determination of the embodiment of the ideal. And it’s an image, and it grips us. It’s the thing we imitate or we fight against. We’re in that whether we like it or not. And then the question becomes for me, okay that’s a psychological truth, but it can also be a metaphysical claim and an ontological claim, and that’s where this starts to shade into the religious per se.

So that’s it for me. So Bishop, do you want to take it from there?

Yeah, thank you. First of all, everybody, thank you. And Jonathan and John, to meet you for the first time, at least virtually. I’ve met Jordan twice now virtually, but good to be with all of you. You’re all Canadians, right? All of you are Canadian-born because all I can think of as you both were talking about Lonergan, maybe I’ll get back to him, but one of my favorite philosophers, the Canadian Jesuit Lonergan came to my mind a lot. But to answer the opening question, I guess I would say meaning is to be in a purposive relationship to a value. So I think certain values appear—epistemic values of the true, moral values, and aesthetic values. So the true, the good, and the beautiful, right? The three transcendental properties of being. And I think those values appear. And I really like what you’re saying too, both of you, about attention. What gets our attention? What draws our consciousness? Why, like, you know, William James says the mind is like a bird that flies, and it perches for time, it looks, and then it flies again. Why does it focus on certain things? And we call those values, I would say. And a meaningful life is one that’s lived in a purposive relationship to values. It’s seeking them in a very concentrated way.

Now, what’s religious value? Is a life lived in purpose of relationship to the supreme value, the summum bonum, to the source of goodness, truth, and beauty, which is God. And you know, what came to my mind as you were talking, Jordan, was two things from Aquinas. One is probably the most misunderstood and overlooked of his famous five arguments. It’s the fourth argument, and it’s the most Platonic of the five. He’s usually Aristotelian in form, Aquinas, but number four is Platonic. And what he says is we experience things in the world as more or less true, good, and beautiful. So just what I was saying, we notice values and we also notice them ordered hierarchically. There’s some that’s truer, that’s better, that’s more beautiful. Then Thomas says we only can make that calculation in implicit relationship to something we consider highest in goodness, truth, and beauty. And the way it’s misunderstood is people think, “Oh, I guess well there’s a tall building, there’s a taller building, and boy, there’s the tallest building. There must be some absolutely tall building.” But he’s not talking about something as trivial as that. He’s talking about the properties of being—the good, the true, and the beautiful. And being is by its very nature unlimited. So therefore, it’s true that we make those calculations. We see those hierarchies only finally in relationship to an unconditioned—I can use the more modern kind of Kantian language—some unconditioned form of goodness, truth, and beauty.

That’s religious meaning, it seems to me, is to be in purposive relationship to that. The other thing from Aquinas—and I think, Jordan, you and I talked about it last time we were together—I love what you did there because that’s an implicit argument for God. It’s in the second part of the Summa from final causality—every time I make an act of the will, I’m seeking a good. I’m seeking a value of some kind. But as you say quite correctly—and that’s just like Aquinas—that value nests in a higher value, which nests in a still higher value. And so I can’t go on indefinitely. That would make my act of the will incoherent. So I’ve got to come finally to some summum bonum—some supreme value that’s motivating me. That’s religious meaning, it seems to me, is now to be in relationship to this most alluring horizon of all of desire. Now there’s Lonergan again, my Canadian reference—to be in relation to God, Lonergan said, is to want to know everything about everything. So that’s the value, the epistemic value of the truth, but now in its unconditioned form. I want to know everything about everything. We call that in religious language the beatific vision. Or I want not just this particular good, so I’m talking to the three of you now, which I think is a good, but it’s nesting, as you say, in a higher good and it’s still a higher good. And so finally, I want not just this particular good; I want goodness itself. That’s a religious relationship.

So I guess that’s how I’d approach it, maybe piggybacking a bit on what you both said. Jonathan?

I think that what’s interesting in what John said in terms of relevant realization and in terms of this hierarchy of values that both Jordan and Bishop Barron brought up—the thing that I might add, at least in my perception, is that first of all, these—this pattern recognition that we engage with and this hierarchy of values and just hierarchies in general, they really are teleological in the way that Bishop Barron said. That is that the reason why we perceive hierarchy is because we’re always judging or perceiving or trying to evaluate whether something is good. But the other thing that this does in terms of—so it binds reality together, right? So you’re looking at something and you want to evaluate the apple. And this desire makes you see the pattern of the apple because you have to engage with it; you have to relate to it; you have to eat it. So because you have to eat the apple, that’s why you see it and that’s why you can perceive it and that’s why you’re evaluating it. But this pattern, let’s say a binding of religio that John mentioned, it stacks up. So until now, we’ve actually talked mostly about individual relationship—this individual relationship with the field, the being that presents itself to us, the individual relationship with the ultimate good. But it also does something else— is that it stacks up people together. It binds us together as well. And that’s in terms of meaning of religion in a broader sense that can also kind of help you understand religious practice: why we get together, why we sing together, why we celebrate. As John mentioned, why do we celebrate together? Because when you see the apple and you see a good apple, you’re implicitly celebrating it. Every act of recognition of a good is going to be a mini celebration. But that stacks up together in terms of people gathering and singing and processing and doing all the things we do in order to celebrate the highest good.

And let me just intersperse something there from a psychological perspective. Well, that idea of the mini-celebration, so there’s a technical reason for that in some sense. So let’s say you specify a goal and that goal is nesting inside the value hierarchy that we’ve already described. And so now you’re pursuing something of value. If you see something that leads you down the pathway to that value, that produces positive emotion. Technically speaking, that’s dopaminergically mediated. And so there’s psychological—there’s a fundamental neuroscientific reality underneath the idea that to perceive something good in relationship to a higher good is a celebration. And that is, it is definitely that. That imbues our life with a sense of positive meaning. And I mean that directly, like meaning is derived from this nested hierarchy and then the perception of valued—what would you—the perceptions of values that lead us down that pathway. Without that, there is no positive emotion in my understanding of it.

And so the last thing I might want to say is that so in the same way that the world reveals itself to us as this hierarchy of the good, in the same way that we see that, we—it also reveals to us cosmically. That’s why I’m saying it stacks up. And that’s why there are these—that’s why there are temples, that’s why there are—the law of Moses that was received on the top of the mountain, that there is a cosmic revelation of the same pattern that you encounter as an individual which is inescapable as an individual. And so that is what ends up creating these revelations of being into the world and binding us together as a body instead of just these disparate individuals. And as Jordan said, it’s very appropriate to discuss, you know, what are these revelations and what do they look like and of these revelations, which is the one that binds the most reality together into itself? And I think that that is when the image of Christ as being God-man, as going all the way down into death, as reaching to the highest summit—as you know we could—I don’t want to go into a story too much, but Jordan, you know that there’s—most of Christ’s story seems to go to the limit of storytelling in all the aspects in which it goes, right? It’s like Christ doesn’t just go down into the underworld and resurrect when he comes back up. The underworld is empty and death is defeated and that’s the end. And so it’s like that for almost every aspect of Christ’s story where he reaches the limit of storytelling. And so in that way, it’s—it is—it ends up just being the fact that we recognize it, that we’ve brought it together, that we’ve celebrated it, means that it is part of this kind of cosmic revelation and it’s something that we can look at objectively and talk about and discuss, but it’s definitely there in our story as Europeans, as Westerners. And we’ve discounted it completely. But I think we’re at a point now with this meaning crisis where we can go back and reevaluate it and understand it as this—the possibility of these relevant realization patterns stacking up beyond the individual, let’s say.

Okay, so I want to comment on that revelation idea. I’m going to go a little sideways here and so you might say that the standard view of the world now is that there’s an objective reality that’s devoid—that’s made out of, think, material things. That’s the most appropriate way to conceptualize it—it’s made out of objective things. They exist independently of consciousness, and we project a value structure onto them. And when we die, let’s say, when there is no human consciousness, that value structure is—there’s no value structure like that there. And so it’s ephemeral and evanescent. It’s not a fundamental part of objective reality outside of subjectivity.

So now, there’s a couple of problems with that viewpoint I would say. First of all, it isn’t obvious to me that we see objects; we see patterns. It’s not obvious that we see—I—you could make a strong case, and this was made by a man who wrote A Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, that what we perceive, first and foremost, aren’t objects; we perceive meaning. We perceive a falling-off place if we get too near a cliff. And even a six-month-old will perceive that. Children, infants, very, very young perceive beauty, they perceive symmetry, they perceive value. And so we don’t perceive the object and obviously project the meaning. You can’t say that that’s the way the neuroscience of perception has laid out the world.

And then the last thing is, is that the problem with the idea that we merely project meaning onto a meaningless objective world is that meaning is disclosed to us in ways that we can’t predict and that are outside of our—what would—outside of new knowledge that we don’t have can be revealed to us through the perception of value. It’s not obvious how we can project that and then also have something new revealed at the same time.

So meaning is disclosed to us, and the phenomenologists—phenomenological psychologists made much of this in the first third of the 20th century following Heidegger. So anyways, I’m going to leave it at that.

Can I just jump in? I go back here to Dietrich von Hildebrand’s famous distinction between the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable. And I mean he certainly understood the play between the subjective and the objective, and all the classical philosophers knew that. Aquinas certainly knew it. I mean the mind and the intelligible form light up each other, he said. I mean each one illumines the other. So I don’t think the pre-modern people had the sense of, you know, sharp demarcation of the two. Nevertheless, there was a distinction. I think, Jordan, you’re hitting at it there. We feel the distinction between the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable. The objectively valuable addresses me. It rearranges me. It’s not something that I’ve configured or I’ve projected. It’s turned me upside down. I think we’ve all had that experience. There was an article in Rolling Stone years ago, and it asked a number of the famous rock and rollers, “What was the first song that rocked your world?” And I remember liking the formulation of that question because it didn’t say, “What’s the first song you liked?” It was, “What’s the first song that changed you, that rearranged your consciousness?” And I can name that very clearly. My own case was Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” It wasn’t the first song I liked, but it was the first song that rocked my world and rearranged me.

And I think that’s what real value is like.

Now, bring it to the religious level. Now we’re in a biblical kind of framework where, you know, it’s not you who’ve chosen me; it’s I who’ve chosen you. And now when the summum bonum isn’t just dumbly out there waiting for us to rise up through some contemplative exercise—because, I mean, the summum bonum, Plato and Plotinus and Kant could all say, “Yeah, there’s a summum bonum.” But when it really gets interesting to me is when the summum bonum is after me. The summum bonum is trying to find me and is breaking into my reluctant and recalcitrant consciousness. And now you’re talking about religious revelation, but it has to do with that stunning objectivity—the good. Think of Iris Murdoch, there she was so strong on that theme that the good confronts us and it changes us and it doesn’t let us go. And religious revelation is the sort of ultimate expression of that, it seems to me.

I think it’s also important to wonder together why this has become so problematic. I think we’re in a meaning crisis, and I think we should remember, you know, the factor—I mean, so Bishop, you invoked Aristotle’s conformity theory, and of course that was replaced by a representational theory of knowledge—a propositional representational theory—for various reasons. One was trying to account for the Copernican revolution, etc. We had nominalism that said those patterns aren’t out in the world, and that’s why I keep saying, Jonathan, is more radical than he sometimes realizes because he’s challenging a fundamental nominalism in his work. And contest is the culmination of that. The real patterns are only in your mind, and we have no access to the world. And there are reasons why we got there, and then, of course, there are, you know, related issues around ideas of levels of being, which is, you know, I think you’re right—all of you have said this, and this is central to the phenomenology of intelligibility—but it seems to be contradicted by something that, you know, starts with Scotus and goes through Ockham and goes into the heart of the scientific revolution—is there’s no such thing as levels. This is not a reality; it just is. You know, existence isn’t a predicate. And those kinds of things. Now, I’m mentioning these things to try to indicate there have been very profound philosophical historical developments that have challenged this phenomenology.

And that part of the task—well, sorry, I don’t want to be presumptuous—part of what I see my task of being is to try and take the very best of science and answer all of those challenges in a way that restores confidence in the hierarchies of intelligibility and the phenomenology of connectedness.

Now, that’s one thing I’d want to say. The second thing—now, why are you doing that? Why are you called to do that, John, do you think?

Well, I’m called to do that because, well this is how I put it to my students who take my introduction to cognitive science—we have a scientific worldview in which science and the scientists and their meaning-making have no proper ontological place. We are the whole science and we are the black hole, within this brutal view that dominates us.

Let’s be very clear. And this is Heidegger’s point. Domination is not just ideational or even ideological. It is woven into the fabric of our technology, the ways we communicate. It’s woven into our cognitive grammar. We talk about—even the way that we divide subjective and objective—one of Gibson’s points, right? Jordan, you mentioned Gibson. Is the notion of an affordance, and an affordance is not properly objective or subjective. The graspability of this cup is not a feature of the cup; it’s not a subjective feature of me; it’s a real relation between me. So, I mean, Gibson, again, Gibson’s work is really profound. This is why it gets taken up into cognitive science. He’s trying to challenge this grammar, and there’s a whole bunch of us. I don’t want to—I’m in no way a singular individual, although I might be a bizarre one, but I mean I represent a lot of people who are feeling called to the fact that this lack of ontological placement and the fact how and the way it ramifies through our ontological technological structure and our cultural cognitive grammar—the very ways we think—is causing massive suffering.

So yes, absolutely right. I’m clear about that. I’m still unclear about exactly what you mean. What is this black hole? This is—I mean, is this the insistence on the absolute distinction between the subjective and the objective?

Oh no, like what is this black—okay, so I—what I meant—I mean, it’s related to that—but what I was directly referring to at the black hole is that science exists, okay? If it is, what kind of entity is it? And tell me, using physics or chemistry or even biology, use just that ontology and those methodology. Tell me what science is. And tell me how it has the status to make the claims it does. And tell me how science is related to meaning and truth and how do meaning and truth fit into the scientific worldview? They’re presupposed by that worldview, but they have no proper place within it. That’s what I mean.

So whenever we’re doing the science and saying this is what the world is, we are absenting ourselves from it. We have no home in which we are properly situated, and I think that ramifies through everything we think, say, and do to each other and with each other in a profoundly corrosive way.

That’s what I mean by the meaning crisis.

What’s the profound—it’s caused enormous suffering. It causes enormous suffering. I mean, like—I was talking to somebody just the other day in Australia and there are more deaths by suicide in Australia right now than Copenhagen. Yeah!

And Australia is one of the epitomes of, you know, the best countries in the world—affluent, liberal democracy, not much conflict, been at peace for a long time, blah, blah, blah, blah—all the things that the Enlightenment said would bring in unending happiness. And what you have is spiking in suicide, you have the loneliness epidemic, you have the addiction epidemic, you have people choosing to learn to live in a virtual world rather than the real world. You have all of these things that are pointing to the fact that there’s a significant stressor. You have positive responses too. You have the mindfulness revolution, you have the resuscitation of ancient wisdom philosophies like Stoicism. You have, you know—if you have the work of people like—right here—I mean one of the things—and I hope Jonathan takes this as a compliment because he knows how highly I think of him. I think one of the things that Jonathan is doing with his work is responding to this suffering in the meaning crisis. We were drawn to each other because we both saw the zombie as a mythological representation. The culture was saying to itself we’re suffering a meaning crisis.

I’m talking too much. I’m going to stop, Jordan, if we go back to the image that you use, which is the idea that we project meaning on an objective world. Already, you can see the alienation that is bound up in that very proposition, which is—okay, so where are we then? We’re not in the world; we’re like these kind of ghosts that are floating above reality. Like, where does that come from? Like, where does that floating intelligence come from that’s able to separate itself so completely from the world that it’s able to just analyze it objectively and then project?

And then realize that—it realizes that it’s projecting subjective meaning on top of it. And so when we—once I think that some of the work that John’s been doing and some of the work that you’ve been doing is to realize this embodied reality is that we are in the world and we are part and parcel of the manner in which meaning—even the world itself discloses itself. We people who think they can imagine the world outside of human consciousness like—where are they? Where are these signs? Where are they standing that they can tell us that we are projecting meaning onto the world? Are they like gods, you know, up in the world? They would never say that. They’ve taken themselves out of the equation.

And so coming back into reality and understanding this image of communion, for example, like a lot of the images that John is saying is really this image of communion that meaning is relational, that it’s communal, that it’s all these things that can help us even understand once again what the religious patterns are for is to just—oh, it’s actually holding reality together. And once we’ve broken that, then we get this increasing alienation. We get the increasing fragmentation. You know, the suburbs as just the spread of people that don’t know each other, they don’t have common projects, that have nothing in common except that they’re living in just this equal space. And so this kind of reducing of hierarchy in the world that the scientists wanted to happen, it’s happened now to us and everything is breaking apart, and nobody can hear each other. And it’s a direct consequence of that thinking.

Yeah, there’s a lot that’s just stimulating my thinking here. And one is, I’m again—I love the sciences, but I hate scientism. And scientism is all over the place in our culture. I deal with it all the time in my evangelical work, hearing from not just younger people but from everybody in our culture that science is the criterion. I saw a video, John, I think you and Jordan were talking to Brett Weinstein, and it was about, I don’t know, maybe something along these lines, but he made very articulately, intelligently, but made the argument that the sciences—the physical sciences belong in the supreme position vis-à-vis all forms of human knowing. And I’m shouting at the screen, “No, no! That’s exactly where they don’t belong!” And that’s a form of scientism.

The medieval is called theology, like the queen of the sciences. Well, at least that’s more appropriate. You’re talking about God and the summum bonum having some kind of supremacy. I also go right back to the classical world. The sciences, from a Platonic standpoint, they’re terrific, but you’re just getting ever more precise accounts of the cave, right? Of the images, the fleeting, even essens images of the world, to rise to higher forms of consciousness by way of mathematics, first of all, then to the higher forms of philosophy, and metaphysics. Aristotle, you know, moving from physics to mathematics to metaphysics. It’s not to denigrate for a second the sciences. Aristotle is the founder of many ways of physics. But it is to say there’s a hierarchy again—a hierarchy of epistemic hierarchy. And science, physical science does not belong at the top of it. When it does, something goes really wrong with the human spirit, and there’s a starvation of the spirit.

Well, and it’s hard to know how to take that seriously. Let’s say that’s a fact—there’s a starvation of the human spirit—that’s a fact. Well, is it a fact like a fact that emerges from physics? Well, not exactly; it’s a different kind of fact. But what happens if we ignore it? Well, people suffer and die. And we don’t use the fact that in the absence of a proposition, people suffer and die, as an index of its truth—not from the scientific perspective. That isn’t the methodology of science. But that leaves us with this problem of meaning. It’s sort of delivered to us, and it isn’t something—it isn’t obvious to me that science can address it at all. I mean, Sam Harris and other thinkers like Harris have tried to put the value up to bring the domain of value within the domain of science. I think it’s an effort that’s doomed to failure because I don’t think they’re of the same type. I think that science by its very nature excludes—it does everything it can to exclude value, except, John, it leaves us with the problem you described, which is the problem that Jung addressed when he was tying the development of empirical science back to alchemy, because—and this goes back to the idea of the hierarchies that we started out with—you know, Jung believed that he was really curious about why people ever became motivated to take things apart like scientists did to concentrate on the mind—mute. Like that—what dream drove them? What fantasies drove them?

And for Jung, it was he found that fantasy in the thousands of years of work on alchemy. And the alchemical notion was that there exists a substance which eventually became a material substance, whose discovery would grant upon its bearer immortality, perfect health, and endless wealth. So the idea, the dream, was that substance could be found in the material world. And that was a deep, deep unconscious fantasy manifested in all sorts of images—all sorts of bizarre images that Jung had the genius to be able to analyze and understand. He saw that as the dream that preceded the development of science in Western culture. Thousands—it took thousands and thousands of years to unfold this dream, and scientists were encapsulated within that dream, whether they knew it or not. And so the prime example would be Newton, who wrote much more on alchemy than he did on physics. And so, and so, John, as scientists, at least from the Jungian perspective, let’s say, we’re necessarily motivated by a narrative that we don’t understand scientifically to engage in the scientific process per se. And we’re so deeply possessed by that that it—it guides and moves our perceptions without us as scientists even necessarily having to be aware that we’re participating in that narrative.

So to your point, the whole enterprise is driven by a dream whose reality can’t be encapsulated within the process itself. It’s a very strange thing, I think. It’s very interesting that dream and sort of the undercurrents of development. So substance goes back to hypostasis. But of course, there’s another history of hypostasis, which is into the persons of the Trinity, which is a very different history. And so there’s no necessity that you go from hypostasis, the grounding of intelligibility, to materiality. And of course, what happened, right, was also the inversion of matter as pure potential to that which resists. And yes, yes. So, and I think that’s part of, again, about how, you know, the—the—the—reason why was supplanted by will as the dominant faculty by which humans understood and identified themselves.

I’d like to say that that’s bound up with a couple other strands. I’m not trying to do—I wish I could do exhaustive history here, but I took 50 hours to do it, so I’m not going to try and do it now. But you also have, like people like Harris and others, you have a deductivism model, right? Which is, I whatever I can deduce from the science is real, but in the neoplatonic tradition, you also look at what is presupposed by your sciences, and that is also a proper location for the real. So I have to presuppose, right, the intelligibility of the world in order to do science. I can’t use science to establish intelligibility. And then if I’m realistic about my science—which I better be because that’s what scientists seem to be doing—I have to be realistic about this intelligibility. But that’s in contradiction to the anomalous presuppositions, the flat ontology. Notice the contradiction—notice the contradiction and reductionism. So you have this whole tradition that says there are no levels of being, get rid of all that platonic stuff. But the bottom level is the really real level, and all the levels above it are false. That is exactly symmetrical to the upper level is most real, and everything coming down from it is derivative.

There’s no deep difference, this is part of the point I’ve made between an emergentist ontology—it is hierarchical, it has levels—and an emanationist, it is hierarchical, and has levels.

And so do you think Dawkins and selfish gene is an example of the idea that you can explain things in a purely bottom-up fashion?

This is part of the alchemical revolution. It was like—and I think—and I agree with Jung on this, and maybe my interpretation is slightly different. But, you know, there was a predominance of, you know, emanation and emanationists coming out of the Neoplatonic tradition, and we needed to rediscover—we need to—

Okay, so let me address that for a second: drag the Christians in, because one of the claims—one of the claims that that Jung made in his works on alchemy, which are very, very difficult to understand, was that, look, the Christian revolution took place and spread across, well, across what became Christian cultures. And there was an offer of salvation, right, of deliverance from suffering. And then—and that’s— that—and the hope that Christ would return in the kingdom of heaven would be established on earth or—or something to that end. And then thousands of years went by, and the disquiet grew, as that wasn’t revealed. And the unconscious imagination, looking to find a source of new knowledge that could redress that suffering and lack, started to focus on this opposite emergent ontology that you described. Said, we haven’t paid sufficient attention to the reality of the material world. Maybe that’s what holds the key to the alleviation of our suffering.

And so then there’s a pull away from the top-down hierarchical structure that Christianity had imposed in some sense, or revealed, to the opposite. And now it’s swung way in the other direction. And so could I just say one thing in the defense of the Neoplatonism, which is, you know, if you read Aeregena and Cusa, you get to—and Aeregena’s clear on this, you get a dialectical—in the Platonic sense, not the Hegelian sense—in which the emanation and the emergence completely interpenetrate. They’re both needed. Then they interpenetrate each other. And I would argue that what’s happening now is there are people moving—especially in the philosophy of biology—towards “we need bottom-up” and “top-down” is, you know, Jordan, this is rife through all of cognitive psychology, bottom-up, top-down thinking, right? And that’s not just specific to the mind. I think it’s never spreading out as—no, no. This is how we should start to think about it. But I think a more proper reading, especially of the later Neoplatonists points to that heritage within Neoplatonism itself so it doesn’t have to be something necessarily foreign to Christianity. I would at least argue that.

No, Saint Maximus is clearly at bottom-up and top-down at the same time in Saint Maximus’ cosmology. You have the notion that these revelations are both a communion of love and also a revelation from above, and there’s absolutely no contradiction between the elements coming together and coagulating in this relationship of love and in expressing this divine principle or this higher principle, which is coming down from above itself.

And in terms of Jung’s theory, I mean, I don’t want to be picky about it. He kind of imagines this story, you know, how come he came—came very much from Islam, by the way. It had a lot of its development was in the Islamic world. Even the word alchemy is not a—it’s not a Western word. And so I find it a little too simplified to just say Christians were waiting for Jesus, and then they created this bottom-up science. There’s a deeper kind of transformation which happened in the West related to nominalism, into a kind of slow progression towards this separation of heaven and earth, we could call it, like this kind of ripping apart of the two sides, which kind of led both to materialism and to all these esoteric things that were going on at the same time, right? It’s not true that materialism was on its own, but there were all these kind of esoteric developments that were manifesting themselves. We have to remember that Descartes spent his whole life trying to become a Rosicrucian. Like, these two things were—it’s like a ripping apart of reality that leads into the New Age and into all this kind of Neo-spirituality, and Christianity’s true message is rather the incarnational one.

It’s the one that John said. It really is this binding of multiplicity and unity, the binding of the emanational part and this kind of emergent part together.

And so if I—basically, I’m sorry, I interrupted.

No, it’s very stimulating stuff. And I would add, you know, the structuring element in the Summa of Aquinas is the so-called exitus and reditus, right? All things coming out from God, then all things returning to God. And so God makes a world that’s good—indeed, very good—but not perfect. And part of the drama of salvation—which is in the Bible always cosmic, not just human, not just personal—the drama of salvation is this wonderful process of leading to us the return of all things to God, the coming together from below, if you want; but under the alluring power of God’s love. So that’s one observation.

The second one about the sciences, I mean, I agree with you—there’s an army of scholars that say the condition for the possibility of the physical sciences in the West was Christianity. That is to say, the fundamental assumption that the world is not God. If you divinize the world, you’re not going to experiment on it; you’re not going to analyze it in this sort of objectivizing way. So the world is not God; it’s been created; therefore it can be experimented upon; it can be analyzed. But then secondly, as we’ve all been saying in different ways, it is radically intelligible—not just in a superficial way, not just in certain parts, but in every nook and cranny the universe is intelligible. That’s a very weird thing, the more you think about it. Why should that be the case?

And of course, it’s coming out, I would argue, of a Christian conception that the world did come forth—the Bible puts it poetically as a great act of speech, meaning it’s imbued with intelligibility from an intelligent source. But when you bring intelligibility and non-divinity together, you get the rise of the modern sciences. So they’re not the least bit repugnant to Christianity. On the contrary, what is repugnant is this scientism. And you’ve all been hinting at it in different ways. You know, trace it to people like Descartes, but I’m with John. I’d go right back to Don Scotus and Ockham and the breakdown of a participation metaphysics. And when you get this univocal conception of being, and following from that nominalism, and I would even dare say certain forms of Protestantism are very much conditioned by that way of looking at things, you get a lot of the problems we’re facing today.

I’m for a recovery of the pre-modern, this wonderfully rich pre-modern sense of a participative view of being— you know, the world in God, the world reflecting God, not a world of separated things, and God being the supreme thing among them.

So Aquinas says that God is not the supreme being; he doesn't call him en summum, but he calls him ipsum esse, to be itself. So there’s a whole view of reality that’s implicit in that description of God, and it’s— that is repugnant to scientism in its various forms.

And I think that’s the key to recovering a lot of sense of religious meaning.

I really liked the invocation of the participatory. Part of what I’ve been arguing is that the cutting-edge cognitive science—what’s called for economy of science—is challenging the reduction of knowing to propositional knowing. Knowing that something, yeah, okay, that what we’re discovering—and you can even find, you know, specific kinds of memory for each one of these—there’s also procedural knowing; there’s knowing how to do something, the skills; there’s perspectival knowing, which is knowing what it’s like to be here in this state of mind, in this situation, giving me situational awareness. And then the deepest is participatory knowing. This is the way in which we know by how we are conformed and transformed by others, by the world, so that our knowing of ourself and our knowing of this—so you see this, of course, prototypically in the way—you know, your beloved, you don’t know them by your skills or your propositional. Of course you know them this way, but this is not the essence of it. The essence of it is the way you know— you are conforming to that and you’re being transformed.

So your self-knowledge and your knowledge of them are bound together. But these— this is now becoming—these ways of talking about other kinds of knowing, and the way in which they, you know, are stored in different kinds of memory, right? Procedural memory, episodic memory, that weird kind of memory we call the self—this is now coming to the fore. But here’s the point I want to make: the point is, right, we’ve suffered kind of a propositional tyranny from Ockham on where we reduced all of knowing to the propositional. And I would argue that most of what I called religio is being carried on by the procedural and the perspectival and the participatory. And so that is in a fundamental way how it’s— it’s not just out there; it’s like right in the guts of our self-interpretation.

Yeah, the question I think—one of the questions is, what is the ontological significance of that, let’s say? I mean, one of the—leaving aside the truth or lack thereof of various religious claims, one of the weaknesses I believe of the rational atheist’s position is that, first of all, that their argument is carried out almost entirely in the propositional landscape. They treat religious—they treat religion as if it’s a set of propositions that are in some sense expressed in a manner contrary to the propositions that constitute science. And then I think, well, wait a minute, guys. You’re missing the point here. It’s like, well, notice that there’s a propositional element to religious claims and I often think that’s the weakest element of it. But what do you make of the fact that people have religious experiences? What do you make of that?

Exactly. When you say, well, that’s epiphenomenal, it’s like, well, yeah, is it really? Like, are you so sure about that? So let me give you an example. So I talked to Brian Murarescu and Carl Rock a while back, and maybe doing some investigation into the Eleusinian mysteries. And Murarescu’s book is predicated on the idea that what the Greeks were doing was using a LSD-spiked wine, essentially, to produce a collective mystical experience, and they had technologies to harness that. So it was collective and that that constituted the core of the Eleusinian mysteries and that that enterprise was practiced by the ancient Greeks for thousands of years continuously. And that experience was at the basis of the unity of Greek culture.

But more than that, that it was the fountain from which Greek wisdom flowed. And so it’s a revelatory hypothesis, by which I mean—it’s a hypothesis about the function of revelation in a society. If these drug-induced, dream-like states of religious experience are the fountain from which a culture like the Greek culture emerges, well, what are we supposed to make of that ontologically? I mean, we’re great admirers of the Greeks, right? We see our culture as certainly the rational element of it and perhaps a tremendous amount of the aesthetic element is deeply rooted in Greek presuppositions. It’s like, well, are the Eleusinian mysteries that religious element— is that an aberration or is it that which—in that within which everything else is embedded?

This is a fundamentally important question. It’s not something trivial. I really don’t know what to make of it because it throws the whole problem of, well, the ontological significance of psychedelic substances into the mix. And that’s a thorny problem if there ever was one, and that’s a problem of the lower meeting the higher, that’s for sure, right? These chemical substances that can reliably induce overwhelming mystical experiences. You can just set that aside and say, well, that’s a form of insanity, but it’s not schizophrenia. It’s not obviously within the category of mental illness. And then—and to Murarescu’s hypothesis runs quite contrary to that. Not only is it not insanity, it’s—it was a vital source of revelatory knowledge, philosophical knowledge, and got the ball rolling in some sense.

So God only knows what to make of that.

Well, there’s—in fact, there’s lots of experimental work being done on this right now—the Griffith Lab— I did an experiment in my lab, right? It’s not epiphenomenal. The people who have more mystical experiences have more meaning in life, reliable correlation.

Yeah, they become more open, they undergo—they undergo significant changes.

Well, for a couple of years anyways. And it’s not trivial; it’s one standard deviation increase. It’s a big difference, man. You have all of Yaden’s work, showing that when people have these experiences, they will reliably improve their psychological well-being.

Yeah, well, so a good friend of mine, who’s a genius by the way, and so I listen to what he has to say. And he’s a technological genius. He talked to me about his mushroom experiences when he was a mixed-up teenager, you know, engaging in various forms of delinquent activity. And he said that after his psychedelic experience, his sense of what was right and was what was wrong was massively heightened, and he abided by it from then on.

Yeah. And like I look at his life—it’s like, well, you know, you’ve accomplished a fair bit and he’s a very solid person and quite the monster in the most positive way. And you know, you can’t just dispense with that. It’s like, well, it taught him the difference between good and evil, and then he abided by that for the course of his life. And, you know, when Griffith’s people have his laboratory subjects have these mystical experiences and they quit smoking, and you think—and if you take a look at this work, you’ll see it’s so onto a normativity. People encounter what they call the really real.

And it’s really unusual because normally what we do is we take these experiences that are disconnected from our everyday intelligibility like a dream, and we say it’s not real because it doesn’t fit in. People do the opposite with these experiences. They say that was really real, and all of this has to change to get closer to it. Now, I think there’s a way, though, of starting—this isn’t going to be a complete answer, Jordan—but I think part of the reason why we find it problematic, these kinds of experiences, and this is what some of the empirical work I did showed, is because we’ve reduced rationality to inference, and we’ve forgotten that rationality is broader and includes insight.

And if you think of how an insight works, and you can see this continuing between insight flow, transformative experience, even the flow experience has mystical aspects to it, and people get into it on a fairly reliable basis, right? And what we have to say is the core of rationality is not inferential coherence; it’s the capacity for self-correction. And insight is one of our most powerful ways of self-correcting. I point to your own work; you showed in some of your experiments that, you know, one of the things that predicts insight is the anomalous card sorting task, right? And you also showed that that predicts how well people are overcoming self-deception. You did the experiments on both of those, right? And that’s not a coincidence. Insight is one of the fundamental machineries by which we overcome how we’ve fundamentally misframed.

It’s a fundamental self-correction. We need a model of rationality that includes them both.

Let me ask you about that. Let’s go back to this nested idea, right?

Can I just say something about psychedelics, please? It is important to mention that, I mean, obviously, a lot of people are talking about it right now, and I did watch that interview with Murarescu, and I think that in this question of psychedelics, I think we’re actually seeing an increase of the problem that we’re talking about—this kind of alienating problem—which is that psychedelics seems like a very nice solution because there it is: there’s the mushroom, I can analyze the chemical substance. I can—so when we talk about the Eleusinian mysteries, now everybody’s excited to talk about the spiked wine, but no one cares to talk about the entire ritual in which this was embedded.

And it becomes this kind of weird reductive thing in which the tool that we can identify, which is—you know, you can put it in a box and you can nicely identify it—then everybody’s attention goes there. Right now, because of our kind of materialism in our thinking. And so I find it very difficult because— you know, what we saw psychedelics do in the 60s is that ripping open the veil, supposedly, in a world where the ritual around, let’s say, the coherence of society—the place where society coheres together and engages in a common ritual and in common attention and in common storytelling—and then we kind of throw this stuff out into a world that is individualistic and based on everybody’s own little whims is not necessary—is going to, I think—and we saw it happen—is going to create these experiences that are frameless and instead of binding, we’ll continue to kind of fragment our society. I’m really worried about the psychedelics.

Yeah, can I just jump in? And I’m sort of thinking out loud because I really loved what both Jordan and John were saying is the way the mystical is being described—there’s something really right in that. I think when you have a true mystical experience, meaning an experience of God, of the sacred, it does have those effects, that it convinces you that that’s really real as opposed to the world. That it’s real, but it’s not as real as that. That now I’m clearer about good and evil.

I mean, the authentically mystical I think has that, but—but when you talk about drugs and all that, look, for me it’s a closed book. I’ve never experienced that myself directly, but I don’t say this: the great mystics in the Western tradition—think of John of the Cross especially—he was my go-to guy. John of the Cross probably had what we call extraordinary experiences—certainly his colleague, Teresa of Avila did. I mean, visions and that sort of thing. But what did John of the Cross consistently say? Let go of them. Let go of them! When people said, “What do I do when I have an experience?” See it; it’s kind of a Buddhist thing. See it, and let go of it. John of the Cross never wanted people hanging onto the extraordinary vision or the extraordinary manifestation.

So there is the mystical for sure, and you know I use my platonic thing going from, you know, the cave, going from physics to mathematics to metaphysics. But beyond metaphysics, there is indeed this mystical dimension of knowing. So I don’t discount that for a minute. But I’m also— I’ve got a lot of John of the Cross in me that says be very wary of hanging on to those. And to Jonathan’s point there about, you know, well if I just take this drug, that’s going to be my guaranteed path into the mystical. Whatever is going on there, the real mystical—you know, tonight I’ll be probably in front of the blessed sacrament at some point with the rosary. And believe me, I’m not having any kind of LSD-like experiences; but that’s the mystical, as far as I’m concerned.

So I’m trying to find what’s really good in that description of it, which I think it really is accurate, but I’m wary of clinging to it.

There’s one thing to be clear—go ahead, Mr.

I want to respond to Jonathan’s criticism. I mean, the point that Jonathan’s making is being recognized by people in the field. First of all, there’s a distinction even in Griffith between a psychedelic experience and a mystical experience. And secondly, okay, most people are clearly indicating—for example, all the therapeutic interventions using psychedelic, and the evidence is mounting that it’s not the drug that does it right. It is the drug in concert with the set and setting, the therapeutic framework—all of this other stuff has—you have to—and I consistently argue for this. You have to have this wrapped in a sapiential framework because it can just as much take you off into self-deception as it can into self-correction.

So I want to be clear that there’s a lot of people that take the criticisms that have been made here very seriously, and it’s actually woven into a lot of the research.

Well, it’s interesting with regards to the scientism issue. So if you look at Griffith’s research, so you see that his subjects take psilocybin and then they have a mystical experience, and then they quit smoking or they’re less afraid of death. And the way it’s written up in the journal is it is a bottom-up drug effect because there’s no description of the content of the mystical experience. It’s like, well, the drug produces a mystical experience and then people don’t smoke. And the scientific journal format only allows for that.

And so—but then there’s this question—like, this is a big question—it’s like, okay, well why are these people no longer afraid of death? Like, did that switch just get turned off? Well, that’s not—that’s not how it works. The whole view they have of reality has been reoriented in some manner. And what manner? It’s like, well, what happened exactly? That’s an even more key question, and it’s relevant to Jonathan’s point. And then John, to go after you a little bit on this topic, Jonathan is pointing to something that’s a very intelligent caution, and that is that—I know, you know that I know you know that—and these hypotheses of set and setting are—they’re just the beginning of that surround that needs to be created to integrate these experiences into the broader culture. They’re just—they’re, you know, they’re not much changed from the early 60s. Well, you have to be somewhere calm; you have to be with someone who you know is going to take care of you. It’s like, yeah, that’s—we’re just barely beginning to figure out what to do with this.

And then, Bishop Barron, I believe, for what it’s worth—and I don’t know what you guys think about that—I think that revelation is a psychedelic account, literally.

Oh, the book of Revelation—I really believe that!

You bet! You bet!

I think that the author of that had a psychedelic experience, and all he did was write down what happened to him.

No, it’s not—that might not be right, but it’s too grounded in the Old Testament, right? The classic apocalyptic literature.

I mean, why is that an objection? Why is that an objection?

He was grounded in that tradition, and all of that tradition was made vivid in imagery during the experience. That’s not beyond the confines of such experiences.

So—and I think the Church is going to have to wrestle with this seriously in the years to come because there’s an association between psychedelic use and revelatory meaning that the Church is going to have to grapple with, I believe.

There are plenty of monkeys that—those are—and have all these types of experiences but that don’t take psychedelics. They, you know, that—it’s actually through asceticism and through transformation. And I think this is coming back to Bishop Barron’s point, is that let’s say in the Hesychastic tradition, in the mystical tradition of the East, it’s exactly like what he said about sin! John of the Cross will talk about the—you know, the dark night of the soul, and that’s really what he means. It’s not a psychological state; it’s God actively taking away these experiences because there’s something else that we’re really talking about in the Eastern tradition. The highest point is absence of all image and thought, right?

Yeah, that you actually don’t have any—there’s no imagination, there’s no thought, there’s nothing. There’s only this kind of pure presence and this pure light, let’s say, that kind of gathers you into God. So it is—the—and they constantly say the same thing. They say, “All these experiences, let them go!” You gotta drop them! You gotta don’t become a guru and, you know, kind of teach out of your little mystical insight, but rather just drop it and keep going up the ladder, let’s say.

Well, right. I mean, I’m very wary of the idea that, like, the communion cup—the origins are in some kind of psychedelic experience. Trust me, it’s never happened to me. I’ve been going to mass since I was a kid. Because the reality of it is—other than that, I mean, even if there was something—and certainly the Eleusinian mysteries have been well studied, and perhaps there was a psychedelic element and so on—but I would never want to put stress on that.

I would want to say that first of all, if you talk—I talked to Aidan Lyon who was—his book is coming out: A Psychedelic Experience, Philosophy of Psychedelic Experience. First of all, he doesn’t pin the term on the use of psychedelics per se. It just means mind-revealing experience, okay?

And so what I would say is that the substances belong to a class that don’t require chemical substances. So these are disruptive strategies. You know, Jonathan mentioned, you know, aesthesis, right, asceticism, yeah, the shamans chanting, the drumming, the sleep deprivation—there’s a whole family of disruptive strategies.

But let me try to show you what I think this is related to. If you are—if you’re trying to—if you’re having a problem, like a problem, because you’ve missed framed the situation and you need an insight, what’s actually really good for an insight is to be moderately distracted from the problem. Or it’s like if you’re trying to solve an insight problem on the computer screen and I put a bit of static or noise into it, that will actually help you break up the inappropriate frame and find a new frame.

You do the same thing with neural networks. Neural networks are trying to learn, and you periodically have to throw in noise because if you don’t throw in noise, they’ll get too narrow and too fixed on what they’re picking up on. So this is—and this is what I meant, but I did a talk about this. It’s like insight requires these disruptive strategies and they look exactly the opposite from our model of rationality.

So I think a more appropriate thing—because I mean, I see disruptive strategies in Saint John of the Cross. I certainly see those, and of course they’re all the way through the Neoplatonic tradition. And they can be cognitive disruptive strategies. Nicholas of Cusa puts you like, you know, that an infinite circle is also a straight line, and you go music like that, right?

So I’m with you on that. No, I’m with you on that. I’m thinking of Thomas Merton, use the Buddhist term “calming the monkey mind.” And he thought that was the purpose of the rosary. Yeah.

And I was conducting a retreat—that’s about three years ago—with the priests of Dublin. Now I’m all Irish, so this is in my cultural DNA. But they were praying the rosary one night; there’s about 60 men, and they prayed the rosary, which normally takes about 25 minutes to do it at the usual pace, they finished it in about six minutes. And it was Hail, Mary, full of grace, Hail Mary from the great source.

Hey, but first it seemed ludicrous, but what it was doing was setting up just that kind of buzz, that sort of mantra-like quality that I think does allow something to happen, that allows something to happen in deeper parts of the psyche, in deeper parts of the soul. So I think that’s right. I agree with you. Those elements are there in the mystical tradition. The Jesus prayer, too, Jonathan, is an example of that, I think.

And so I, for me as a scientist, I’m studying these things—like when I did the one experiment I mentioned, the content—which I think is supportive of Jonathan’s point—isn’t the key thing that’s predictive of the changes in people. It’s predictive of the relationship to meaning in life.

Yes, it is.

It’s actually the insight process rather than the particular phenomenological content that seems to be driving the transformation.

The Christian ascetic and the Christian mystic, this insight gathering or this kind of mounting up into insight is bound up in the transformation of the person in terms of their own passions and also the transformation of the community in terms of liturgy and participation in communion. And so it’s buffered like it—like I said, it’s binding. It doesn’t—it’s not just someone, you know, doing something to get some insight, but it ends up being this binding of the, like if Bishop Barron was talking about all these monks sitting together doing the rosary together and then maybe going into liturgy and taking communion together and working together. And so there’s something more than just the psychological or, you know, personal experience or personal healing from this or that problem, but it’s—yeah, it’s—it’s a holistic thing. I hate using that word, but it’s a holistic process, let’s say, because both ways, right? The insight isn’t just propositional; it’s perspectival and procedural.

And I think mystical experience is the most profound version of participatory knowing. I mean, I think, and yeah they could make a very strong Neoplatonic argument, and I think I agree with you, Jonathan. I think, I mean, you see this in some of the things I’ve been doing: the ethnographic work on where people do the circling. You can get shared insight flow that doesn’t belong to any one person; it belongs to the community as a whole. And people do the same with that. And I think that that’s very important for, as you said, making sure that this doesn’t—I mean, it’s so easy for these experiences to become a magnet of narcissism for people, right?

And so the de-centering that happens when we are immersed in something larger than ourselves, which I think helps cultivate the virtue of reverence. I absolutely agree with you. I think that absolutely has to be the case. I’ve argued repeatedly for that. I hope I’m not coming across as trying to say it’s an individual personal thing that I’m talking about. That’s not fundamentally what I’m talking about. I’m talking about it being systemic in the individual and systematic throughout the community.

So, okay, so let me—Jonathan, I’m curious about this. I mean, your cautions are duly noted on my end. I saw—see what happened, say, in retrospect when the hallucinogens were introduced to Western culture. Right? I mean, it didn’t work very well. And look at what happened to Timothy Leary, for example. I had his old job at Harvard, by the way.

Oh, I didn’t know that!

Yeah! Yes! Many people have pointed that out to me, Jordan, by the way! So, it’s one of the weird things, and in any case, you know, Merce Eliata also believed that the true shamanic tradition wasn’t psychedelic-driven. No!

And now that was an aberration!

I think he was wrong. I really do believe that he was wrong. And I think that—and I’m also not entirely convinced that the practices that you’re describing can produce experiences that are as intense as those that are produced chemically.

Maybe they are!

But even if they are, they’re not available to the typical person. They take a tremendous amount of training. And then so that’s a big problem.

And then is that a problem or is that a feature?

Well, it seems like—well, I don’t—I don’t—yeah, look, it’s a feature too, Jonathan, because maybe you need to do all that training to handle the insight, you know? And I’m not trying to look for a facile solution here, believe me!

But the Church has a hard time attracting people at the moment, and I don’t know what’s happening in the broad church with regards to the sort of work, for example, that Griffiths is doing. And it’s not like I have the answers to these things, but by we shouldn’t look to the psychedelics as a savior, certainly, but they should also not be discounted because they are the means by which people can have the sorts of experiences that the scientists—the followers of scientism discount.

It’s right there! It’s right there as proof, in some sense.

I’d be more—maybe that’s irrelevant to the choosing the wisdom tradition, Jordan, as you’ve been doing. I mean, the fact that you’re drawing a lot of people back toward Christianity through the opening up of the Bible is, that to me is a great way the churches can start drawing, especially young people back.

It’s obviously working in your case, you know? We’ve got our problems and some of it came from the scandals, certainly, but some came from an exaggerated attempt to be relevant to the society and to sort of dumb down our language and to make it sound like an echo of the culture