Daemons, Demons, God, & the Meaning Crisis | Dr. John Vervaeke | EP 414

My faith is a faithfulness to a process of self-correction, not to any one faculty as the voice of the Divine. I think the capacity for the self-correction to take on a life of its own, and a life on its own that plugs into transpersonal and transcendent aspects of my being, for me, that is better.

I'm very impressed that you managed to bring all of that back to the point where it started, by the way. [Music] Hello, everybody! I have the pleasure today of talking with my colleague at the University of Toronto, Dr. John Vervaeke. We've discussed much many times on my podcast and in public, and so it's a continuation of a conversation that's been going on for a very long time. We concluded today with the proposition that we're both working on the edge of what you might describe as the counter-Enlightenment, which I suppose is the endeavor to place what, would you say, cognitive processes that have gone astray into the abstract and representational back on their feet, to rediscover the sacred, to rediscover what's deep and meaningful, to rectify the meaning crisis as a consequence of that rediscovery and new discovery. We delve farther into that today.

So welcome aboard! Hopefully, it's useful practically and metaphysically. I've got an idea about the sacred I want to run by you.

Sure, technically. Well, imagine that you have a hierarchy of thinkers such that this would exist over time, okay? Such that some thinkers have more thinkers dependent on them than other thinkers, right? So they're more seminal. You'd get a rough approximation of that with citation counts in the scientific endeavor, and citation counts are a pretty good index of quality as well as quantity, at least compared to every other index that we have.

So you can imagine a dependency structure among thinkers. So that obviously, a thinker like Milton would be of primary depth and Shakespeare, the people who are part of the canon. Rather than conceptualizing the canon as a consequence of the arbitrary decisions of arbiters of taste, let's say, you could say that the canon is the consequence of the cumulative impact of a thinker's thoughts moving forward, and some thinkers are more key than others.

My sense, for example (and there's historical reasons for this obviously), is that the biblical corpus stands at the bottom of the Western canon. And then there are thinkers who have their feet placed firmly in that tradition—Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, etc.—and then a branching structure above all that.

Okay, so it's a matter of dependency. And so how fundamental a given thought is, is dependent on how many other thoughts are dependent on it for its validity. Okay, now this works out neuropsychologically too. So imagine that you have Janoff-Bulman who talked about trauma has a theory that's analogous to this, and I think it fits in well with the entropy control theories of Friston.

So then imagine that your perceptions, and therefore your emotional regulation, are dependent upon a nested sequence of assumptions. A given phenomenon can violate an assumption, and the degree of entropy that's produced by the assumption violation is proportionate to the depth of the assumption, right?

Right. So Janoff-Bulman talks about, for example, her model of trauma is shattered assumptions. The deeper the assumption—so for example, one way you can be traumatized in a marital relationship is through the discovery of infidelity.

Yeah. Yeah, right? Your hyperpriors get destroyed.

Yeah. So what do you call them? Hyperpriors?

Hyperpriors in the Bayesian brain framework, in Friston's framework, the sort of priors that you use to run any of the Bayesian approximations. I actually don't like using the Bayesian math because you don't actually run the math; you run a dynamical system approximation. But that's how they talk about it in the literature.

These are the most... these are the things that are applied in your predictive modeling in the most context-invariant manner, so they apply, right?

Context-invariant. Right, right.

Well, that's another way of thinking about it too. Something more fundamental applies across more situations and time spans.

Right. Okay. So here's a secondary consequence of that I think. So then, imagine that the degree to which you can handle entropy emerging as a consequence of the violation of your assumptions is proportionate to your social status.

Okay. And the reason for that is that the better your reputation and therefore the better your situation in the social environment happens to be, the more resources you can bring to bear on a problem if one emerges.

Okay. Now, imagine your serotonin system indexes that because we know serotonin is one of the systems that's implicated in the relationship between social status and emotional regulation.

Sure. So now the serotonin system has inputs into the memory systems that have this hyperdependency structure, and they're a tuner.

And so that for you, imagine disruption would be characterized in terms of its estimated magnitude by the depth of the presumption that was being violated. And then there's a control mechanism off to the side of that, such that the more tenuous your grip on the social environment is, the higher the level of negative emotion that's produced in relationship to the violation of a given level of assumption.

Sure, right.

Okay, okay. So that makes sense to you?

That seems to be reasonable. Very clear!

Yeah. Okay, good.

Okay, well, so then I've been working—well, I'm writing, as I mentioned, a book on the explication of biblical narrative. It's called "We Who Wrestle with God," and I've been working—oh, nice pun on Israel!

Yes, exactly! Exactly! And I discovered that relationship when I did the lectures on Genesis in 2017.

So I've been kind of trying to come up with a technical definition of the sacred, right? And this is relevant to research on awe too.

So the deeper you go, the closer you get to the sacred. And I'm speaking as a matter of definition here. So as you move down your assumption hierarchy, and you get to these—you call them hyperpriors—yeah, the closer you get to the ultimate hyperprior, the more you're walking on sacred ground.

And that's a technical definition. Now, if you encounter something that shifts you in a hyperprior, and that's a positive encounter, that's going to produce a corresponding sensation of awe, right? And I would say that's probably a dopaminergically mediated revelation of possibility.

So, okay, let me run something else by you and tell me what you think about this.

Okay.

Okay, so I've been conceptualizing the sacred as a process too. So there's a spirit in the Old Testament that's characterized as Yahweh, and the theory in the corpus is that whatever this central spirit is makes itself manifest in a number of different guises.

So for Noah, for example, God is the spirit that calls the wise to prepare when the flood is coming. And for Abraham, God is the call of the spirit of adventure. And so you see these juxtapositions of narratives that shed a different light on this central spirit, with each story united by the claim that regardless of the surface differences of the manifestation of this spirit, it's reflecting an underlying unity—that's the monotheistic hypothesis—one God underneath all the gods.

So a dependency structure that has a fundamental base or a pinnacle, depending on which set of metaphors that you use. So when I wrote "Maps of Meaning," I had started to conceptualize the call of the sacred as something like spontaneous interest, right?

Is that—well, so things will grip your attention and compel you in a certain direction. I realized later, after I wrote that book many years later, that that was equivalent to the more traditional notion of calling.

And so I think I missed something in "Maps of Meaning"—that's half of the Divine because I really concentrated on interest, and that was sort of under the influence of humanistic psychologists who were oriented toward, say, self-actualization.

But there's a corresponding element of conscience. And so there are conceptualizations by Cardinal Newman, for example, of God as the internalized voice of conscience—right? Like the source of the super-ego. That's not—that's another way of thinking about it.

But then you could think of Yahweh as sort of the dynamic relationship between calling and conscience. And to me, that maps nicely onto positive and negative emotion because a calling is going to entice you forward with dopaminergically mediated—what would you say—indications of treasure to come.

And conscience is going to say you’ve deviated off the Golden path into the domain of danger, and there's something you should sort out. And then—well, you see quite clearly in the Old Testament corpus, and it also emerges in the New Testament, that there's a dynamic relationship between conscience and calling, and that looks to me like what's conceptualized as the Holy Spirit—that dynamic relationship.

So, wow, that's a lot.

Well, I've been working on this for months, you know, so—

Yeah, so interesting because I've been working on this sacred a lot too.

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Let me share my thoughts and I'll share where I think they intersect with yours, but maybe they differ, but I think in a fruitful way.

First of all, there's sort of—in the literature I've been reading, there's sort of three dimensions that are usually talked about with respect to the sacred.

One is ultimacy, which I think you’re articulating. And the move you made—and this is a compliment to you, by the way—is the classic move of neoplatonism, which is called asymmetric dependence. So what is everything asymmetrically dependent on? That's how you get your ultimate. What is that in terms of which everything else is explained or understood, right?

That's ultimacy. And then two other dimensions of the sac, which I think you're alluding to—one is axiological, that you love this ultimate; it isn't just an intellectual grasp for you.

So that's the directionality, yes. And there's a valuing, there's a loving. But it's the reason why I want to say love rather than just value is love doesn't carry with it necessarily the egocentrism of value, which can be very egocentrically oriented.

So love—so would that be maybe expressed in the Old Testament corpus as part of the covenantal relationship? Because it's a personal relationship rather than a—I mean, what would you say—instrumental relationship?

Yeah, I think so. Like, me argues that in her covenantal epistemology, knowing God and loving God that you can't separate them, right?

And so that's conceptualized metaphorically in the guise of a relationship rather than as having something.

Oh yes, it's very much about being in relationship.

And that's why I want to use the word love. You can have preferences or even values, but you have to be in love. It's a commitment of the whole self, right?

And the thing about love is it gets you on Plato's pivot point. It involves the whole of the self without being self-involved, which seems to be another dimension of this calling. The sacred doesn't just call your aesthetic interest or your ethical interest or your intellectual; it calls you as a complete person.

This is one of the things that Till emphasized—speaks to the image of God within, yes?

And you know the Christian tradition of the transmutation of the image into the likeness.

And so I think that's the axiological dimension. And then there's the soteriological dimension, that this loving relationship to what is ultimate is transformative. It's healing, it's redemptive, it's liberating.

And so the reason why this is important is, of course, is this allows the sacred to be found in things that are in non-theistic traditions, like Buddhism, the Dao, right?

So I—the first part of what you were talking about, like I said—and again, I think this speaks well of it—is aligned with the classic Neoplatonic proposal of that what we're trying to get in touch with what is most real, we have to get to the ground of intelligibility through looking at symmetric dependence.

This is the notion of the ultimate, the One: asymmetric dependence is the terminology that's used.

Yeah, Kevin Corcoran uses that when he tries to talk about how Plotinus U makes his argument for the One—the ultimate reality within the neoplatonic system—which gets taken up.

Well, one of the ways of sorting through that as far as I'm concerned is to note that there's either a unity or there's a plurality and then to note what the consequences of those are.

If there's a plurality, there's in-built contradictions in the structure of being and becoming itself, and there's divisiveness that can't be overcome. If there's an ultimate unity, it might be mysterious and ineffable, but it does indicate that all things can be brought together in some sort of harmonious relationship.

And that's relevant to human motivation because if there's a plurality, there's going to be confusion and anxiety, because confusion and anxiety mark a plurality.

So, well, yeah, this is Kierkegaard's "Purity of Heart is To Will One Thing."

And so, but again, this is a Neoplatonic argument. The idea is whenever we're understanding something, what we're doing is taking two things and finding a unifying principle.

And then if you were to pursue understanding to its depths, you'd get something that technically speaking can't be understood because it is the principle by which all understanding—all things are understood, right?

Right, right.

So what you'll get is—it grounds out ineffability. It grounds out ineffability, and if you look at—like Nicholas of Cusa, where it grounds out is it grounds out in sort of the paradoxical realization that what we consider ultimates, ultimate polarities, are actually somehow stereoscopically transcended.

So for example—though the term is the One, right? It is understood as being beyond singularity and plurality; it is neither singular nor plural because it is the basis for that particular kind of intelligibility.

It is trans-centric. God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Is that Nicholas of Cusa?

Well, it was taken up by Nicholas and others, but it was actually—that’s a great—yes, that's a great line.

And, well, Nicholas has one that goes with it that God is within everything but not enclosed, and beyond everything but not excluded.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, right, right. And so that’s ultimacy. And then the idea is—and this comes from Yaden's work and some of my own work—when people come into relationship to that which they consider more real, the really real, they take on this loving relationship that they seek to transform their identities and their lives.

You suppose that's a marker for the validity of the encounter? Like, if you stumble across something that entices you into a relationship of love, is that actually a reliable ontological marker, let's say?

Well, I think it—I think if two things line up, yes, I think the answer is yes. I think that's an excellent question.

I think if you get the reciprocal opening that's found in love—for example, you know, I have a wonderful partner, and I’ve come to understand that there’s something about her that will always be beyond my grasp, and I open up to that, and she opens up to that in me, and we reciprocally open.

And that’s—that’s how you fall in love with something. So I think, from the first-person perspective, it's yes. But I think Yaden and other people have done work that when people have this sense of being called and they have this noetic experience of the really real, they do make their lives better by measurable, objective measures; their relationships get better.

Well, you mentioned healing, so wrest about that physiologically.

Well, partly because I've been writing about the Gospels, and about a quarter to a third of the Gospel account is miracles of healing, right?

Which is a difficult—that's difficult ground to tread on if you're an empirical materialist, let's say.

If you're a naturalist. Exactly.

But there's another frame of interpretation which doesn't necessarily exclude the miraculous but at least sidesteps it for the moment possibly, or brings together to suggest that if the pattern of being that Christ represents is a divine ideal, there's every reason to assume that it would be allied with the kind of healing that you were describing.

So imagine that you could embody a spirit, a set of practices, a set of perceptions and emotions that would optimize your function in relationship to the Transcendent. There's every reason to assume that what would accompany that would be an optimization of psychophysiological function.

That's—that's no different than claiming that you're going to have a much higher risk of mortality if you're depressed, which is—

Well, right. So there are certainly links between attitude and underlying thriving that are well established, and it’s not unreasonable to point out that like the archetypal ideal—that manifestation of the archetypal ideal or even contact with the archetypal ideal would be something that would tap you hard in a healing direction.

I think so. And I mean, one of the arguments I've been working on is—well, you know, I mean, you know this better than I do—one of Piaget's great insights, the thing that made him a brilliant scientist, right, is he was looking for systematicity in the error being produced in the psychometric measures of intelligence.

Just that move alone is brilliant. Everybody else treats the errors as noise. He says, "Well, what if there's patterns in the error?" And if the patterns—if there's systematicity, that points to intrinsic concerns and development arc and all that, and that alone is brilliant.

And then I've sort of been reflecting on that and connecting with some of the literature and insight, which is to think, well, if there's systematicity of error, there's also the possibility of systematicity of insight—not an insight into this particular problem but an insight into a family or network of problems such that it would lead to a systematic transformation of one's orientation and grip on the world.

And it would also be systemic; it would tend to percolate through the entire psyche.

That's what a baptism is.

Well, I mean, it can be. I mean, well, right, right.

That's the transformation that a baptism is designed to bring about if it's possible, yeah.

And I mean, I think the shamanic death and rebirth aspects, I think the great doubt in zazen is doing it.

And you know, well, that's what happened to Descartes too.

How so?

Well, he decided that he was going to doubt everything, right, and to take a journey down to what, would you say, the land of the fundamental presumption, something like that?

And my sense with Descartes—I mean, his realization is often translated as "I think, therefore I am," but I don't really think that that's how he would have conceptualized it had he been alive now.

I would think it's something more like "I'm conscious, therefore I am," or "I can't doubt the fundamental reality of my own..." Well, I'll put it back to you in the way I see it.

Let's say—before the Scientific Revolution, on Descartes, we have a contact epistemology. We have the epistemology that when you and I—when you know something, the form of that, not the shape, the form of it—the principle of intelligibility in it is identical in your mind and the thing; they conform together.

So this is a contact epistemology; it's a mutual participation. And then, of course, when we get to, because of Seamus and Kepler, we get this separation and the divorce.

I talk about this a lot in "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis." And what Descartes does is he tries to find where there's still that contact, and where he finds it remaining is in self-consciousness.

The mind's contact with itself is where that knowing by being is still to be found, and he withdraws.

The problem we have faced since that is you can't get contact with the world from that contact of the mind with itself.

And so this is what a lot of the work I'm engaged in is about, trying to overcome. What's interesting is that Descartes notes, to a lot of people, of course, Descartes puts a lot of emphasis on logic, but Descartes also puts quite a bit of emphasis on insight, that moment of insight when you get the flash and so all of the premises of the argument hang together.

That's crucial. Do you—

Well, okay, I want to go a couple of directions from all that. I've been thinking about thought itself as a form of secularized prayer.

Okay.

So let me lay out what I've been thinking and tell me what you've been thinking and what you think about this.

So the first issue is this: we say we think things up, but we have no idea what that means because the phenomenology—this is something, by the way, that Jung—Carl Jung caught me onto to some degree. He said that we come across our own thoughts like we come across the furniture in a room.

It's like they're laid out before us. And so—and always struck me, because being struck by a thought or having a thought appear in your internal landscape is—well, I think it's a revelation. I don't think it's any different than a revelation.

So here's the steps, as far as I can tell, of thought. The first step is something like a confession, and the confession is whatever I think about this is insufficient, which is equivalent in part to thinking I'm insufficient, right?

So it's a humble step. I have to not know something, and that not knowing has to be of motivational significance, and then that has to be allied with wanting to know, okay?

And that has to be allied with faith that knowing would be better than ignorance, and that's a presumption, man, especially because lots of times when you get a revelatory thought, you're going to pay a price for your knowledge, which might be the catastrophic dissolution of some of your previous assumptions.

Right, so you have to have this axiomatic presumption that more knowledge is good in the ways that would be desirable to you, and even more generally.

And I think that's something like faith in the essential goodness of being and its intelligibility itself.

And I think that's partly why the scientific endeavor is embedded in that assumption of the goodness of being and the goodness of knowledge.

Anyways, no, I agree with that.

Okay, okay, okay.

So with regards to revelation, so the first is admission of insufficiency.

Yes.

And then there's the positing of a question, and that seems to me to be allied with this Gospel insistence that if you knock, the door will open, and if you ask, you'll receive, and if you seek, you'll find—all that—all depends on actually asking, actually wanting to know, actually seeking.

It can't be a game; you've got to want to know. You know, one of the things I've noticed in my own life is, for example, if I'm having a problem communicating with my wife or I'm having a scrap with a family member and there's a certain amount of pain in it, that if I sit down and I say probably I'm contributing to something to this, I'd like to know what it is—which is not a fun thing to do.

No, no.

But you'll get an answer.

Okay, so that's the next step. So you've got your humble confession, then you've got your revelation, which is the appearance of a solution to that.

Now, people say when they describe that that they thought that up, but to me, that's an empty explanatory framework because if you could think it up, why didn't you know it to begin with?

And what exactly did you do to think it up? And the answer is, well, I asked a question, and the thought arose.

It's something like that, and you can infer all sorts of unconscious mechanisms, but phenomenologically, the revelation appears and it strikes you, you know?

But that's not enough; that's not enough, because you still then have the problem of potentially delusional or self-deceptive revelation, of course.

But then there’s an insistence, a Judeo-Christian insistence in the case that I'm referring to, that you have to test the spirits to see if they're of God.

So you have your confession and your openness to revelation; you have the receipt of the revelation, but then the next step is, well, you better put that thought to the test.

And, you know, attack it from this side, attack it from this side, test it out and see if it's got solidity and weight and to understand its implications.

And it seems to me that, well, first of all, it seems to me that that's a variation of the practice of—it's a secularization of the practice of prayer—that's how it looks.

I mean, that makes sense historically as well, but—okay, so what do you think about that?

Well, first of all, I mean, notice that you were provoked in my mentioning of insight and the possibility of systemic insight because a deep revelation would be a systemic insight.

I think so. And there's a lot of work—part of what I'm doing on sabbatical is also going through all of the last five years of the insight literature, trying to keep abreast of that.

But, yeah, so interesting, both in the Neoplatonic tradition and then Zen tradition, you’ll get—like I do a practice every day where I’ll say, “Who is asking the question?”

Oh, yeah, and then there's a good question, yeah—

And then who's listening to the answer?

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And, okay, when you get an answer to that, do you get a vision? Like, are you asking about like a form of possession, so to speak? Like, what set of motivations are positing this question and what set of motivations are offering the answer?

No, you see that—that's the thing. I mean I could if I was doing sort of a phenomenological analysis for scientific reasons, and I do do that, but in this practice, what I'm trying to do is to get at, uh, aoria—to get at genuinely not knowing what Nicholas of Cusa called learned ignorance, which is what Socrates started with.

He said my wisdom consists in knowing what I do not know. I call it an aporetic aperture. What happens is you get a sense of, actually I don't know who's listening. What'll happen is images will come up.

Yeah, that's what I was wondering, right?

And but then when you go, yes, and those are helpful images—but that is, I can just as easily ask what generated the image, right?

And what you get is, right, you get this falling away, and you get a very profound and frequently disturbing sense of actually deeply not knowing.

But it's not a not knowing in the sense that you're disconnected from the depths, if I can use that language.

It's not knowing that precisely connects you deeper and deeper to the depths.

And then—okay, so do you think by doing that that you're—are you attempting to circumvent what might be regarded as narrowly self-serving biases in questioning or answering?

Yes, and you're doing that by attempting to establish a relationship with what's ineffable at the base instead of stalling out, let's say, partway down.

Yes, but it's nothing I can have; it's only something I can participate in. It's only something I can be. I can't have it.

Right. I can't ever—it's like James's distinction between the I and the me, which you're familiar with. I can never have the I; I can be I because I can only be aware of it; I can only have the me.

It's the same kind of thing. There's a nothingness to it, but even saying nothingness sounds like you're putting a name on an entity.

What happens instead is a falling away of representational reification of any attempt to reify things by representing them.

And what you get is you get in a completely non-inflationary way—because I'm cognizant of who I'm talking to—you get that nothing is excluded, but nothing is enclosed within and without, and there is no within and without.

You get to this state now.

So what's been the practical consequences of that practice for you?

The practical consequences of that is a abiding sense that becomes more and more capable of intervening in my everyday consciousness and cognition, of that epistemic and moral—at least that's what I believe is happening.

What people are telling me—uh, humility?

Yeah, well, when I saw you today and started talking to you, I thought three things: I thought you look more resigned, you look more hopeful, and you look more humble.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know what it is exactly.

Well, your expression, maybe, and your voice tone.

Like, and I mean, it's not a dramatic shift from the last time I saw you, but it's a shift in the direction that you just described.

And the resignation is interesting because I think that's a sign of faith and a sign of humility, you know?

And it's not—people often think of resignation as pessimistic, but it doesn't—like I think of resolution.

I use the—because of the double senses of the word of coming properly into view, like when you resolve an image, but also I am resolved.

This I am being called to this pilgrimage on—in the philosophical Silk Road.

I—this is my pilgrimage to the God beyond God. I am making myself as available as I possibly can to that—

To that.

And so, okay, okay, so I mean, go ahead.

Well, I mean, we mentioned baptism a little earlier, and I was writing about the descent of the Holy Ghost in the Gospels.

So that's when Christ's ministry starts. So it's an opening of the sort that you described. It's an opening to possession by this ultimate ineffability, and there's a consequence of that, and that's the descent of the Holy Spirit.

And so that descent we talked earlier about, and you helped me characterize, too, in different language—what that ineffable Spirit, how it might make itself manifest.

I talked about the interplay between conscience and calling, and you talked about—you talked about love, and you talked about the axiological, and there was one other dimension—the soteriological.

So imagine now you open yourself up to that, okay? So that's when Christ's ministry starts.

But here's something very interesting and weird, and I'm interested in your take on this. As soon as the baptism ends, Christ goes into the desert.

Yes.

Okay, so now what that indicates is a radical transformation of personality. So what was there before has—I wouldn't say it's been supplanted, but that leaves a desert emptiness.

That's a good way of thinking about it. Now, so Christ goes out into the desert; it's like the Israelites leaving 40 days of tyranny.

Okay.

So now he’s in the desert, and that parallels the Israelite desert, and then he goes to the bottom of things.

So you can imagine this is a colloquy with conscience, that's a good way of thinking about it.

So imagine that you did something wrong, and you decided that you were going to delve into the depths to understand exactly why it was that you set yourself up for that, and that you were willing to go wherever the Spirit called you to delve into the understructure of that error.

So I think that's what happens. I think that's what's being presented in the sequence of temptations that arises in the desert.

So you imagine you go into the landscape of the soul, and then you go down the dependency hierarchy, to the point from which evil emerges—that's a good way of thinking about it.

It parallels the notion in Dante's Inferno, right? Because Dante's Inferno—what's that?

I'm reading The Inferno.

Oh, okay, okay.

So it's a journey, so my sense with The Inferno is you could take any given proximal and trivial sin and delve into it, and end up at the bottom.

And what Dante presents is that the meta-sin—the sin upon which all others emerge—is something like betrayal, right?

Because it violates trust.

Yeah, I mean, for me, it's betrayal, but of the ultimate—that is also idolatry.

You see all of the sins are our versions of idolatry about loving something in place of loving God, right?

Right, right. That's a Tower of Babel problem too.

Yes, yes, right.

And so—and this is T.K.'s notion, T.K.'s notion is what we're trying to do is we’re trying to bring an ultimate concern to—and have it properly conform to what is most ultimate.

And this is the quest for the God beyond the God of theism, but I see that tunneling down. I mean, I do other practices. I do a spiritual Alchemy practice in which you try to recall moments of profound hurt and humiliation because those are the moments where you get the falsification of the pretentious projections that you make—the pretensions to know and to control both within and without.

And in those moments of hurt and humiliation, you so indicate profound indications of error and presumption.

Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.

So they remove the presumption—they give you—now what you try to do is you try to bring agape to bear on them—neither pride nor guilt—so that you can turn away from the super-salience of the pain and get the revelation, the humiliation, right?

And get the revelation, though, of—but look, there's an aperture here, there's a glimpse of how things are outside of the pretense and the presumption.

You see, I think that's the same thing as the father who's trapped in the belly of the beast.

I think so, and this happens to Jonah, you know, when Jonah descends into the depths.

And the consequence of that is his radical revaluation of his ethical stance and his reemergence as a prophet, right?

But he goes all the way down to the bottom of things.

He does that, interestingly enough, because he tries to escape both his calling and his conscience, yes?

Right? Because God tells him to do something stupidly impossible and dangerous, and he basically says, “Yeah, I don't think so.”

I've always been fascinated by that story—of course, Melville makes a lot of it in Moby Dick.

There's a moment in that story that I find particularly compelling, and one of the things I like about the Bible is it will have these little moments of very powerful humanity in the midst of wrestling with the numinous.

If you remember the story, they come to Jonah—the sailors—and say, “What's going on?” And he says, “Well, you know, blah blah blah blah, and God’s punishing me.”

And they don't immediately throw him overboard; they go back and they try to save him.

Yeah.

And I thought, yeah, what's going on there? That's such a powerful moment.

And for me, right, they only throw him overboard when there's nothing left to do.

They try everything they can; they exhaust their human capacity in the pursuit of this stranger, right?

And it's—and guilty stranger, by his own admission, right?

And it would be so easy to be self-righteous and just—“Well, he’s guilty!”—and throw him overboard and witness the miracle.

And they put all of that aside for this—and like—and it's often— for me, I mean, I am often like everyone else.

I mean, especially coming through the Christmas season, I am impressed by the impressive moments of the Bible.

But even that, I mean, you think about Elijah right after he has the—you know, he defeats the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel and the fire, fire from Heaven, and all—and then he flees into the desert.

And then God, you know, says, “Come, I'm going to show you something.”

And there's the big fire, but God's not in the fire.

And the big wind—

And God—is—that's conscience there, right? The still small voice within.

Or sometimes it can be translated as a sheer silence. It can be translated that way also in the Hebrew.

And so it's almost like what we were talking about before, that I love this idea of the sheer silence because it's the ineffable but not as negativity, but as superlative, as that which is calling you.

Because what does he do? He covers his face in the light.

He beholds these other—do you think there's any difference between the valid voice of conscience and the voice of the ineffable?

I mean, if the ineffable is the foundation and if conscience is a sign of transgression against it, then those things should be related.

Well, see, here's the problem—and this is a problem that goes back, that I have with Descartes.

Descartes—he has a standard philosophical trope, so I'm not claiming any originality here—but Descartes seems to get bunged up on the difference between a psychological and logical indubitability, right?

He gets the things that he can't doubt, and he then concludes that they're ontologically certain.

And of course, our inability to doubt can be driven by many things other than metaphysical necessity; they can be driven by all kinds of psychological issues, self-deception issues, demons of various sorts.

Yes, yes.

And so—and of course, everybody made continual philosophical hay out of that.

And I worry also—because this comes up in Plato's private problem about what actually turns people towards the good because of the problem of eros.

And I don't trust any—maybe let me try a different word; I don't idolize any one of my faculties. I think my conscience can also be something that was driven into me, perhaps by aspects of my culture, my parents.

That's the pathological super-ego problem, and I suffer from a sadistic super-ego in a lot of ways.

And so, see, in Pinocchio, the puppet has to establish a relationship with the conscience, and it transforms as well.

Yes, right.

So it's not an unerring divine voice from the outset. It's something like a generic approximation that can err—and a tyrannical great father within would be an example of that, right?

And I think part of the Socratic project and how it's unfolded for me, often in a psychologically startling way, is to try and enter into a dialogical relationship with my conscience, with my consciousness, with my character.

And that, for me, is one of the great benefits of the Socratic way of life when they came to Antioch.

Is that part of testing the spirit?

I think so. I mean, Socrates had a daimonion.

Yeah, right, he had his divine sign.

And he said he always listened to it, right?

He relied on that in his trial in the Apology and said that that was the thing that made him different than other men.

Now what's interesting, and many people have said this about it—especially in what's called Third Way scholarship, Platonic scholarship—Socrates both trusts it and always comes up with an argument around it.

He never does one or the other, and while we see them as oppositional, he somehow saw them as deeply dialogical.

Yeah, dialogical and convergent.

Yeah, and see, when I was—in this journey, and I was in the midst of doing IFS, I had a very powerful—I talk about this in my after-Socrates experience—I had a—I had, um—I don't know how familiar you are with IFS, internal family systems, where you do parts work.

So what's going on right now? Now is this huge convergence within the psychotherapeutic domain of biological models of the self—diabatic practices—and I was in the middle of doing parts work, and I was working with a part.

What would that mean practically? What were you doing exactly?

So what happens is what you’ll—when you notice that you’re sort of possessed by something, you try and step back your mother, your father, an ancestral spirit fragment.

Yeah.

And try and step back into, well, Schwartz calls it the seat of the self, but I don't think that's quite right, but what you try is you try and step back into that more sage-like awareness.

Right, right.

And then what you do is you try to—and you don't demonize this part; you try and enter into a dialogue.

You realize that it is guarding something—this is—it has some adaptive functionality.

Now, this is my take, not necessarily his, but I think what you do is you bring sort of a mirror of agency or self-reflectiveness to this part.

You act like a mindfulness mirror to it; you dialogue, and you get it—you get to say, “Well, oh, well, what?” You try and get it to explicate its normativity.

What’s actually governing and guiding it—and then you get to—and then you can help it develop that way.

Yes, and you call it—and then you become Socratic with it; you call it to—but how much part are you following the normativity that you're enforcing on me?

And what will happen frequently is it will relax and open because it's being listened to.

It's being listened to, and it's also realized that there's an opportunity here for growth.

Yes.

And of course, this overlaps with a lot of—so you recommended naming those things.

Oh, you do. You name them.

But something happened, and you’ll probably see a very Jungian thing in this.

And like I said, this is difficult for me to talk about, but I did talk about it already publicly, and after hours—a hell of a thing for an introvert to do—yes.

So I was in the midst of one of these sessions, and an archetypal presence came in and pushed aside all the parts and said, “No, you’re going to listen to me.”

And who are you? He said, “I'm Hermes.”

Oh, yeah, the god of interpretation, the god of meaning-making.

Did he have little wing slippers on him a little bit?

Well, no, he was—he very much had a presence of a psychopomp.

And when you mean it, when you say appeared, what was the phenomenology—?

What was the phenomenology? It was like the phenomenology of the presence of a mind—like I have a mindsight into your awareness right now.

What's interesting about these things—and this is, again, my take—not the IFS people, although I've talked to Mark Lewis at length about this, and he thinks it's a good take.

I think of these entities as neither subjective nor objective. I think of them as transcendent.

And I think this is in the domain of relevance, and relevance is neither objective nor subjective, but what binds them together—

Right.

He’s binding the inner and the outer, the upper and the lower, and all of that together.

And so it’s the sense of a presence, but it’s like what Charles Stang talks about—the divine double.

It's both you and not you, kind of like the way conscience is—but it has a—it, right?

I mean, and so I have ongoing dialogue with Hermes.

It's very much, um, is this some—is this a presence that you visualize?

How do you know of its appearance?

I've had only one sort of vision of what was the vision like.

The vision was very, um, well, I've had—the vision was very much—what I later—very much like sort of Michael the Archangel, which is very interesting.

And then I’ve had one of sort of Thoth from Egypt and Hanuman from the Vedic tradition, as well as Hermes from the Greek tradition.

And they've—they, in the ancient literature, they're often seen as corresponding to each other in some fashion.

You understand I'm treading on this very fine, okay?

So what was the consequence of the appearance of this superordinate spirit, arguably superordinate spirit, in the presence of this domain of chaos?

Well, one, I mean, it made it very clear to me that it—I don't want to say it anymore—he wanted to make it very clear that there was a dialogical relationship that needed to be developed and cultivated.

And it would be a relationship by which I would cultivate something analogous to Socrates’ daimonion.

That was the promise that was given.

Oh, that's a good deal!

I think so!

Well, it’s dangerous, but so is everything else.

Yeah, excellent things are rare, or we wouldn't pursue them, as Spinoza said—or we would all pursue them, as Spinoza said.

So I found Ralph’s work on ally work, and I've talked to a bunch of people that have—you know, the kind of practices you can do to enter into this. Anderson taught a friend of mine.

Very helpful around this.

And so what became very apparent was that—know that this daimonion and the way I've internalized Socrates as a sage were very allied to each other.

Because Socrates also portrayed himself as being a maturing being between the human and the divine.

And then to get to the deep answer to this, this all started to psychodynamically integrate with the intellectual philosophical realization of the Platonic proposal that human beings are supposed to always hold in dynamic creative tension Nicholas of Cusa, Heraclitus—our finitude and our transcendence.

If we only hold on to our finitude, we fall prey to servitude and despair. If we only hold on to our transcendence, we fall prey to hubris and inflation.

But if we can hold the two together—if we are the matu between the beast and the God, right—we can properly realize our humanity.

And this is what Socrates sees himself—this is how he portrays agape, this is how he portrays the task of philosophy.

And so for me, that Socratic spirit and Hermes as a psychological biological presence have become integrated together.

So that's quite a trip.

Well, I mean, that's very much like—it's very much the conscious equivalent of a dream.

It's like a dream.

But what's intriguing is the Platonic, Socratic possibility of it being filled as much with logos as it is with mythos.

That there is also as much—because when I dialogue, I write out dialogues with Hermes.

Yeah, it's very much—at times, it’s very much like encountering an archetypal figure, and there’s all—

Have you read "The Book"?

I've read parts of it.

Because it's what you're talking about is quite reminiscent of the sorts of exercises that Jung undertook.

Well, what you find out is this is also deeply reminiscent of a lot of theoric practices that were going on in the Neoplatonic tradition, as I've come to discuss, and then get taken up into Eastern Orthodox Christianity by Dionysius.

And Gregory Shaw has done some excellent scholarship showing that.

So let, okay, let me—but I just want to make clear that there is a lot of rationality in this discourse where I don't mean sort of Cartesian logicality.

I mean the calling to the full person, recognition and responsibility towards the ongoing proclivity to self-deception and trying to comprehensively address it and seek systematic.

It's a lifelong endeavor, and it's—there's something mysterious about it in Marcel's sense, if you ever think you’ve got a full phenomenological grasp on the engine of self-deception within you, you of course have fallen prey to one of the deepest forms of self-deception.

So whenever you think you frame it, you have to not idolize—this is telic again—you have to not idolize that framing; you have to constantly—it has to be constantly open to self-correction.

Yeah, well, the opposite of self-deception is probably something like the constant openness to self-correction rather than a stance per se.

I was deceived; now I have the truth.

It's like, no, there’s a process by which you continually discover the truth.

And allegiance to that is the opposite of self-deception.

So that's what my—I would call my faith.

My faith is a faithfulness to a process of self-correction, not to any one faculty as the voice of the Divine.

I think the capacity for self-correction to take on a life of its own and a life on its own that plugs into transpersonal and transcendent aspects of my being, for me, that is better.

I'm very impressed that you managed to bring all of that back to the point where it started, by the way.

So I would say, in relationship to that, that first of all, that I agree that that, in fact, the eye that's at the top of the pyramid, let’s say the Eye of Horus that's at the pinnacle of the pyramid, is a representation, as far as I'm concerned, of the aware attention that allows for continual self-correction.

And part of the implication of the ancient Egyptian theology is that nothing should be put higher on—the higher up in the pyramid of value than the thing that’s gold at the top that’s associated with the open eye.

It’s right—watch and attend.

And in that spirit of—to use your phrase—guilt-free—there were two criteria you had: free of guilt and free of pride.

Pride, yes.

Just apprehension of what's there in front of you.

This is, Christ says something like this too. This is in the Gospel of Thomas, though. He says, “The kingdom of God is spread upon the Earth, but men either do not or will not see it.”

The "will not" being the more interesting one, as far as I'm concerned.

And part of that organization of the psychological hierarchy to put the eye—not the letter I, but the eye on top—is to prioritize that—not neutral isn't exactly right; it's an attention that's oriented towards the highest ineffable good—to put that above everything else.

Now, I would say that I wasn't trying to reduce that to conscience and calling; I didn't think you were.

Okay, okay, I—I was thinking about those as, what would you call, they're part of the dynamic process of attention that allows the attention, per se, to rise to the top.

So because I could pay careful attention to how it is that I'm calling myself out, let's say in a Socratic manner because you also are granted the right to the presumption of innocence.

Right? So even if you're accusing yourself, it’s perfectly reasonable to set up a defense.

But there’s a starting point with the prodding of conscience.

If conscience prods you, two questions come up: one is I'm falling prey to an internal tyranny; the other is I'm wrong.

Well, you need to figure out which of those two is right.

You can do that dialogically; you can do that in conversation with someone as well.

And calling is the same thing, I would say, as that a calling can emerge as a consequence of your possession by a particular ideological spirit, or it can be a manifestation of the real thing—and like, it's up to you to tread very carefully to make sure you get those right.

And then the dynamic interplay of those two things is even more reliable, probably—especially if you share it with other people.

There’s a—I’ve been thinking about the Exodus story of the burning bush in terms of calling, and I think it maps very nicely onto our discussion of depth because—and you tell me what you think about this—so when Moses encounters the burning bush, things are actually not going so bad for him.

Now he's escaped from—he's freed himself from tyranny, and now he's got himself two young wives, and he's doing pretty well with his father-in-law, who he gets along with, and he's a shepherd.

And so it's not like he's—no longer an Egyptian aristocrat, but you know, all things considered, he has a perfectly stable and productive ordinary life.

Now he's wandering around, and it's near Mount Sinai, by the way, which is the place where the Divine and the proximal meet.

And this thing glimmers and catches his attention; it's like a manifestation of Hermes.

And so he decides to step off the beaten track as a consequence of this calling and invitation, and he moves closer and closer to this manifestation of the sublime.

And as he moves closer, he starts to understand that he's on sacred ground.

And I don't think there's anything different to that than noting what it is that calls to you, and then pursuing it and going down into the depths as a consequence.

And eventually what happens to Moses, because he continues his pursuit, is that the voice of being itself speaks to him.

And that's when he's also transformed into the kind of leader who can fight tyranny and slavery.

So that's excellent.

Um, that’s why it’s Moses and Elijah, by the way, I think, that end up at the Transfiguration because you have Elijah as the—well, they're also both—the—they both encounter the fire of God.

They both—they're both, but they're interesting parallels because it’s Elijah who's the first proponent of the notion that God is not an external phenomena associated with the natural world associated with Baal, but this internal voice, and it's conscience for Elijah.

And then for Moses, the God that he encounters seems to be the God of calling.

And so—and they’re like on what would you say, one on each side of Christ, which is, you know, a mind-boggling narrative representation.

There’s a lot I want to talk to you about, but let me try one thing because I want to circle back to the question of sacred and God and the god beyond God.

So one of the things that I find interesting in the fire, of course, is that it burns but it does not burn up, right?

And so this goes toward a Neoplatonic model too.

Of course, Plato is—the image of the Sun—but it’s the same thing; the fire that burns and is not burnt up.

At least in Greek mythology, and Heraclitus said that the cosmos was that too.

What am I getting at? I'm getting at this notion—all those associations because I'm associating the long-standing association of fire and logos, by the way, they're associated together.

So the sacred also seems—we've been talking a lot about the soteriological and the axiological and the ultimate, but I want to return to something that I think binds them together, which is the Neoplatonic notion of the sacred as an inexhaustible fountain of intelligibility.

So the well that never runs dry, the τὸ ὄν.

Yes, the δαιμόνιον!

Absolutely!

And let me give you a concrete experience of that. I'm going to assume, given what you've said, that this is the case for you in the Gospels.

I have a different relationship with the Bible—maybe we can perhaps talk about that.

But for me, the Republic does this for me. Plato's Republic—I will read the Republic, and it's inevitably transformative.

There's a reciprocal opening. I see something in the text I haven't seen; it opens me up. I go into my life, my life opens up, I'm transformed.

I come back after a bit, and I read the text and it opens itself up again to me, and I—and it’s inexhaustible.

There's this inexhaustible fountain, and so there's some sacredness in there, I think this is, you know, this is the present—the opportunity to enter into a conformity with the good, with the one, right?

And so I—for me, there's a positive in this—in the experience of the Sacred.

And the reason I want to do that is I want to complement—and I use that word exactly—complement, you know, the call and the conscience with also this notion of being fed, of being nourished.

I'm doing—I'm reading a book on Lectio Divina by—what's his name?

The Ladder of the Monks.

And he talks about when you're reading the text, and you're actually being nourished by it.

And of course, there's the Manna from Heaven, all that stuff.

And of course, you can't grasp it because you try and grasp it and store it, you’ll lose it—and all that sort of Blakean stuff that's there.

And so I want to—this idea also of a fountain, an inexhaustible fountain of intelligibility, and if Neoplatonism is right—and I think philosophy, at least some philosophy, and a lot of philosophy of physics and of biology is pointing toward—to which is that there is a non-logical oneness between intelligibility and being.

The way we get at what's most real is we trace out the asymmetric dependence relationships of intelligibility that's based on a faith in Parmenides’ proposal that somehow thinking and being are one.

They're not identical, but they're one in some way.

Because if they’re fundamentally not conformable, we are bound into skepticism.

Something Richard Dawkins said: an adapted organism is, by necessity, a microcosm of its environment.

Yes.

And Friston has said this: when we don't have models, we are models.

And I've made a similar argument based on the stunning work of Katherine Pikus and others for extended naturalism, but we can perhaps come back to that in a sec.

So let me—because I've been thinking about this, and there's a concern for idolatry here, and I think you’re in many ways maybe the perfect person to talk to about this.

So I'm going to say something and then give me a moment around it.

Yep!

I find Plato’s Republic, and I find, let’s say, my relationship to my beloved partner—we made a lifetime commitment to each other, right?

There's something sacred there in that; I continue—I've come to realize I will never sound her depths completely.

And right!

And there’s a way in which that's a good deal.

Yeah, it is a good deal!

And I have—I’ve made a lot of horrible mistakes to get there, and I'm appreciative for those errors, and for the people that actually hurt me in some ways because they—that hurting was a sensitivity that allowed me to see her first person; I fell in love with their soul before I fell in love with their physical beauty.

That's a good order!

I'm not responsible for it; I just happen to be responsible for being grateful for it.

I am; I am continually grateful.

Yeah, well, that's a good deal too.

So now, why am I bringing this up?

I think these things are properly sacred, but I don't think—while they are symbols in the Yangtuan sense—they are not themselves the One; they are not the ultimate.

And so I am—I'm just—I’m going to talk about a practice I've adopted.

So I'm not advocating for this as a metaphysical proposal, but I've been using the term the One or God for when we experience ultimacy as sacred—not just something pointing to the ultimate as sacred, but in and of itself.

And that we—so we—so that's a very restricted usage, and careful it is.

It’s careful because you, again, the concern is the concern against idolatry.

Idolatry, yes!

The concern is the concern for idolatry and the concern—but there's also the Zen concern of ultimately not being bound to your representations, but realizing they have an ongoing, asymmetrical asymptoting towards reality, right?

So the commitment to, no matter what, I'll do—my thought will have representation, but I'm always trying to push towards that which lies below representation.

Well, all my work on relevance realization helps me because that's much lower than the level of representation, much more primal, right?

Right, so I wanted to put those two things together in a prop—that's meaning as the ultimate instinct—whereas what if we mean by meaning is religio, if we mean to be connected to something that has a reality and a value beyond my existence?

That’s that nourishing aspect.

But it's interesting because what happens is once we are—well, at least what seems to be happening for me and what I read in the texts I'm reading is once we get a certain degree of nourishment, we are more and more capable of—because we're primate mammals—of turning the arrow of relevance outward.

Magic!

Right? Not how are things relevant to me, but ultimately how I can be relevant to them.

The meaning in life literature, this is how you find out if people have meaning in life—what do you want to exist even if you don't?

And how much of a difference do you make to it now?

Do you have a good answer to those?

Yes.

Would you share them?

So for me, my religio to the sacred realization of ultimacy is that that gives me those answers.

And so all of the projects that I'm engaged in that help people for themselves—not for me, but for themselves, either individually or collectively—realize that that gives me a sense of meaning in life.

And what are you doing about that?

Would you say those are the proximal actions that are imbued with meaning by that transcendent goal?

Yes.

So I mean, a big part of it is all the work I'm doing with and for the Verveacu Foundation—new series—but also the academic work I'm doing—all of my academic scientific work about intelligence and rationality.

I've just recently been integrated—the relevance realization and the predictive processing framework, in a lot—in a way that a lot of people are finding very valuable.

All of that has—I think it’s fair to say because other people are saying it to me—it has scientific merit. I’m happy about that, but it’s all oriented towards this, what I’ve appointed—because for me, it’s not just the call away from self-deception, the call of conscience; it’s the calling to a fullness, which isn't a completion.

It’s that sense of religio, that meaning in life that—so that I'm—and I feel that I have experiences of what is Ultimate as sacredness—experiences of things that are calling the whole of me to a commitment, right?

And that's the genuine answer to the problem of relevance realization and the meaning crisis—to find out what's actually meaningful.

So let me offer you something in relation—

Okay.

So I talked to Sam Harris recently again, and one of the places that Sam and I find firm mutual ground is in a concern, metaphysical concern, with evil.

So Sam was really struck to the soul, I would say, by the reality of evil associated—in his case, particularly with what happened in Auschwitz and places like that.

So Sam is metaphysically convinced of the existence of evil, and that's been an orienting point for him.

And part of the reason that he wanted to ground his ethical metaphysics in objective science was because he didn't feel that there was a better way of demonstrating the reality of good in relationship to evil unless that grounding was possible.

Now I've been thinking about that as I've been writing what I'm writing, but I took a different tack, I would say to some degree than Sam, even though maybe the net end goal is the same, as it was, by the way, for PJ because that was his project right from the beginning.

Because PJ wanted to reconcile materialism with metaphysics.

And so, in any case, I've been thinking a fair bit about what's real in terms of meaning.

And one of the people have very little doubt that pain is real; they certainly act as if it's real.

You can’t—you can’t—it's very difficult not to act as if pain is real.

And one of the consequences of that realization is that you can therefore very rapidly claim that whatever rectifies pain most effectively is even more real.

And then you might ask what rectifies pain most effectively.

And so here's a couple of—here's something not to do: think about yourself a lot, your proximal immediate demands and needs.

So, you know, the relationship between narrow self-consciousness and suffering is so high that they load on the same factor—in fact, factor analytic studies of negative emotion.

So if you're self-conscious, that narrow self—you are miserable.

This is what I meant—just one small intervention that I'll let you go—this is what I meant about this is Plato's pivot problem.

How do you involve all of the psyche without becoming self-involved in that narrow pain, you know?

Self-inflicting suffering, loss of agency on this is Plato’s thing about how do—because we need to involve all of you.

This is Till too—that’s his definition of spirit; that which involves the whole of the psyche.

But how do you get all of that involved with while resisting the magnetism?

It’s also partly by realizing that it’s not only all of the psyche; it's all of the psyche embedded in the whole structure of being simultaneously, right?

This is part of the reason that our current conceptualizations of mental health suffer from such a poverty of conceptualization because we view mental health as something like harmony in the subjective world.

But that’s like—you’re talking about the mysteries of your relationship.

I mean, it’s obvious from talking to you that part of the reason that you’re as sane as you are and as happy as you are is not because immediately because you're well constituted as a subjective creature, but because you’ve established a harmony of existence in relationship, at least to one other person.

You want that more broadly, and that means that you have to be called to service for something that's certainly not localized to the like narrowness of me now.

Yes.

Okay, because your phenomenological markers, subjective well-being, don't track meaning in life; they come apart.

They can move—they can move opposite to each other.

This is what happens when you have—what happens to Job?

Well, but it's also what happens when if you have a child, and you enter into committed—all of your measures of subjective well-being collapse.

And if you ask people why they do it, and they're giving you a healthy answer—not they fell into it or they are irresponsible—but they've chosen parenthood.

And they're going to what La Paul calls a transformative experience—something you can't understand until you go through it.

So, very much, right?

This act of faithfulness, right? What happens is why they do it is because they say it makes their life more meaningful because they're connected to something that has a reality beyond it—beyond the immediate.

Yes, beyond subjective self-report, right?

And they're an entity they want to exist even if they don't; in fact, they're willing to sacrifice their life for it, right?

And, right, they feel that they make a difference to it.

This is the agapic concern—there love is person—not morally person, I mean cognitive person—is creative of—I mean, when you bring a child home, they're obviously a moral person; I'm not talking moral.

But they're not a cognitive person—and this we get to partake in this miracle.

Like, we shine agape on them, which isn’t—AGAPE isn’t EROS, right?

That’s not your friend; it's not something you want to be one with—in fact, the project is the opposite.

You're trying to make it autonomous from you.

Right, right—a major sacrifice.

Yes, it's agape!

And it's just an astonishing thing.

It's like magic.

So one of the things I figured out by going through the Book of Job is aligned with what you just described.

So there's a moral proposition in Job that has to do with the segregation between immediate subjective well-being, let’s say, and long-term meaning.

So Job's proposition is he—Things Fall Apart very badly for Job, right?

Yes!

And we know he's a good man because that’s stated right at the beginning, right?

That’s axiomatic.

Okay, but his friends attribute blame to him, and he basically says, “Well, yeah, I’m sinful, but no better than the no worse than the typical good man, and so you can't just dump all this at my feet; I’m not going to take myself apart in the face of my misery and decimate my soul in addition to my suffering.”

And then his wife says, “Well, shake your fist at God and die.”

And Job says, “Well, I have some reason to do that, given the tragedies that have befallen me, but at minimum I’m going to suspend judgment, and better than that, I’m going to retain my faith in the essential goodness of existence, regardless of the proximal evidence.”

And then there’s a deeper consideration in Job, which is you’re called upon to do that no matter what.

And that is definitely a place where measures of, say, subjective well-being and ultimate meaning are going to separate because the moral impetus in the Book of Job is that you’re called to maintain your allegiance with what is highest, no matter what proximal price you currently might be paying.

And then you can even think about that practically, which I think is useful to do. It's like if you're stricken with a terminal and painful disease, let's say, and maybe coincidentally a series of financial catastrophes just to make it a little bit worse, and maybe your family's also dumping heaps of coal on your head.

You have every reason to descend into a kind of nihilistic bitterness, but then you might say, “Well, to what end?”

Now you have your illness, you have your financial catastrophe, you have your moral culpability, and you have your bitter nihilism to contend with.

The one thing you do have, if you're fortunate—and I would say also God willing—that it is in the face of multiple dimensions of simultaneous catastrophe, the refusal to take the path of nihilistic bitterness and to shake your fist at the world.

And that's not nothing.

You know, maybe that wouldn’t be enough to rescue you from the dire states that you’re in, but it might be enough to stop you from descending to the ultimate possible hell.

I really love talking with you. I want to respond because I want to talk about my take on Job and how, when I finally got Job, I was actually watching a Tom Hanks movie called “Joe Versus the Volcano,” which is a very silly movie.

It’s a farce, but it's a guy who discovers he’s only got a year to live, and he goes on the proverbial last great journey.

And of course, it becomes a quest, and he doesn’t realize it.

There's a scene where he’s shipwrecked, and he’s on a raft made of luggage, and there's a girl that he's taking care of and she’s unconscious, and he's giving her the last remaining water.

So he’s starting to suffer from exposure, and so he’s at, by all measures of subjective well-being he’s at the worst.

He’s literally lost—he’s adrift, he’s cast away.

He's suffering physically; the one person he’s with is unconscious and he’s caring for them.

And they’re not capable of reciprocating at all; it’s a very powerful image.

I don’t know how this scene got in this movie; I think the staff writers went on lunch break and gave the intern a moment to write a thing.

And then what happens is—and it’s astonishingly well done—there’s a moonrise, and it’s the moon illusion, and the music swells, and he calms down the ocean, and he struggles and he rises to his feet, and he opens his arms and he says, “Oh God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life.”

I had forgotten how big—thank you for my life.

None of his problems have been solved.

And what I took from that is what happens at the end of Job when God appears and starts showing Job all these astonishing things.

And he’s saying—and God—and God don’t forget about the wonder of the world.

And well—and also the numinous. The numinous, right?

Oh, that's interesting, right?

And the numinous says—even in its monstrous forms—yes, even in the—they speak of transcendence, and God is saying, “I am that presence that goes to the very depth of the numinous, both the happy forms and the—and this is supposed to be the thing that is the answer.”

Right, and Job does reattain his fortune in the aftermath of that encounter.

And what happens with Job is he gets gratitude for his life, not because any of his moral—in that—in this other sense, there is no proof that the world is just, right?

All that’s been happened is he has been opened to a connection, a contact with the numinous, and that is sufficient.

I think that's what's also happening at the end.

So the reason why I bring this up is because my lab, we're doing a lot of work on post-traumatic stress disorder and how it looks like a violation of the hyperprior of a just world hypothesis.

Right, right.

And what we're pursuing—one of the things we're doing is we're seeing if meaning—generating meaning in life—generating—not semantic meaning like the dialectic and dialogos practices that I run—if they can restore people’s sense of religio, connectedness, meaning in life.

Yeah, that helps heal them from the trauma without trying to argue them into that, this is ultimately a just world.

See, that's what I'm hoping for.

I'm hoping that these AR—that's an experiential replacement for a logical argument in some ways.

And I think more—it's more real than—

Well, one of the things I always did with my clients in therapy, sometimes for post-traumatic stress reasons was this is where it's not cognitive; it's like the first thing I would do often was a differential diagnosis, let's say, for people who are depressed.

Okay, so there's two possibilities.

Okay, one is that you're depressed, the other is that you have a terrible life.

Okay, so let's take those apart.

Do you have a partner? Do you have friends? Do you have family? Do you have a job? Do you have educational resources at hand?

Are you embedded in a structure of meaning? A multi-dimensional structure of meaning where you find purchase?

And if they answer to all those questions is no—

And