John Vervaeke & Jonathan Pageau: Decoding the Demons
Ahead of the forthcoming sense-making full course decoding of Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmactenberger, and Jamie Wheal (see here!), we offer a bite-sized morsel of sense-making to whet your episode. Here Matt and Chris engage in a 'short' session of gurunalysis, or guruology (if you prefer the original Latin). The subject of the gurunalysis is a conversation between the cognitive scientist & philosopher, John Vervaeke and the amateur theologian/icon carver, Jonathan Pageau. Specifically, we join these two as they apply sensemaking to delve deep into the spine-chilling world of demonology. Are demons real creatures, patterns of thought that resonant in collective cognition, or maybe both? And what about daemons, egregores, banshees, how do they fit in?Join us for this special mini decoding and find out!LinksRebel Wisdom: Demons & the Machine, John Vervaeke & Jonathan PageauRebel Wisdom: Making Sense of Sensemaking: Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal, Jordan Hall
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
As always, I'm Matt Brown and with me is Chris Kavanagh and I have to tell you everybody, Chris and I are deep in the weeds.
We are working our way through some pretty impressive sensemaking, a three-way emergent conversation between Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and Jamie Wheel.
It's sensemaking about sensemaking, and when we get through with it, it's going to be sensemaking cubed.
So it's a bit of a mammoth understanding.
Yes, hello Matt.
As Matt says, we are...
Cutting into the sense-making cake.
The magnus opus of the sense-making genre with this three-way sense-making session.
And it's something to behold.
I think people will enjoy it.
It may even well be our first two-parter episode because it does seem to be...
A mammoth undertaking from the clipping.
There's just so much there.
There's so much insight to get through.
So many metaphors that track.
It's a rich, rich vein.
Tapestry!
You might say tapestry, Matt.
You might say tapestry.
It's a rich tapestry.
Yeah, they're weaving.
And when you think of weavers, you think about looms, right?
And the mechanical parts of looms.
Anyway, we could go on, but let's not.
Let's deal with something a little bit more manageable today.
Hey, Chris?
Yeah, so we're trying out this thing where we occasionally do little supposedly bite-sized pieces of decoding.
You could call it, should you want to.
And exercising Guruology.
You could.
You could call it that, you know.
You could call it something better.
If you have any ideas, please email us.
But yeah, we did this already once with the Jordan Peterson short episode, which ended up not being a very short episode for us.
And we also did it when we looked at Sam Harris's kind of nine minute piece of content about meditation and introspective practices before.
So the idea is that.
We'll take a not a full-length piece of content, but rather something that we think illustrates...
An interesting principle or recurrent rhetorical technique or just feature that happens in the guru sphere.
And, you know, try to have a nice little analytical cupcake rather than the full three-course cake.
The sense makers are infecting me.
I know, they're rubbing off on you.
The metaphors are coming thick and fast.
I can thick and fast like the...
Like a scrumptious gravy, I was going to say.
Like treacle.
Anyway, so what have you got for us, Chris?
What's the bite-sized snippet?
It's something I haven't heard.
I've heard a bit of it, but I know of it.
Yes, Matt.
So...
This is a...
It's actually from Rebel Wisdom channel.
The one that we took the main sense-making content that we're looking at.
David Fuller's channel.
But it's a recent release from just a couple of weeks ago, 1st of August, called Demons and the Machine.
A discussion by...
John Vervaki and Jonathan Paggio, somebody who's come up before.
Jonathan Paggio is the kind of symbolic theologian, sense maker, and John Vervaki is a academic, I believe, cognitive scientist of some description, or philosopher, cognitive philosopher.
Anyway, he's an academic, and we haven't come across him before.
But they're having a little discussion about demons.
And the machine.
And the section that I have chosen to focus on is discussing demonology and whether we can take anything useful, potential insights from it, what are demons and so on and so forth.
Now, Matt, you haven't heard these clips that I'm about to play and that's by design because...
I wanted to get an immediate reaction without you knowing where things are going to go.
So, of course, I'll offer my own thoughts, but I'm just curious to see an immediate reaction.
So I kept these clips hidden from you.
And I'm going to start off here.
Here's our first one.
Introducing the topic a little bit, or at least explaining, I believe this is maybe Pajot's.
View about demonology.
So anyway, here we go.
Clip one.
Demonology is to understand that evil is transpersonal.
It has a kind of parasitic intelligence.
And that you can recognize it.
You can name it.
And you can see the pattern.
And you can notice when it embodies itself.
And then you can see that for most of us, sometimes, most of us will, let's say...
Give up to some demon sometimes.
Like, I get angry, I do this, I do that.
But then sometimes, some people get completely taken over by something, a parasitic pattern that they become completely taken over by, and then they're possessed.
They're possessed by the demon of anger.
And that this is something that happens.
I think that that's what demonology is.
Okay, Matt.
So what is demonology?
How would you regurgitate that?
I was a bit...
At first I thought he was talking about being possessed by demons, but then towards the end he said you could get possessed by anger and that's being possessed by a demon.
So it's an evil pattern.
So I guess I'm not sure now.
Is he talking about demons or is he talking about negative emotions or unhelpful patterns of behavior?
Yeah, like psychological states, right?
I went on the same journey when I heard that.
It starts off seemingly talking about the kind of traditional conception of demons, but then moving it into like a modern contemporary takeoff.
Well, you know, of course, demons are really just the kind of negative emotional states that we inhabit.
And like the demon of anger.
You can understand that.
And this is actually a pattern that's pretty common when people interpret things in Western Buddhism, for example.
They often want to interpret figures like Mara and various supernatural things as actually being about mental states that can cause you hassle, not actual physical entities.
Okay, okay.
Well, you know, I can't help but relate this to the sense-making thing we've been listening to, where they certainly love their metaphors, but even though they mix them and they take them probably far too seriously, they're pretty clear that they are metaphors, right?
Most of the time.
Yeah.
What I'm not quite sure with this one is whether or not the demons are purely a metaphor.
Well...
It's a good question, Matt.
Let's see if we can get some more clarity.
So I'll play you another clip and this is more discussion about the nature of demons and what they may or may not be.
I understand people would be hesitant to bring back demonology because it has so many weird connotations.
But if we can understand it properly, we can see that it is this idea that There are these patterns that are intelligent and that have agency and that you can recognize them and that, like you said, it doesn't necessitate conscious actors all through the way that they embody themselves.
It doesn't at all.
But you can still see the structure and you can still see it embodying itself.
Okay, so it's embodied.
It's intelligent, but not necessarily...
Agentic.
It has agency.
Demons have agency, but they're not necessarily conscious.
Right.
If this is a metaphor, then we're going pretty far with it.
We've got...
I find this interesting, right?
You've got the combination of...
It certainly sounds, if you say that something has intention and agency and can be an embodied thing, that it might be an actual force,
right?
Like a thing that exists.
It might be real.
It might be real, I think is what you're saying.
Yeah, but then you get...
So at least it's not conscious and it's a pattern.
It's a pattern, Matt, you know?
So, okay.
Okay, maybe we're getting closer.
So now you heard mumblings in the background and John Verwecki, who...
That's, you know, Jonathan Pajot, he's a religious person.
He's, like, theologically inclined.
So this is part of the course.
But maybe...
John Vavacki can help, like, clarify, do some sense-making to help make things clearer for us.
So let's see what his take is on all of this.
So, yeah, I mean, we've had another discussion about this, you know, we've had two, and the idea of, you know, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, and that I think the evidence for this is overwhelming, and, you know...
Dan Chiappe and I published papers on that and, you know, a shared agency.
So I think what I'm saying is because we're breaking out of the individualistic model of cognition, we are now maybe groping or at least moving towards an ontology in which we can now relocate what we used to point out with demons and evil.
And not just try and place it within individual moral choice.
That's what I'm suggesting is actually the key thing that is happening here.
Okay.
So, did that help?
Well, no, not so much.
Like, he's saying that because there are distributed intelligences and you can have Agency that isn't localized to a concrete individual, then these demons can be real,
can be intelligent, can have agency, but are not like a single individual, might be manifested in the collective intelligence somehow.
It's hard to follow, very hard to follow.
Yeah, no, of course, some part of this is that we're pulling, I'm pulling out clips from a conversation, but, like, I think if you were to hear all of the inter-joining points, I'm not so sure that you wouldn't still be arriving at the same point, because, like, for me here,
you have Pajot, right, kind of introduced the concept and seemed to whiffle round about, is our demons actual, independent, real entities?
And then Varaki...
Flies in here and suggests, well, we know about collective intelligence and kind of group dynamics.
So, you know, maybe...
And that's all, you know, that's not controversial.
That's all well established now.
So I guess we can say that that is true, right?
And that's what these deeming concepts were previously pointing at.
Okay.
Right.
That's what you...
I think part of the issue is, like, it's never quite clear, is there a contradiction saying, like, oh, so obviously the demon things were getting things wrong because they just had this partial understanding, or whether the argument is that those demon concepts have been validated now,
right?
So, if you say demons exist...
You can actually just mean collective dynamics exist, right?
And you don't actually mean like a physical evil demon.
Yeah, because like the whole idea of a demon, like why would you use that word?
The whole idea of a demon is that it's a malevolent evil entity that, yeah, wants to do harm in the world.
That really doesn't have anything to do with, say, some sort of emergent...
Social dynamics, or systemic, dare I say, things which no particular person is behind, but just yields something that might be very bad, just the way that people interact with each other.
But yeah, that seems like entirely different things, no?
Yes, yes, it could be.
So let's see if we can get the sound speakers to help.
Resolve this possible contradiction.
So here's clip number four.
People are afraid to talk about these things.
Because, like, look what I just said.
I just said, I'll say it straight out.
I said, there's a demon that is a watcher, that is watching over a pattern of reality, and that is what is maintaining it together and making its boots work in the world.
And these people are possessed and are unwilling agents of a demon.
And they're bringing about this system.
And it's like, okay, really?
And then everybody starts to look around and tries to get out of the room.
Right.
But the point, and you know, we don't completely agree on this.
Although we, like, whether or not...
Maybe I can just say one thing.
I think that our long conversation, for hours and hours of conversation, has made it possible for me to say that.
And I think you were able to see that...
That what I mean is coherent.
I'm using a language.
I'm trying to bring back a traditional language to explain something which I can then...
I could break it down in causalities.
I could use other languages if you want.
But that language is also possible.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, I get it.
Yeah, shades of sense-making.
I'm feeling the connections here because they're very into the idea that there are different languages and different sort of meaning structures or symbolic.
structures which can all articulate the same kind of thing.
So it seems like Peugeot there is saying the same thing.
He's saying, look, we've got this old-fashioned medieval religious language where we're just going to call a spade a spade.
There are demons out there that are possessing people and making them do evil things, and that language sounds scary to you, and you could try to describe it in a more modern way
Sciencey or rational language if you wanted to, but it would amount to the same thing.
Have I got that right?
Yeah, I think that's it.
The thing that struck me is that Pajot is explaining directly to Vervaki that because we've had these long, in-depth, indulgent sense-making conversations, I know that you're not going to dismiss me as a crank when I say that demons are real.
And we can, like, the way I hear it is it's saying, look, we can dress this up in the flowery academic language and, you know, obfuscate nicely because through our discussions, we've found a way.
That we can talk about literal demons and agentic patterns recreating.
And there's a way to make everybody comfortable with this, which isn't just like straight up religious vocabulary.
And it sounds to me a little bit like accidentally peeling back the curtain to say, well, sensemaking in a way is just...
Adding a veneer of legitimacy to fairly, like, traditional religious sentiments.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've got to say, I'm getting strong resonances with the big bumper content that's coming up, because throughout, these sense-makers also, that's Jordan Hall, David Shebakter-Berger and Jamie Wheel.
All of them, throughout that conversation, evidence a very high regard for these pre-modern, ultra-traditional, I'm not sure what the words to describe them, but you're an anthropologist.
What would you call this constellation of, I want to say tribal, but I don't want to get in trouble, you know what I mean?
I mean, that's what they're talking about.
They explicitly, in the content that we'll cover, they...
Reference classic anthropological terms from famous ethnography's Victor Turner's Communitas and Durkheim's Collective Effervescence and all that kind of thing.
It's a bit like techno-shamanism.
Yeah, so those guys stick to the intellectualized, conceptualized, abstractified language pretty much all throughout.
They don't do this.
This Pajot guy is...
It's interesting.
It's kind of refreshing.
He's saying, well, stuff all that.
I'm just going to call a spade a spade.
I'm going to tell you like it is.
There are demons possessing people, causing them to do evil things in the world.
That's what we mean.
But actually, the funny thing is when we've seen his content, he very much uses this obfuscatory two-step where he will say, well, I'm just going to straight up say, you know, demons exist.
And then he will say, And of course, by demons, I don't mean little guys with horns jumping out of the lava.
I mean patterns of agentic structure which are, you know, have agency and resonate but are not conscious in and of themselves.
So it's kind of like having your cake and eating it, dare I say?
That's a good metaphor.
Yeah, I think it is like that.
I think it is like that.
Like the rhetorical power.
Comes from the medieval language, right?
Or those hints or images that have been projected.
But then there's an awful lot of obfuscatory, intellectualised cover.
For that.
So if anyone wants to criticize you for saying, "Hey, are you saying that demons are real?"
No, no, no, no, no.
It's much more complicated than that.
Don't be so coarse.
It's much more complicated.
Much more complicated.
And actually, David Fuller raises this issue of fellow John Vervaki is comfortable discussing demons in public because of this issue.
Well, he did say that he felt that the driver was metaphysical.
Right, so he's kind of pointing towards something like that.
That's an interesting question, but you're a professor with tenure, like, you don't talk about kind of metaphysics in this way.
Do you feel uncomfortable about...
What do you mean?
Well, I do talk about distributed cognition.
You've got a reputation to protect.
We don't.
That's basically what I'm saying.
And Jonathan's pointing at this, that there is a discomfort with this language, a discomfort with this, but you're kind of pointing in that direction with the talk of kind of distributed cognition.
There's other people like B.J. Campbell now talking about egregores, and it's sort of like overlapping with talk of the occult, with sort of areas that are not comfortably within academia, for example.
I mean...
I published three papers on it, so at least some part of it's comfortable in academia and in important journals.
So I think this idea of extended cognition, extended mind, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, hyper-objects, hyper-agents, I think this is all, like I said, I think it's giving a metaphysics that is free from some of the history.
That Jonathan acknowledged, but he was also, he was trying to put it aside.
Yeah, I had to look up Egregore.
Oh, yeah, Egregore.
An autonomous psychic entity that is composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, so, I know, Egregores, but I mean, Egregores are essentially just, they're very, very analogous to what they're describing demons as, so David is right to draw that parallel,
but, like, this is the two-step in reverse, right, where David is like, you know, are you, are you...
So are you a bit scared about talking about these metaphysical things so directly?
And John Favacki is like, no, I've published on collective intelligence.
It's like, wait.
So, okay.
We are arguing that collective intelligence is demons.
Like, it is metaphysical demons.
Or it isn't.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, this is basically, these guys are theosophists, aren't they?
Yeah.
Yeah, modern theosophists.
Right.
I mean, what can you do with that?
What's theosophy, Matt, for people who don't know?
Oh, God.
I can't even define it.
I've got to, I mean, in my brain, it's this mystical, obscurantist, you know, philosophical religion and spiritualism.
But that's probably not a good definition.
That's pretty good.
That's not bad.
I think it rose to prominence in the Victorian era and it was associated with kind of Western people with kind of Orientalist approach to religions that they were encountering in the East.
Yeah, and also dabbling with the occult and having seances and things and having very complex, they might be creating symbolic art or something like that with pyramids and interlocking circles and colours.
Jordan Peterson would love that shit.
Like, if he was alive then, he would be in the parlour.
Pushing the Ouija board around and talking about how it's all much more complicated than we can imagine.
The Brahmin essence and all this.
I think that's a perfect analogy.
And I'm not even sure that...
The sense-makers would entirely reject that because I think they would argue that the theosophists were trying to grapple with very real issues and occult and spiritual realities that they might have done an imperfect job of it and it might look quaint.
But, like, the issues that they were raising with the limitations of materialism are very real.
And I think all the people in this conversation, David Fuller, Jonathan Pajot, and John Vervaki, have genuine, like, concerns about reductive materialism, kind of, modern science.
Yeah, yeah, like, I don't...
Yeah, I know you're not equating the whole sense-making group to the sort of occult or theosophy, but what they have in common is that very great skepticism of what the sense-makers call game A, like modernity and science and reductionism and expecting things to be well-defined and clarity.
They're very analytical.
So they share with the theosophist this fascination with the mysterious and the ineffable and the idea that there is a hidden world out there, including demons,
that is affecting...
And driving what's going on around us.
But what do you mean by demons, Matt?
It's very complicated.
It's not.
That's the issue.
It's very complicated.
Clearly, I mean an intelligent agent.
Distributed consciousness.
Pattern.
A pattern.
Yeah, that is...
No, not conscious, Matt.
Not conscious.
No, no, no.
Not conscious.
But having a distributed effect on a group of people.
Yeah, it might even be a metaphysical reality, some people could say.
But yeah, so, like, I just...
And I think John Favacki would probably, because he leans more towards the academic side, he would take issue with us saying, you know, he doesn't care about definitions and stuff.
I think he would say he has quite precise definitions and comes from a philosophical, cognitive point of view.
But from all the content I've heard of his in discussion with other sense makers, at very least, he's very open to talking in dense metaphorical abstractions.
And this is just a thing that gurus do.
They just...
They very much like metaphors and they very much like dancing between metaphorical language and being unclear about whether they're asserting an independent, actual, physical existence to a thing.
That's why Jordan Peterson cannot answer if well God exists or something like that.
It's far too complicated to answer that with a...
A simple, like...
Yeah, yes or no answer.
Yeah.
No, I was thinking of Jordan Peterson too, and he's got the same two-step, isn't it?
Which is that flitting between...
A metaphor, like literally just being a metaphor, which is like a little story or a little mental image to help you conceptualize something else, right?
It's nothing more than that.
But they take their metaphors so seriously, and it's very ambiguous as to whether or not...
And they give their metaphors a kind of reality, like they invest so much into them that the logic of the metaphor then becomes...
Like a proof of the thing that they're arguing is real.
And it's hard to pull them up on it or argue with them because they'll just flip backwards and forwards between, oh, it's just a metaphor or being actually real.
Like I remember Jordan Peterson in that recent video, he said the best model, you know, in one of his recent videos railing against climate, people wanting to do something about climate change.
He said the best model of the climate is the free market.
Now, is that literally true?
Or is he saying that it's like a metaphor that they share some common element?
But, yeah, it's never quite clear.
Yeah, exactly.
Never quite clear is a pretty accurate way to describe it.
So, I have a last clip for you, Matt, for this section.
It's got a little bit of Pajot and a little bit of Vervaki pinging back and forth.
So let's see where they end up, where this conversation kind of spirals out a little bit.
Hit me with it, Chris.
Okay.
I don't see it as a way to cast it aside.
I see it as a way to recapture it in a manner that will not be silly and superstitious and ridiculous.
I think that this moment and your work affords the possibility of going back into a medieval grimoire and saying, okay, we can now understand this in a better way that the horror movie doesn't understand.
Give me that caveat and then my answer to you is, given that caveat, I'm happy to talk this way.
But in addition to demons, I would talk about daemons, right?
And I would talk about demoniums.
There's a multiplicity of terms in Greek, and we've only picked up the one term.
So Socrates has his demonium, his divine sign, right?
I've been thinking about this so much, and I've been trying to poke at it.
There seems to be the positive aspect and the negative aspect of these principalities.
And interestingly enough, St. Gregory talks about the angel of the right hand and the angel of the left hand of God.
Oh my god.
I've had this realisation that these people are word cells.
They are just obsessed with words and their definitions and their meanings and the things that they are hinting at.
They invest so much in them.
It's fascinating.
It's never quite clear what they mean.
It's always obscure.
It's opaque and dense and endlessly complex.
And I'm realizing that's the point.
The opaqueness is the point, isn't it?
It's about maintaining everything in a state of ambiguity, but keeping this kind of rich tapestry of ideas.
And I don't know, to people, I mean, when you look at the YouTube comments to these things, people love them.
People love them, Matt.
Why, Chris?
Why?
Why do you both like Chris?
Well, look, it's because...
It's the same reason that some people enjoy, like, theological discourse and stuff like that.
I really feel that this is part, like, this hinting at metaphysical realities.
And basically, as Pajot says clearly in that clip, Vervaki, your work gives us a way...
To look at this stuff and for it not to be dismissed as silly superstition, but to be reinterpreted as something complex and, you know, important and very, like, that we need to really deeply grapple with what these, you know,
demonology manuals mean.
And I love that part where Vervaki says, you know, we're only talking about demons.
That's part of the problem.
We haven't even got into daemons.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, isn't it?
Yeah.
Like, none of that actually addresses the fundamental issue.
Like, yeah, you could talk about all manner.
Like, we haven't even got the banshees yet.
No.
What about the troglodytes?
Have we considered the troglodytes?
That's a concept that exists.
That's a word.
Yeah.
And, you know, and you can see...
Like, he spirals off into, like, theological stuff, right?
The interpretation of some saint about the angels of the left and right hand or whatever.
And...
And it's kind of, in a sense-making ecosystem, that's all fine, because actually, that's a sign of being, you know, more...
Like, you and I, Matt, are reductive materialists.
We're not good sense-makers, because we wouldn't play along with people, and we'd want them to clarify, you know, what exactly...
They're stating, and to what degree they are describing something as a physical reality versus a metaphorical description.
And they would even see asking that question as illustrating your...
It's very game-y, isn't it?
Yeah, your ignorance, right?
You're so obsessed by putting things into these boxes, and it's much more complicated than that.
But like...
What annoys me a little bit about it is, you know, this allows Peugeot to simultaneously endorse the reality of demons to a religious audience and to basically tell people these traditional concepts about demons and stuff, it's all valid and science is validating it and philosophy is validating it.
And then at the same time, if there's a, you know, more scientifically inclined audience that is...
It's responding to it to be like, well, look, this is actually about psychological collective forces and patterns of behavior that impact human cognition throughout time.
You know, little demons, you know, dancing around in hell.
No, no.
We're talking about collective, we're talking about collective, the function of collective intelligence, just like price finding in a free market.
You know, that's something that happens in a distributed way and no one person does it.
So, yeah, it is having your cake and eating it too.
But Pajot is explicit, like, as you said before, Pajot is explicitly...
You know, very religious, right?
He's a theologian.
But these guys really are picking up the project of the medieval scholastics, aren't they?
Because the sort of Christian, the old-fashioned Christian would have very much looked down at the kind of primitive, you know, what would they call it?
The heresies.
The interpretation of the lay people, right?
That see God as a man in the cloud and demons as dangerous creatures, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Like, you know, saying that that river is haunted or there's a water sprite or something like that.
So, they would definitely look down their noses at that kind of thing.
But rather, they'd dedicate their lives to doing this kind of extremely complicated and...
Dense justifications and interpretations of Christian scripture, which included exactly the same statements about witches and demons and all that stuff, but it was done in Latin, so it's fine, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
So, there's always a way to interpret religious scriptures and traditional concepts in a way which makes them acceptable within a contemporary framework.
To me, it's fine to do that, but you should recognize that what you're doing is, you know, it can be religious apologetics, it can be sophistry, or it can, you know, simply be an exercise in symbolic interpretivism.
But I think that the sense-making ecosystem leans into This not just being, you know, like an exercise in discussing fiction, right?
It's not just a book club talking about ways that you can interpret, you know, historical texts.
That is not it.
No.
I mean, like you said, anyone in the sense-making sphere who listened to someone like you and me would definitely say that we are...
Bad actors, that we're deliberately being obtuse.
We've got a closed mind.
And the entire attitude that we have, which is being critical, is the antithesis of what they believe in.
So their belief...
is in this idea of cohesion, that a conversation is like a band of jazz musicians riffing off each other and taking the stuff that the other person is saying and not attacking it or being reductionist or trying to pin them down,
but rather picking the ball up and then making another...
Melody with it, to mix my metaphors, and then sort of pass it around and together you create this sort of new creative types of meaning.
And so, just basically supporting your point, this is why the sense makers are...
Entirely vulnerable to what is straight up medieval religious thinking because to them it's all ideas.
It's all a rich tapestry.
These are just threads that can form part of a greater new understanding of the whole.
There is no place for...
For disagreement, really, or like pinning people down.
You can have disagreement.
But you can't reject, I guess is what I'm saying.
No, that's exactly.
You cannot reject.
It has to be like the Omega rule, which we'll get into in the next episode, is explicit that you cannot do that and that you must search for the signal to the noise, even if the noise is 98% of the conversation.
You must focus on the 2% that, you know, is not noise.
Yeah, so refusing to play that game just makes you a bad sense maker and an obnoxious person, right?
Because you're disrupting the whole collective spirit of sense making.
Yeah, but it does feel that you're also losing a rather important tool and an important part of science, which is to be able to say...
Right, but that's bullshit.
Like, is there any actual evidence for egregores metaphysically existing outside of a, you know, a fanciful metaphor?
Yeah, like, actually expecting a yes or no answer.
That's...
You know, that's not allowed.
Like, your first question would be, hang on, he said this is literally true, are they real, or is it just a metaphor?
And if they say it's just a metaphor, then you could then say, well, it's a terrible fucking metaphor.
Yeah, given the history.
This is the same thing.
Peugeot does the same trick with witches.
And he basically wants to argue that there's important wisdom to be gleaned from medieval books about how to detect and torture witches and put them on trial.
To me that's very sinister because it ignores that what actually occurred there was due to superstitious reasoning and the false belief that there were Metaphysical creatures called witches.
That people were tortured and put to death.
And generally, it was people who, you know, were on the outskirts or unmarried women or people with mental illnesses.
And that's why we shouldn't bend over backwards to, you know, interpret these things in harmless, highly abstract ways.
Because no, actually, like, belief in demons and witches...
It caused harm in the past.
It still causes harm around the world today.
And, you know, the airy-fairy intellectuals playing around with their abstract concepts.
I can't help but feel, you know, Alex Jones talks a lot about demons as well.
And, you know, this is a much more intellectualized version of that.
But I...
I do think there is a connective tissue there.
Like you say, Chris, I feel like there's no obligation on any of us to indulge this kind of thing and take it seriously because it was exactly that kind of fuzzy thinking and that lack of ability to actually think about things in terms of observable evidence and applying that critical thinking.
That was the reason why...
The various courts, ecclesiastical or secular courts in the Middle Ages, could put people to death because somebody's cow stopped giving milk.
It was because they had such a poor handle on evidence-based reasoning, which our courts today, our law processes and the various institutions we have, including scientific ones, that are better at.
They're better.
They're not perfect, but they're better.
I'm not saying they're perfect.
I'm saying that they're better than the Spanish Inquisition.
Yeah, so, you know, you don't indulge it because it just leads to bad things, like fuzzy thinking, having a poor grip on what's real and what's not real, what's just in your imagination.
You know, it gets people killed.
So, screw them.
Yeah, yeah.
And, like, this does not mean...
Theologians aren't allowed to waffle together or sense makers can't record their podcast conversations.
That's fine.
It just means we don't have to be nice to them.
That's all.
We can call the spear the spear because we don't need to live in this ambiguous...
Peterson-esque wonderland where you're not allowed to say anything isn't, that there's no evidence for things existing or that, like, metaphors are actually sometimes obfuscatory, right?
Rather than clarifying.
So, yeah.
So this was just a little, you know, just a little side trip into the sense making.
Ecosystem.
And we're going to, like we said, we're going to dive in for the full course, the full meaty two or 40 minute episode of Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jimmy Wheel.
And sense making about sense making.
That's what that episode is about.
So look forward to that.
Look forward to that.
It'll be epic.
It'll be epic.
This is just a taste.
This is just a little morsel of an entree of sense.
So, yeah, the full course will be the real deal.
It's just a pattern.
It's just a pattern that, you know, it has its kind of own intentionality impacting your psychology through these.
Just think you're listening on something.
The air is vibrating and it's hitting your ears.
Your neurons are firing off electrons.
Connections are being made.
And in a way, isn't that magic?
When people talked about magic, is that not magic?
What is actually happening here?
Magic is real, Matt.
Magic is real.
Magic is real.
The goddess is dancing.
Can't wait.
It'll be good.
Let's do it.
Look it over there.
Beautiful.
In our finery.
Yes.
All right.
Or is that an emperor with no clothes?
I can't tell.
It's one of the two.
So, yes.
We'll be back soon with a full core sense-making meal for you all.
And until then, enjoy yourself.
Beware of the disc.
Note to Jim, keep an eye on those activities and have a good day.
Yep, stay clear of any egregores.
Oh yeah, close things.
Banshees too!
Banshees.
Ciao. Ciao.
you you
So, I did a lecture series on Genesis, and I got a lot of it unpacked, but by no means all of it.
When God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, He puts cherubim with flaming swords at the gate to stop human beings from re-entering paradise.
I thought, what the hell does that mean, cherubim?
And why do they have flaming swords?
I don't get that.
What is that exactly?
And then...
I found out from Matthew Paggio, who wrote a great book on symbolism in Genesis, that cherubim are the supporting monsters of God.
It's a very complicated idea.
And that they're partly a representation of that which is difficult to fit into conceptual systems.
They've also got an angelic or demonic aspect.
Take your pick.
Why do they have flaming swords?
Well, a sword is a symbol of judgment and...
And the separation of the wheat from the chaff.
Use a sword to cut away, to cut away and to carve.
And a flaming sword is not only that which carves, it's that which burns.
And what does it carve away and burn?
Well, you want to get into paradise?
It carves away everything about you that isn't perfect.
And so what does that mean?
Okay, well, here's part of what it means.
This is a terrible thing.
You could say that the entire Christian narrative is embedded in that image.
Why?
Well, let's say that flaming swords are a symbol of death.
That seems pretty obvious.
Let's say further that they're a symbol of apocalypse and hell.
