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Nov. 22, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

02:02:43

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

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	There's also something important, Jordan, in understanding that at least the traditional churches, at least the liturgical churches, that you don't...
	Like, for example, in the Orthodox Church, they always say, if the sermon is more than 15 minutes, it's pride.
	Keep your sermons as short as possible, because you're not there to encounter...
	I'm obviously guilty of that.
	You're not there.
	I mean, propositional understanding is fine, but it's participatory.
	Church is participatory.
	So you enter into the church, like you imagine an Orthodox church, even a traditional Catholic church, you have a space which is structured as the hierarchy, ontological hierarchy of being, and then you see these images which are patterned, And are revealing to you these mysteries that are beyond words.
	And then you participate in the singing, these processions.
	And it is a participative thing.
	And so if you go there to kind of get knowledge, it's not the same type of practice.
	And as you're singing these songs and as you're hearing these hymns, all of a sudden, two images connect together.
	And all of a sudden, you know, these things start to connect inside you in somewhat, in almost a kind of We're good to go.
	The same time we were presenting the Bible in this flattened-out, historical-critical way, we also were flattening out our churches, emptying out our churches of just that mystical, cosmic symbolism, the angels, the saints, color, the cosmic dimension, and we flattened them out, out and we made them like, you know, empty meeting spaces.
	Music by Ben Thede Hello, everybody.
	I'm pleased today to have the opportunity to speak with people that some of you will be familiar with.
	They've been guests on my podcast and YouTube channel, sometimes multiple times.
	It's always been interesting to me and to some of you, at least, according to the comments.
	I thought it would be very interesting to get these three gentlemen together with me and talk about meaning.
	What meaning means.
	What religious meaning means, more specifically.
	And we're hoping to have a free-flowing conversation to investigate that question from psychological, theological, and personal perspectives.
	And so I'm happy to have John Verveke.
	Professor at the University of Toronto.
	Bishop Barron, who's a bishop.
	Bishop Robert Barron.
	And Jonathan Paggio, who's an Orthodox Christian icon carver and now, as well, a frequent YouTube commentator and public speaker.
	And these men, I found my conversations with them always stretched my mind and taught me new things and made me think.
	And so I thought we'd see what we could all do together.
	So welcome, gentlemen.
	It's a pleasure to have you here.
	Thank you.
	Thanks for having me.
	John, I'll start with you.
	So I'm going to ask you two questions.
	I'm going to ask you what you think meaning means.
	What does the term mean?
	What does it signify?
	And then there's some implicit idea, I suppose, that meaning has different depths and that religious meaning is among the deepest of depths.
	And I'd like you to riff on that.
	We'll go from man to man to do that.
	Then we'll start talking as if it's a conversation.
	Great.
	Thanks again for inviting me, and it's a great pleasure to be here.
	It's great to see you again, Jonathan, and it's a pleasure meeting you, Bishop.
	So there's a question, as you said quite correctly, that's at the center of a lot of my work and also, I guess, my own personal project.
	I take it when we're talking about meaning in this context, we're using meaning as a metaphor.
	We're talking about something similar to the way a sentence works.
	It has an intelligibility to it that connects us to the world in some important way so that we can interact with the world and so we can be informed by the world.
	And what we're talking about when we're talking about meaning in the sense of meaning in life, not just the meaning of a sentence, the question to ask is what is that metaphor pointing to?
	So I've put forth the proposal that what that metaphor is pointing to is something that's fundamental to our cognitive agency.
	And Jordan, this is something you and I have talked about before in other contexts, which is the problem of relevance realization, which is this deep, profound problem at the heart of cognitive science.
	You find at the heart of AI, many issues within cognitive psychology, categorization, communication.
	And this is, of all of the information available to me, How do I zero in on the relevant information?
	Of all of the information available in my long-term memory and all the potential ways I could combine them, how do I connect and zero in on the relevant information?
	Out of all the possible courses of actions I could undertake, the way I could sequence various things together, how do I select the appropriate sequence of actions?
	How do I do that?
	And the thing that's mysterious and wonderful and perplexing and intriguing and I'm obsessed about is we're doing it all right now and we're doing it like this.
	And it's not a cold calculation.
	You know, I'm standing out.
	I'm salient.
	There's an element of arousal.
	There's affect.
	You're caring about some information and you're backgrounding and ignoring other information.
	So it's this very affectively laden connectedness.
	Because the idea of relevance realization is relevance isn't in the head.
	It isn't in the world.
	It's in a proper real relation between the embodied brain and the world.
	This is what's known as embodied cognition.
	This is the kind of cognitive science.
	I'm involved in.
	So the idea is this is a dynamical self-organizing process and you can feel it a little bit at work right now.
	As I'm talking, part of your attention wants to drift away and think about other things.
	Right.
	This is like variation and evolution.
	Another part of your attention is focusing in and selecting and you're constantly varying and selecting.
	And you're evolving in this dynamically coupled fashion, a salience landscape that makes you feel that you're here now in this particular state of consciousness, in this situational awareness.
	So you're deeply fundamentally connected and that is deeply central to your cognitive agency.
	If you don't have that You're not a cognitive agent.
	And this is, of course, one of the things that has the whole project of artificial intelligence has disclosed.
	We thought that intelligence was mostly about propositional manipulation, getting sort of coherence.
	And instead, no, this dynamical, embodied, evolving connectedness is very central.
	So much so that it stands to good reason that it is a core motivational feature and dimension of our whole agency.
	So I talk about meaning in life, and I use a word, and I use it deliberately, but I hope it's not offensively.
	I use the word religio.
	To describe this connection, because that's one of the, that's the meaning of religio, to bind together.
	It's one of the purported etymological origins of the word religion.
	And that allows me to now segue into what I would want to say religious meaning is.
	So I think when we are, here's a metaphor.
	And I often use this.
	A lot of the time, our mental framing is transparent to us, like my glasses.
	We're looking through it and by means of it.
	But there are times when I need to step back and consider.
	This is what you do in mindfulness practices.
	I need to consider that mental framing.
	And I might want to not only consider it, I might want to educate it.
	I might want to celebrate it.
	So normally, religio is transparent to us, and therefore it affords our agency.
	But there are things we do where we step back and we try to become more directly aware of religio in order to educate it, perhaps correct it, improve it, celebrate it.
	And when we're doing that in a way that creates...
	What I call a reciprocal opening, the opposite of what happens in addiction.
	Reciprocal opening is my agency is opening up, the world is opening up, and I'm experiencing this inexhaustible fount of emerging intelligibility that's not just conceptual, but is about this religio.
	For me, that's the experience of sacredness.
	And so when we focus upon religio rather than focus through it, In order to accentuate it and accelerate it so that we can come into the deepest mutual resonance between ourselves and the depths of reality.
	That, for me, is what religious meaning would be.
	The religio about the sacred.
	So that would be my initial answer.
	I hope that was helpful.
	Okay, so I'm going to comment on that, and I'll make my comments about this question, because I'm also a psychologist, and then we'll move to you guys, to Jonathan and to Bishop Aaron.
	So, if you think, when you look at the world, there's a central point of focus, and that's mediated by your fovea, and that's at the back of your, that's on your retina, in the center, essentially.
	And You'll notice that when you zoom your eyes on something, that becomes very clear.
	It's a very small area that becomes very clear.
	And then you'll notice that around that area, it's less and less and less clear until it fades out into nothingness.
	And the nothingness you don't even perceive.
	It's just not there.
	And so it's high resolution in the center, lower, lower, lower, lower.
	Way out here in the periphery, you actually don't even see color.
	You can't tell that, but you don't.
	And you're better at detecting motion because maybe you should look at moving things.
	And then the world vanishes.
	And that's very much like what consciousness is.
	And also it's associated with meaning because you focus your fovea on what's most meaningful.
	And those foveal cells are tremendously connected into the visual cortex.
	That...
	It takes a lot of brain to make that fovea work.
	And that's why it's such a small area and we move it around instead of just having a retina that's all fovea.
	We'd have to have a brain like this big to manage that.
	So, okay, so that's sort of like a metaphor for consciousness and meaning.
	And then I want to layer something on top of that metaphor.
	So...
	And this is something like the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious and also the relationship between narratives and consciousness and consciousness and unconsciousness.
	So I'm looking at, say, John right now.
	I'm looking at his eyes.
	Because that's what you do when you converse with someone.
	And I'm doing that because we're having a conversation.
	And so I have this little frame of reference that helps me realize what's relevant right now.
	My goal is to have an interesting conversation.
	And I'm picking out the targets that I presume are relevant to that goal.
	But then you might ask yourself, well, why that goal?
	And then, so, that story that's guiding me is nested in a larger story, which is, well, maybe I'm an educator and a communicator, and I'd like to bring this knowledge to myself, but also to other people.
	And then, outside of that is another story, which is, well, why am I doing that?
	And, well, it's because I think that it's an interesting thing to do, and it's a meaningful and useful thing to do, but It'll help educate people and maybe that'll make the world a slightly better place in some manner.
	And then outside of that, there's another presumption, which is, well, why would I bother trying to make the world a better place?
	And maybe that's because, well, because not suffering is better than suffering and because I think that that's a moral way to act and I would like to act in a moral manner.
	And then outside of that, there's yet another story, which is, well...
	And that's where you start to shade into the religious.
	It's like, who exactly am I imitating when I enact that morality?
	And I think that's where we can have a particularly interesting discussion because I would say psychologically that implicit figure at the outer edge of the narrative structuring of my consciousness and meaning realization, that would be something that's psychologically equivalent to The hero of heroes.
	In some sense, that would be culture-free, but in our culture, in the Judeo-Christian culture, that figure is Christ.
	And so, this is independent of religious belief, as far as I'm concerned.
	Now, there's an interesting relationship with formal religious belief, but I think this is the way it works psychologically.
	And I got some of this from studying neuroscience, the same sorts of things John is studying, but some of it from studying Jung.
	At the very least, speaking psychologically, Christ is the symbol of the self.
	And what he meant by that is that Christ is the symbolic realization of our culture's determination of the embodiment of the ideal.
	And it's an image and it grips us.
	It's the thing we imitate or we fight against.
	We're in that whether we like it or not.
	And then the question becomes for me, okay, that's a psychological truth.
	But it can also be a metaphysical claim and an ontological claim.
	And that's where this starts to shade into the religious per se.
	So that's it for me.
	So, Bishop, do you want to take it from there?
	Yeah, thank you.
	First of all, everybody, thank you.
	And Jonathan and John, to meet you for the first time, at least virtually.
	I've met Jordan twice now, virtually, but good to be with all of you.
	You're all Canadians, right?
	All of you are Canadian-born?
	Because all I can think of, as you both were talking about Lonergan, I'll get maybe back to him, but one of my favorite philosophers, the Canadian Jesuit Lonergan, came to my mind a lot.
	But to answer the opening question, I guess I would say meaning is to be in a purposive relationship to a value.
	So I think certain values appear, epistemic values of the true, moral values, and aesthetic values.
	So the true, the good, and the beautiful, right?
	The three transcendental properties of being.
	And I think those values appear.
	And I really like what you were saying, too, both of you, about attention.
	What gets our attention?
	What draws our consciousness?
	Right?
	Why, like, you know, William James says the mind is like a bird that flies and it perches for a time, it looks and then it flies again.
	Why does it focus on certain things?
	And we call those values, I would say.
	And a meaningful life is one that's lived in a purposive relationship to values.
	It's seeking them in a very concentrated way.
	Now, what's religious value?
	Is a life lived in purposive relationship to the supreme value, the sumum bonum, to the source of goodness, truth, and beauty, which is God.
	And you know what came to my mind as you were talking, Jordan, was two things from Aquinas.
	One is...
	Probably the most misunderstood and overlooked of his famous five arguments is the fourth argument, and it's the most platonic of the five.
	He's usually Aristotelian in form, Aquinas, but number four is platonic, and what he says is, That's true, good, and beautiful.
	In implicit relationship to something we consider highest in goodness, truth, and beauty.
	And the way it's misunderstood is people think, oh, I guess, well, there's a tall building, there's a taller building, and boy, there's the tallest building.
	There must be some absolutely tall building.
	But he's not talking about something as trivial as that.
	He's talking about the properties of being, the good, the true, and the beautiful.
	And being is by its very nature unlimited property.
	So therefore it's true that we make those calculations, we see those hierarchies, only finally in relationship to an unconditioned, if I can use the more modern kind of Kantian language, some unconditioned form of goodness, truth, and beauty.
	That's religious meaning, it seems to me, is to be in purposive relationship to that.
	The other thing from Aquinas, and I think, Jordan, you and I talked about it last time we were together.
	I love what you did there, because that's an implicit argument for God.
	It's in the second part of the Summa.
	From final causality, every time I make an act of the will, I'm seeking a good.
	I'm seeking a value of some kind.
	But as you say, quite correctly, and that's just like Aquinas, that value nests in a higher value, which nests in a still higher value.
	And so I can't go on indefinitely.
	That would make my act of the will incoherent.
	So I've got to come finally to some summum bonum, some supreme value that's motivating me.
	That's religious meaning, it seems to me, is now to be in relationship to this most alluring horizon of all desire.
	Now there's Lonergan again, my Canadian reference.
	To be in relation to God, Lonergan said, is to want to know everything about everything.
	So that's the value, the epistemic value of the truth, but now in its unconditioned form.
	I want to know everything about everything.
	We call that in religious language the beatific vision.
	Or I want not just this particular good.
	So I'm talking to the three of you now, which I think is a good.
	But it's nesting, as you say, in a higher good.
	And it's still a higher good.
	And so finally, I want not just this particular good.
	I want goodness itself.
	That's a religious relationship.
	So I guess that's how I'd approach it, maybe piggybacking a bit on what you both said.
	Jonathan?
	I think, I mean, it's interesting because, by the way, thank you for making me last in this stacking up on everything that everybody said.
	But I think that what's interesting in what John said in terms of relevance realization and in terms of this hierarchy of values that both Jordan and Bishop Barron brought up, the thing that I might add, at least in my perception, is that First of all, this pattern recognition that we engage with and this hierarchy of values and just hierarchies in general, they really are teleological in the way that Bishop Barron said.
	That is that the reason why we perceive hierarchy is because we're always judging or perceiving or trying to evaluate whether something is good.
	But the other thing that this does, in terms of, so it binds reality together, right?
	So you're looking at something and you want to evaluate the apple, and this desire makes you see the pattern of the apple because you have to engage with it.
	You have to relate to it.
	You have to eat it.
	So because you have to eat the apple, that's why you see it, and that's why you can perceive it, and that's why you're evaluating it.
	But this pattern, let's say, of binding, of religio that John mentioned, it stacks up.
	So until now, we've actually talked mostly about individual relationship, this individual relationship with the field of being that presents itself to us, the individual relationship with the ultimate good.
	But it also does something else, is that it stacks up people together.
	It binds us together as well.
	And that's in terms of meaning of religio, in a broader sense, that can also kind of help you understand religious practice.
	Why we get together, why we sing together, why we celebrate, as John mentioned, why do we celebrate together?
	Because when you see the apple and you see a good apple, you're implicitly celebrating it.
	Every act of recognition of a good is going to be a mini celebration.
	But that stacks up together in terms of people gathering and singing and processing and doing all the things we do in order to celebrate the highest good.
	Let me just intersperse something there from a psychological perspective.
	Well, that idea of the mini celebration, So there's a technical reason for that in some sense.
	So let's say you specify a goal and that goal is nested inside the value hierarchy that we've already described.
	And so now you're pursuing something of value.
	If you see something that leads you down the pathway to that value, That produces positive emotion, technically speaking.
	That's dopaminergically mediated.
	And so there's psychological...
	There's a fundamental neuroscientific reality underneath the idea that to perceive something good in relationship to a higher good is a celebration.
	And it is definitely that that imbues our life with a sense of positive meaning.
	And I mean that directly.
	Meaning is derived from this nested hierarchy and then the perception of...
	Of valued...
	What would you...
	The perceptions of values that lead us down that pathway.
	Without that, there is no positive emotion in my understanding of it.
	Yeah.
	And so, the last thing I might want to say is that, so in the same way that the world reveals itself to us as this hierarchy of the good, in the same way that we see that, it also reveals itself to us cosmically.
	That's why I'm saying it stacks up.
	And that's why there are temples.
	That's why there's the law of Moses that was received on the top of the mountain, that there is a cosmic revelation of the same pattern that you encounter as an individual, which is inescapable as an individual.
	And so that is what ends up creating these revelations of being into the world and binding us together as a body instead of just these disparate individuals.
	And as Jordan said, It's very appropriate to discuss, you know, what are these revelations and what do they look like?
	And of these revelations, which is the one that binds the most reality together into itself?
	And I think that that is when the image of Christ as being God-man, as going all the way down into death, as reaching to the highest summit, as, you know, I don't want to go into his story too much, but Jordan, you know that there's a...
	Most of Christ's story seems to go to the limit of storytelling in all the aspects in which it goes, right?
	It's like Christ doesn't just go down into the underworld and resurrect.
	When he comes back up, the underworld is empty and death is defeated, and that's the end.
	And so it's like that for almost every aspect of Christ's story, where he reaches the limit of storytelling.
	And so in that way, it ends up just being, the fact that we recognize it, that we've brought it together, that we've celebrated it, means that it is part of this kind of cosmic Revelation.
	And it's something that we can look at objectively and talk about and discuss.
	But it's definitely there in our story as Europeans, as Westerners, and we've discounted it completely.
	But I think we're at a point now with this meaning crisis where we can go back and reevaluate it and understand it as the possibility of these relevance realization patterns stacking up beyond the individual, I'd say.
	Okay, so I want to comment on that revelation idea.
	I'm going to go a little sideways here.
	So you might say that the standard view of the world now is that there's an objective reality that's devoid, that's made out of material things.
	That's the most appropriate way to conceptualize it.
	It's made out of objective things.
	They exist independently of consciousness, and we project a value structure onto them.
	And when we die, let's say, when there is no human consciousness, there's no value structure like that there.
	And so it's epiphenomenal and evanescent.
	It's not a fundamental part of objective reality.
	Outside of subjectivity.
	Now, there's a couple of problems with that viewpoint, I would say.
	First of all, it isn't obvious to me that we see objects.
	We see patterns.
	It's not obvious that we see...
	You could make a strong case, and this was made by a man who wrote Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, that what we perceive, first and foremost, aren't objects.
	We perceive meaning.
	Mm-hmm.
	We perceive a falling-off place if we get too near a cliff, and even a six-month-old will perceive that.
	Children, infants, very, very young, perceive beauty, they perceive symmetry, they perceive value, and so we don't perceive the object and obviously project the meaning.
	You can't say that that's the way the neuroscience of perception has laid out the world.
	And then the last thing is, is that the problem with the idea that we merely project meaning onto a meaningless, objective world is that meaning is disclosed to us in ways that we can't predict and that are outside of our...
	What would...
	Outside of...
	The...
	New knowledge that we don't have can be revealed to us through the perception of value.
	It's not obvious how we can project that and then also have something new revealed at the same time.
	So meaning is disclosed to us.
	And the phenomenologists, phenomenological psychologists made much of this in the first third of the 20th century following Heidegger.
	So anyways, I'm going to leave it at that.
	Can I just jump in?
	I go back here to Dietrich von Hildebrand's famous distinction between the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable.
	And I mean, he certainly understood the play between the subjective and the objective, and all the classical philosophers knew that.
	Aquinas certainly knew it.
	The mind and the intelligible form light up each other, he said.
	I mean, each one illumines the other.
	So I don't think the pre-modern people had this sense of sharp demarcation of the two.
	Nevertheless, there's a distinction.
	I think, Jordan, you're hitting at it there.
	We feel the distinction between the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable.
	The objectively valuable...
	It addresses me.
	It rearranges me.
	It's not something that I've configured or I've projected.
	It's turned me upside down.
	I think we've all had that experience.
	There was an article in Rolling Stone years ago, and it asked a number of the famous rock and rollers, what was the first song that rocked your world?
	And I remember liking the formulation of that question, because it didn't say, what's the first song you liked?
	It was the first song that changed you, that rearranged your consciousness.
	And I can name that very clearly.
	My own case was Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone.
	It wasn't the first song I liked, but it was the first song that rocked my world and rearranged me.
	And I think that's what real value is like.
	Now, bring it to the religious level.
	Now we're in a biblical kind of framework where, you know, it's not you who've chosen me, it's I who've chosen you.
	And now when the sumum bonum isn't just dumbly out there waiting for us to rise up through some contemplative exercise.
	Because, I mean, the sumum bonum, Plato and Plotinus and Kant could all say, yeah, there's a sumum bonum.
	But when it really gets interesting to me is when the sumum bonum is after me.
	The sumum bonum is trying to find me and is breaking into my...
	Reluctant and recalcitrant consciousness.
	And now you're talking about religious revelation.
	But it has to do with that, I don't know, stunning objectivity, the good.
	Think of Iris Murdoch there.
	She was so strong on that theme that the good confronts us and it changes us and it doesn't let us go.
	Religious revelation is the sort of ultimate expression of that, it seems to me.
	This is something with which I'm in significant agreement, but I think it's also important to wonder together why this has become so problematic.
	I think we're in a meeting crisis.
	And I think we should remember You know, the factor, I mean, so Bishop, you invoked Aristotle's conformity theory, and of course, that was replaced by a representational theory of knowledge, a propositional representational theory, for various reasons.
	One was trying to account for the Copernican Revolution, etc.
	We had nominalism that said those patterns aren't out in the world, and that's why I keep saying Jonathan is more radical than he sometimes realizes, because he's challenging a fundamental nominalism in his work.
	Yeah.
	And Kant is the culmination of that.
	The real patterns are only in your mind, and we have no access to the world, and there's reasons why we got there.
	And then, of course, there are, you know, related issues around ideas of levels of being, which is, you know, I think you're right.
	All of you have said this, and this is, you know, central to the phenomenology of intelligibility, but it seems to be, you know, contradicted.
	By something that, you know, starts with Scottish and goes through Occam and goes into the heart of the scientific revolution is there's no such thing as levels.
	This is not a reality just is, you know, existence isn't a predicate and those kinds of things.
	Now, I'm not I'm not mentioning these things to espouse them.
	I'm mentioning them to try and indicate there have been very profound philosophical historical developments that have challenged This phenomenology.
	And that part of the task, well, sorry, I don't want to be presumptuous.
	Part of what I see my task of being is to try and take the very best of science and answer all of those challenges in a way that restores confidence in the hierarchies of intelligibility and the phenomenology of connectedness.
	Now, that's one thing I'd want to say.
	The second thing I... Why are you doing that?
	Why are you called to do that, John?
	Well, I'm called to do that because...
	Well, this is how I put it to my students who take my introduction to cognitive science.
	We have a scientific worldview in which science...
	And the scientists and their meaning-making have no proper ontological place.
	We are the whole.
	Science and we are the black hole within this worldview that dominates us.
	And let's be very clear, and this is Heidegger's point.
	Domination is not just ideational or even ideological.
	It is woven into the fabric of our technology.
	The ways we communicate, it's woven into our cognitive grammar.
	We talk about, like, even the way that we divide subjective and objective.
	One of Gibson's points Jordan, you mentioned Gibson, is the notion of an affordance.
	And an affordance is not properly objective or subjective.
	The graspability of this cup is not a feature of the cup.
	It's not a subjective feature of me.
	It's a real relation between me.
	And so, I mean, Gibson, again, Gibson's work is really profound.
	This is why it gets taken up into 40 cognitive science.
	He's trying to challenge this grammar.
	And there's a whole bunch of us.
	I don't want to...
	I'm in no way a singular...
	I represent a lot of people who are feeling called to the fact that this lack of ontological placement and the way it ramifies through our ontological technological structure and our cultural cognitive grammar, the very ways we think, is causing massive suffering.
	Yes, absolutely right.
	I'm still unclear about that a bit.
	I'm still unclear about exactly what you mean.
	What is this black hole?
	I mean, is this the insistence on the absolute distinction between the subjective and the objective?
	No, no.
	What is this black...
	Okay, so what is it?
	Well, what I meant...
	I mean, it's related to that, but what I was directly referring to at the black hole is that science...
	Does science exist?
	Okay, if it is, what kind of entity is it?
	And tell me using physics or chemistry or even biology, use just that ontology and those methodologies.
	Tell me what science is.
	And tell me how it has the status to make the claims it does.
	And tell me how science is related to meaning and truth.
	And how do meaning and truth fit into the scientific worldview?
	They're presupposed by that worldview, but they have no proper place within it.
	That's what I mean.
	So whenever we're doing the science and saying this is what the world is, we are absenting ourselves from it.
	We have no home in which we are properly situated.
	And I think that ramifies through everything we think, say, and do to each other and with each other in a profoundly corrosive way.
	That's what I mean by the meaning of purpose.
	It's caused enormous suffering.
	It causes enormous suffering.
	I was talking to somebody just the other day in Australia, and there are more deaths by suicide in Australia right now than COVID. And Australia is one of the epitomes of, you know, the best countries in the world, affluent, liberal democracy, not much conflict, been at peace for a long time, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	All the things that the Enlightenment said would bring in unending happiness.
	And what you have is spiking in suicide.
	You have the loneliness epidemic.
	You have the addiction epidemic.
	You have people...
	Choosing to live in a virtual world rather than the real world.
	You have all of these things that are pointing to the fact that there's a significant stressor.
	You have positive responses too.
	You have the mindfulness revolution.
	You have the resuscitation of ancient, you know, wisdom philosophies like Stoicism.
	You have, you know, You have the work of people right here.
	I mean, one of the things, and I hope Jonathan takes this as a compliment because he knows how highly I think of him.
	I think one of the things that Jonathan is doing with his work is responding to this suffering and the meaning crisis.
	We were drawn to each other because we both saw the zombie as a mythological representation.
	The culture was saying to itself, we're suffering a meaning crisis.
	I'm talking too much.
	I'm going to stop it.
	Jordan, if we go back to the image that you used, which is the idea that we project meaning on an objective world, already you can see the alienation that is bound up in that very proposition, which is, okay, so where are we then?
	We're not in the world.
	We're like these kind of ghosts that are floating above reality.
	And where does that come from?
	Where does that floating intelligence come from that's able to separate itself So completely from the world that it's able to just analyze it objectively and then project and then realize that it's projecting subjective meaning on top of it.
	And so I think that some of the work that John's been doing and some of the work that you've been doing is to realize this embodied Reality is that we are in the world, and we are part and parcel of the manner in which meaning, even the world itself discloses itself.
	People who think they can imagine a world outside of human consciousness, where are they?
	Where are they standing that they can tell us that we are projecting meaning onto the world?
	Are they like gods up in the world?
	They would never say that.
	They've taken themselves out of the equation.
	And so coming back into reality and understanding this image of communion, for example, like a lot of the images that John is saying is really this image of communion.
	That meaning is relational, that it's communal, that it's all these things that can help us even understand once again what the religious patterns are for.
	It's actually holding reality together.
	And once we've broken that, then we get this increasing alienation We get the increasing fragmentation, you know, the suburbs as just a spread of people that don't know each other.
	They don't have common projects that have nothing in common except that they're living in just this equal space.
	And so this kind of reducing of hierarchy in the world that the scientists wanted to happen, it's happened now to us.
	And everything's breaking apart and nobody can hear each other.
	And it's a direct consequence of that thinking.
	Yeah, there's a lot that's just stimulating my thinking here.
	And one is, I mean, God, I love the sciences, but I hate scientism.
	And scientism is all over the place in our culture.
	I deal with it all the time in my evangelical work, hearing from not just younger people, from everybody in our culture that science is the criterion.
	You know, I saw a video, Jonathan, you and Jordan were talking to Brett Weinstein, and it was about, I don't know, maybe it's something along these lines.
	But he made, very articulately, intelligently, but made the argument that the sciences, the physical sciences, belong in the supreme position vis-a-vis all forms of human knowing.
	And I'm shouting at the screen, no, no, that's exactly where they don't belong.
	And that's a form of scientism.
	The medievals call theology like the queen of the sciences.
	Well, at least that's more appropriate.
	You're talking about God and the sumum bonum having some kind of supremacy.
	I also go right back to the classical world.
	The sciences, from a Platonic standpoint, they're terrific, but you're just getting ever more precise accounts of the cave, of the images, the fleeting, evanescent images of the world, to rise to higher forms of consciousness.
	By way of mathematics, first of all, then to the higher forms of philosophy and metaphysics.
	Aristotle, you know, moving from physics to mathematics to metaphysics, it's not to denigrate for a second the sciences.
	Aristotle is the founder, in many ways, of physics.
	But it is to say there's a hierarchy again.
	There's an epistemic hierarchy.
	And science, physical science, does not belong at the top of it.
	When it does, something goes really wrong with the human spirit.
	And there's a starvation of the spirit.
	Well, and it's hard to know.
	How to take that seriously.
	Like, let's say that's a fact.
	There's a starvation of the human spirit.
	That's a fact.
	Well, is it a fact like a fact that emerges from physics?
	Well, not exactly.
	It's a different kind of fact.
	But what happens if we ignore it?
	Well, people suffer and die.
	And we don't use the fact that in the absence of a proposition...
	People suffer and die as an index of its truth.
	Not from the scientific perspective, that that isn't the methodology of science.
	But that leaves us with this problem of meaning.
	It's sort of delivered to us, and it isn't something, it isn't obvious to me that science can address it at all.
	I mean, Sam Harris and other thinkers like Harris have tried to put the value, to bring the domain of value within the domain of science.
	I think it's an effort that's doomed to failure, because I don't think they're of the same type.
	I think that science, by its very nature, excludes, it does everything it can to exclude value, except John, it leaves us with the problem you described, which is the problem that Jung addressed when he was tying the development of empirical science back to alchemy, because, and this goes back to the idea of the hierarchies that we started out with,
	you know, Jung believed that He was really curious about why people ever became motivated to take things apart like scientists did, to concentrate on the minute like that.
	What dream drove them?
	What fantasies drove them?
	And for Jung, he found that fantasy in the thousands of years of work on alchemy.
	And the alchemical notion was there exists a substance.
	Which eventually became a material substance whose discovery would grant upon its bearer immortality, perfect health, and endless wealth.
	So the idea, the dream was that substance could be found in the material world.
	And that was a deep, deep unconscious fantasy manifested in all sorts of images, all sorts of bizarre images that Jung had the genius to be able to analyze and understand.
	He saw that as the dream that preceded the development of science in Western culture.
	Thousands, it took thousands and thousands of years to unfold this dream.
	and scientists were encapsulated within that dream whether they knew it or not and And so the prime example would be Newton, who wrote much more on alchemy than he did on physics.
	And so, John, as scientists, at least from the Jungian perspective, let's say, we're necessarily motivated by a narrative that we don't understand scientifically to engage in the scientific process per se.
	And we're so deeply possessed by that that it guides and moves our perceptions without us, as scientists, even necessarily having to be aware that we're participating in that narrative.
	So, to your point, the whole enterprise is driven by a dream whose reality can't be encapsulated within the process itself.
	It's a very strange thing.
	I think it's very interesting, that dream, and sort of the undercurrents of development.
	So substance goes back to hypostasis, but of course there's another history of hypostasis, which is into the persons of the Trinity, which is a very different history.
	And so there's no necessity that you go from hypostasis, the grounding of intelligibility, to materiality.
	And of course, what happened, right, was also the inversion of matter as pure potential to that which resists and resists.
	And I think that's part of, again, about how a history of how the reason was supplanted by will as the dominant faculty by which humans understood and identified themselves.
	I would like to say that That's bound up with a couple other strands.
	I wish I could do exhaustive history here, but I took 50 hours to do it, so I'm not going to try and do it now.
	But you also have, people like Harris and others, you have a deductivism model.
	Which is, whatever I can deduce from the science is real.
	But in the Neoplatonic tradition, you also look at what is presupposed by your sciences.
	And that is also a proper location for the real.
	So I have to presuppose the intelligibility of the world in order to do science.
	I can't use science to establish intelligibility.
	And then if I'm realistic about my science, which I better be because that's what scientists seem to be doing, I have to be realistic about this intelligibility.
	But that's in the contradiction to the anomalous presuppositions, the flat ontology.
	Notice the contradiction.
	Notice the contradiction in reductionism.
	So you have this whole tradition that says there are no levels of being.
	Get rid of all that platonic stuff.
	But the bottom level is the really real level, and all the levels above it are false.
	That is exactly symmetrical to the upper level is most real, and everything coming down from it is derivative.
	There's no deep difference, this is part of the point I've made, between an emergentist ontology, it is hierarchical and has levels, and an emanationist, it is hierarchical and has levels.
	And so do you think dark and selfish gene is an example of that?
	I think the idea that you can explain things in a purely bottom-up fashion, this is part of the alchemical revolution.
	It was like, and I think, and I agree with Jung on this, and maybe my interpretation is slightly different, but, you know, there was a predominance of, you know, emanation, an emanationist ontology coming out of the Neoplatonic tradition, and we needed to rediscover, we needed to Okay,
	so let me address that for a second, drag the Christians in here, because one of the claims that Jung made in his works on alchemy, which are very, very difficult to understand, was that, look, the Christian revolution took place and spread across...
	Well, across what became the Christian cultures and the West, broadly speaking.
	And there was an offer of salvation, right?
	Of deliverance from suffering.
	And the hope that Christ would return and the kingdom of heaven would be established on earth or something to that end.
	And then thousands of years went by and the disquiet grew as that wasn't revealed.
	And the...
	The unconscious imagination looking to find a source of new knowledge that could redress that suffering and lack started to focus on this emergent, this opposite emergent ontology that you described, said we haven't paid sufficient attention to the reality of the material world.
	Maybe that's what holds the key to the alleviation of our suffering.
	And so then there's a pull away from the top-down...
	This top-down hierarchical structure that Christianity had imposed in some sense or revealed to the opposite.
	And now it's swung way in the other direction.
	And so...
	Could I just say one thing in the defense of the Neoplatonists, which is, you know, if you read Erigena and Cusa, you get to, and Erigena's clear on this, you get a dialectical, in the Platonic sense, not the Hegelian sense, in which the emanation and the emergence completely interpenetrate.
	They're both needed And they interpenetrate each other.
	And I would argue that what's happening now is people are moving, especially in the philosophy of biology, towards we need bottom-up and top-down.
	You know, Jordan, this is rife through all of cognitive psychology, bottom-up, top-down thinking, right?
	And that's not just specific to the mind.
	I think it's now spreading out as, no, no, this is how we should start to think about it.
	But I think a more proper reading, especially of the later Neoplatonist 20s, It points to that heritage within Neoplatonism itself.
	So it doesn't have to be something necessarily foreign to Christianity, I would at least argue.
	No, St.
	Maximus is clearly a bottom-up and top-down at the same time.
	In St.
	Maximus' cosmology, you have the notion that, you know, these revelations are both a communion of love and also a revelation from above, and that there's absolutely no contradiction between the elements corresponding Coming together and coagulating in this relationship of love and it expressing this divine principle or this higher principle, which is coming down from above.
	And in terms of Jung's theory, I mean, I don't want to be picky about it, that he kind of imagined this story.
	You know, alchemy came very much from Islam, by the way.
	A lot of its development was in the Islamic world.
	Even the word alchemy is a...
	It's not a Western word.
	And so I find it a little too simplified to just say Christians were waiting for Jesus and then they created this bottom-up science.
	There's a deeper kind of transformation which happened in the West related to nominalism into a kind of slow progression towards this separation of heaven and earth.
	We could call it like this kind of ripping apart of the two sides, which kind of led both to materialism And to all these esoteric things that were going on at the same time, right?
	It's not true that materialism was on its own, but there are all these kind of esoteric developments that were manifesting themselves.
	We have to remember that Descartes spent his whole life trying to become a Rosicrucian.
	Like these two things were, it's like a ripping apart of reality that leads into the new age, into all this kind of neo-spirituality.
	And Christianity's true message is rather the incarnational one.
	It's the one that John said.
	It really is this binding of multiplicity and unity, the binding of Of the emanation of part and this kind of emergent part together.
	And so, Bishop, sorry, I interrupted you.
	No, it's very stimulating stuff.
	And I would add, you know, the structuring element in the Summa of Aquinas is the so-called exitus raditus, right?
	All things coming out from God, then all things returning to God.
	And so God makes a world that's good, indeed very good, but not perfect.
	And part of the drama of salvation, which is, in the Bible, always cosmic, not just human, not just personal.
	The drama of salvation is this wonderful process of radiatus, the return of all things to God, the coming together from below, if you want.
	But under the, you know, the alluring power of God's love.
	So that's one observation.
	The second one about the sciences.
	I mean, I agree with an army of scholars that say the condition for the possibility of the physical sciences in the West was Christianity.
	That is to say, the fundamental assumption that the world is not God.
	If you divinize the world, you're not going to experiment on it.
	You're not going to analyze it in this sort of objectivizing way.
	So the world is not God.
	It's been created.
	Therefore, it can be experimented upon, it can be analyzed.
	But then secondly, as we've all been saying in different ways, it is radically intelligible.
	Not just in a superficial way, not just in certain parts, but in every nook and cranny, the universe is intelligible.
	That's a very weird thing the more you think about it.
	Why should that be the case?
	And of course, it's coming out, I would argue, of a Christian conception that the world did come forth The Bible puts it poetically as a great act of speech, meaning it's imbued with intelligibility from an intelligent source.
	But when you bring intelligibility and non-divinity together, you get the rise of the modern sciences.
	So they're not the least bit repugnant to Christianity, on the contrary.
	What is repugnant is this scientism, and you've all been hinting at it in different ways, you know, trace it to people like Descartes.
	But I'm with John.
	I go right back to Duns Scotus and And Occam and the breakdown of a participation in metaphysics.
	And when you get this univocal conception of being and following from that nominalism, and I would even dare say certain forms of Protestantism are very much conditioned by that way of looking at things, you get a lot of the problems we're facing today.
	I'm for a recovery of the premodern, this wonderfully rich premodern sense of a participative view of being.
	You know, the world in God, the world reflecting God, not a world of separated things and God being the supreme thing among them.
	So Aquinas says that God is not the supreme being.
	He doesn't call him en sumum, but he calls him ipsum esse, to be itself.
	So there's a whole view of reality that's implicit in that description of God.
	And that is repugnant to scientism in its various forms.
	And I think that's the key to recovering a lot of sense of religious meaning.
	I really liked the invocation of the participatory.
	Part of what I've been arguing is that the cutting edge cognitive science, what's called 4E cognitive science, is challenging the reduction of knowing to propositional knowing, knowing that something is okay.
	That what we're discovering, and you can even find specific kinds of memory for each one of these.
	There's also procedural knowing.
	There's knowing how to do something, the skills.
	There's perspectival knowing, which is knowing what it's like to be here in this state of mind, in this situation, giving me situational awareness.
	And then the deepest is participatory knowing.
	This is the way in which we know by how we are conformed and transformed by others, by the world.
	So our knowing of ourself and our knowing of this.
	So you see this, of course, prototypically in the way you know your beloved.
	You don't know them by your skills or your proposition.
	Of course, you know them this way, but this is not the essence of it.
	The essence of it is the way you are conforming to them and you're being transformed.
	So your self-knowledge and your knowledge of them are bound together.
	But this is now becoming...
	These ways of talking about other kinds of knowing and the way in which they are stored in different kinds of memory, procedural memory, episodic memory, that weird kind of memory we call the self.
	This is now coming to the fore.
	But here's the point I want to make.
	The point is, we We've suffered kind of a propositional tyranny from Occam on, where we reduced all of knowing to the propositional.
	And I would argue that most of what I called religio is being carried on by the procedural and the perspectival and the participatory.
	And so that is in a fundamental way how it's not just out there.
	It's like right in the guts of our self-interpretation.
	Yeah, the question, I think one of the questions is what is the ontological significance of that, let's say?
	I mean, one of the, leaving aside the truth or lack thereof of various religious claims, one of the weaknesses, I believe, of the rational atheist's position is that First of all, their argument is carried out almost entirely in the propositional landscape.
	They treat religion as if it's a set of propositions that are in some sense expressed in a manner contrary to the propositions that constitute science.
	And then I think, well, wait a minute, guys, you're missing the point here.
	There's a propositional element to religious claim, and I often think that's the weakest element.
	But what do you make of the fact that people have religious experiences?
	What do you make of that exactly?
	Well, you say, well, that's epiphenomenal.
	It's like, well, yeah.
	Is it?
	Really?
	Like, are you so sure about that?
	So let me give you an example.
	So I talked to Brian Mirorescu and Carl Rock a while back, and they'd be doing some investigation into the Eleusinian mysteries.
	And...
	Mirorescu's book is predicated on the idea that what the Greeks were doing was using an LSD spiked wine, essentially, to produce a collective mystical experience, and they had technologies to harness that so it was collective,
	and that that constituted the core of the Lucindian mysteries, and that that enterprise was practiced by the ancient Greeks for thousands of years, continuously, And that that experience was at the basis of the unity of Greek culture, but more than that, that it was the fountain from which Greek wisdom flowed.
	And so, it's a revelatory hypothesis, by which I mean, sorry, it's a hypothesis about the function of revelation in a society.
	If these drug-induced, dream-like states...
	Of religious experience are the fountain from which a culture like the Greek culture emerges.
	Well, what are we supposed to make of that ontologically?
	I mean, we're great admirers of the Greeks, right?
	We see our culture as certainly the rational element of it, and perhaps a tremendous amount of the aesthetic element as deeply rooted in Greek presuppositions.
	It's like, well, are the Eleusinian mysteries, that religious element, is that an aberration?
	Or is it that within which everything else is embedded?
	This is a fundamentally important question.
	It's not something trivial.
	I really don't know what to make of it.
	Because it throws the whole problem of...
	Well, the ontological significance of psychedelic substances into the mix.
	And that's a thorny problem if there ever was one.
	That's a problem of...
	The lower meeting, the higher, that's for sure, right?
	These chemical substances that can reliably induce overwhelming mystical experiences.
	You can just set that aside and say, well, that's a form of insanity, but it's not schizophrenia.
	It's not obviously within the category of mental illness.
	And then, and to, you know, to, Muir Rescue's hypothesis runs quite contrary to that.
	Not only is it not insanity, it's, It was a vital source of revelatory knowledge, philosophical knowledge, and got the ball rolling in some sense.
	So, God only knows what to make of that.
	But, well, there's lots of experimental work being done on this right now, the Griffith Lab.
	I did an experiment in my lab, right?
	It's not epiphenomenal.
	People who have more mystical experiences have more meaning in life.
	Reliable correlation.
	But...
	Yeah, they become more open.
	Their personality undergoes a permanent transformation.
	Well, at least longstanding, yeah.
	Yeah, well, a couple of years anyways.
	And it's not trivial.
	It's one standard deviation increase.
	It's a big difference, man.
	And you have all of Yadin's work showing that when people have these experiences...
	They will reliably improve their...
	Yeah, well, so a good friend of mine, who's a genius, by the way, and so I listened to what he has to say, and he's a technological genius.
	He talked to me about his mushroom experiences when he was a mixed-up teenager, you know, engaging in various forms of delinquent activity, and he said that from the...
	after his psychedelic experience...
	His sense of what was right and what was wrong was massively heightened and he abided by it from then on.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And like I look at his life, it's like, well, you know, you've accomplished a fair bit and he's a very solid person and quite the monster in the most positive way.
	And, you know, you can't just dispense with that.
	It's like, well, it taught him the difference between good and evil and then he abided by that.
	For the course of his life.
	And, and, you know, when, when, when Griffiths, Griffiths, people have his laboratory subjects have these mystical experiences and they quit smoking.
	Yeah.
	And you think.
	And if you take a look at this work, you'll see like it's, so it's onto normativity.
	People encounter what they call the really real.
	And it's really unusual because normally what we do is we take these experiences that are disconnected from our everyday intelligibility, like a dream.
	and we say it's not real because it doesn't fit in.
	People do the opposite with these experiences.
	They say that was really real and all of this has to change to get closer to it.
	Now, I think there's a way, though, of starting...
	This isn't going to be a complete answer, Jordan, but I think part of the reason why we find it problematic, these kinds of experiences, and this is what some of the empirical work I did showed, is because we've reduced rationality to inference.
	And we've forgotten that rationality is broader and includes insight.
	And if you think of how an insight works, and you can see a continuum between insight, flow, transformative experience, even the flow experience has mystical aspects to it and people get into it on a fairly reliable basis.
	Right.
	And what we have to say is the core of rationality is not inferential coherence.
	It's the capacity for self-correction.
	And insight is one of our most powerful ways of self-correcting.
	I point to your own work.
	You showed in some of your experiments that, you know, one of the things that predicts insight is the anomalous card sorting task.
	And you also showed that that predicts how well people are overcoming self-deception.
	You did experiments on both of those.
	And that's not a coincidence.
	Insight is one of the fundamental machineries by which we overcome how we fundamentally mis-framed.
	It's a fundamental self-correction.
	We need a model of rationality that includes them both.
	Let me ask you about that.
	Let's go back to this nested idea, right?
	Can I just say something about psychedelics, which to me is important to mention, is that, I mean, obviously a lot of people are talking about it right now, and I did watch that interview with Mura Rescue, and I think that in this question of psychedelics, I think we're actually seeing...
	An increase of the problem that we're talking about, this kind of alienating problem, which is that psychedelics seems like a very nice solution because there it is.
	There's the mushroom.
	I can analyze the chemical substance.
	So when we talk about the Eleusinian mysteries, now everybody's excited to talk about the spiked wine, but no one cares to talk about the entire ritual in which this was embedded.
	And it becomes this kind of weird reductive thing in which the tool that we can identify, which is, you know, you can put it in a box and you can nicely identify it, then everybody's attention goes there right now because of our kind of materialism and art.
	And so I find it very difficult because what we saw psychedelics do in the 60s is that ripping open the veil, supposedly, in a world where the ritual around, let's say, the coherence of society, the place where society coheres together and engages in a common ritual, And in common attention and in common storytelling.
	And then we kind of throw this stuff out into a world that is individualistic and based on everybody's own little whims is going to, I think, and we saw it happen, is going to create these experiences that are frameless And instead of binding, we'll continue to kind of fragment our society.
	I'm really worried about the psychedelics.
	Can I just jump in?
	I'm sort of thinking out loud, because I really loved in what both Jordan and John were saying, is the way the mystical is being described.
	There's something really right in that.
	I think when you have a true mystical experience, meaning an experience of God, of the sacred, it does have those effects that it convinces you that's really real, as opposed to the world that's real, but it's not as real as that.
	That now I'm clearer about good and evil.
	I mean, the authentically mystical, I think, has that.
	But when you talk about drugs and all that, look, for me, it's a closed book.
	I've never experienced that myself directly.
	But I'd also say this.
	The great mystics in the Western tradition, think of John of the Cross especially, who's my go-to guy.
	John of the Cross probably had what we call extraordinary experiences.
	Certainly his colleague, Teresa of Avila, did.
	I mean, visions and that sort of thing.
	But what did John of the Cross consistently say?
	Let go of them.
	Let go of them.
	When people said, oh, what do I do when I have an experience?
	See it.
	It's kind of a Buddhist thing.
	See it and let go of it.
	John of the Cross never wanted people hanging on to the extraordinary vision or the extraordinary manifestation.
	So there is the mystical for sure.
	And, you know, I use my Platonic thing going from, you know, the cave, going from physics to mathematics to metaphysics.
	But beyond metaphysics, there is indeed this mystical dimension of knowing.
	So I don't discount that for a minute.
	But I'm also, I've got a lot of John across in me that says, be very wary of hanging on to those.
	And to Jonathan's point there about, you know, well, if I just take this drug, that's going to be my guaranteed path into the mystical.
	Yeah.
	Whatever is going on there, the real mystical, you know, tonight I'll be probably in front of the Blessed Sacrament at some point with the rosary.
	And believe me, I'm not having any kind of LSD-like experiences, but that's the mystical as far as I'm concerned.
	So I'm trying to find what's really good in that description of it, which I think really is accurate.
	But I'm wary of clinging to it.
	There's one thing, to be clear.
	Go ahead.
	Just to respond to Jonathan's criticism.
	I mean, the point that Jonathan is making is being recognized by people in the field.
	First of all, there's a distinction even in Griffith between a psychedelic experience and a mystical experience.
	And secondly, most people are clearly indicating, for example, all the therapeutic interventions using psychedelics.
	And the evidence is mounting that it's not the drug that does it, right?
	It is the drug in concert with the set and setting, the therapeutic framework, all of this other stuff.
	And I consistently argue for this.
	You have to have this wrapped in a sapiential framework that Because it can just as much take you off into self-deception as it can into self-correction.
	But I want to be clear that there's a lot of people that take the criticisms that have been made here very seriously, and it's actually woven into a lot of the research.
	Yeah, well, it's interesting with regards to the scientism issue.
	So if you look at Griffith's research, you see that his subjects take psilocybin and then they have a mystical experience and then they quit smoking or they're less afraid of death.
	The way it's written up in the journal is it is bottom-up drug effect because there's no description of the content of the mystical experience.
	It's like, well, the drug produces a mystical experience and then people don't smoke.
	And the scientific journal format only allows for that.
	And so, but then there's this question that's like, this is a big question.
	It's like, okay, well, why are these people no longer afraid of death?
	Like, did that switch just get turned off?
	Well, that's not how it works there.
	The whole view they have of reality has been reoriented in some manner.
	And what manner?
	It's like, well, what happened exactly?
	That's an even more key question, and it's relevant to Jonathan's point.
	And then, John, to go after you a little bit on this topic, Jonathan is pointing to something that's a very intelligent caution.
	I know you know that.
	I know you know that.
	And these hypotheses of set and setting are just the beginning of that surround that needs to be created to integrate these experiences into the broader culture.
	They're not much changed from the early 60s.
	Well, you have to be somewhere calm.
	You have to be with someone who You know, it's going to take care of you.
	It's like, yeah, we're just barely beginning to figure out what to do with this.
	And then Bishop Barron, I believe, for what it's worth, and I don't know what you guys think about that, I think that Revelation is a psychedelic account.
	Literally.
	Oh, the book of Revelation.
	I really believe that.
	You bet.
	You bet.
	I think that the author of that had a psychedelic experience, and all he did was write down what happened to him.
	No, it's too grounded in the Old Testament, the classic apocalyptic literature.
	I mean, it's...
	Why is that an objection?
	Why is that an objection?
	He was grounded in that tradition and all of that tradition was made vivid in imagery during the experience.
	That's certainly not beyond the confines of such experiences.
	And I think the church is going to have to wrestle with this seriously in the years to come because there's an association between psychedelic use and revelatory meaning.
	That the church is going to have to grapple with, I believe.
	There are plenty of monks who have relations and have visions and have all these types of experiences, but that don't take psychedelics.
	It's actually through asceticism and through transformation.
	And I think this is coming back to Bishop Barron's point, is that, let's say, in the hesychastic tradition, in the mystical tradition of the East, it's exactly like what he said about St.
	John of the Cross.
	They consistently insist that the mystic has to ignore all experiences.
	Because the purpose is not to have experiences.
	The purpose is to be united with God, to be transformed, to be free of your passions, to be free of the things that kind of bind you.
	And it's going to happen.
	And maybe that can actually be somewhat instructive for others, but that's not the point.
	And so I think that I understand it because there's something about our world, too, that wants experiences, right?
	We want to have these experiences.
	These exciting or very exciting experiences, but the real purpose is to be transformed, which is why someone is willing to be martyred.
	That has nothing to do with having a really great mystical experience.
	It really is about the transformation of the person into the image of Christ, let's say.
	Jonathan, is it true?
	I'm curious, in the Eastern traditions, I don't know as well, but in the West, certainly, the mystics all talk about God actively stripping these things away.
	So even something like the great contentment I get in the beginning of my relationship with God, my sense of consolation, to use Ignatius' term, God will take that away because I'm not meant to fall in love with the consolation.
	I'm meant to fall in love with God.
	So I'm not meant to fall in love with the mystical experience or with the vision or whatever.
	I'm meant to fall in love with God.
	And so God actively—John on the Cross will talk about the dark night of the soul, and that's really what he means.
	It's not a psychological state.
	It's God actively taking away these experiences because there's something else that we're really talking about.
	In the Eastern tradition, the highest point is absence of all image and thought.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	That you actually don't have any...
	There's no imagination.
	There's no thought.
	There's nothing.
	There's only this kind of pure presence and this pure light, let's say, that kind of...
	Gathers you into God.
	And they constantly say the same thing.
	They say, all these experiences, let them go.
	You've got to drop them.
	Don't become a guru and kind of teach out of your little mystical insight, but rather just drop it and keep going up the ladder, let's say.
	Right.
	I mean, I'm very wary of the idea that the communion cup, the origins are in some kind of psychedelic experience.
	I mean, trust me, it's never happened to me.
	I've been going to Mass since I was a kid.
	Because the reality of it is other than that.
	I mean, even if there was something, and certainly the Ellicinian mysteries have been well studied, and perhaps there was a psychedelic element and so on, but I would never want to put stress on that.
	I would want to say that, first of all, I talked to Aidan Lyon, whose book is coming out, A Psychedelic Experience, A Philosophy of Psychedelic Experience.
	First of all, he doesn't pin the term on the use of psychedelics per se.
	It just means mind-revealing experience.
	So what I would say is that the substances belong to a class that don't require chemical substances.
	So these are disruptive strategies.
	Jonathan mentioned, you know, ascesis, right?
	Asceticism.
	The shamans chanting, the drumming, the sleep deprivation.
	There's a whole family of disruptive strategies.
	But let me try and show you what I think this is related to.
	If you're having a problem because you've mis-framed the situation and you needed insight, What's actually really good for an insight is to be moderately distracted from the problem.
	Or it's like if you're trying to solve an insight problem on the computer screen and I put a bit of static or noise into it, that will actually help you break up the inappropriate frame and find a new frame.
	You do the same thing with neural networks.
	Neural networks are trying to learn and you periodically have to throw in noise because if you don't throw in noise, they'll get too narrow and too fixed on what they're picking up on.
	So this is, this is, and this is what I meant.
	I did a talk about this.
	It's like insight requires these disruptive strategies and they look exactly the opposite from our model of rationality.
	So I think a more appropriate thing, because I mean, I see disruptive strategies in St.
	John of the Cross.
	I certainly see those.
	And, of course, they're all the way through the Neoplatonic tradition.
	And they can be cognitive disruptive strategies.
	Nicholas of Cusa puts you, like, you know, that an infinite circle is also a straight line, and you go, like that, right?
	Yeah, I'm with you on that.
	No, I'm with you on that.
	I'm thinking of Thomas Merton used the Buddhist term, calming the monkey mind, and he thought that was the purpose of the rosary.
	Yeah.
	And I was conducting a retreat just about three years ago with the priests of Dublin.
	Now, I'm all Irish, so this is in my cultural DNA. But they were praying the rosary one night.
	These are about 60 men.
	And they prayed the rosary, which normally takes about 25 minutes to do it at a usual pace.
	They finished it in about six minutes, and it was, Hail Mary for the Great Stars.
	Hail Mary for the Great Stars.
	But at first it seemed ludicrous, but what it was doing was setting up just that kind of buzz, that sort of mantra-like quality that I think does allow something to happen, that allows something to happen in deeper parts of the psyche, deeper parts of the soul.
	So I think that's right.
	I agree with those elements are there in the mystical tradition.
	The Jesus prayer, too, Jonathan, is an example of that, I think.
	And so for me...
	As a scientist and studying these things, like when I did that one experiment I mentioned, the content, which I think is supportive of Jonathan's point, isn't the key thing that's predictive of the changes in people.
	It's predictive of the relationship to meaning in life.
	It's actually the insight process rather than the particular phenomenological content that seems to be driving the transformation.
	The Christian ascetic and the Christian mystic, this insight gathering or this kind of mounting up into insight is bound up in the transformation of the person in terms of their own passions and also the transformation of the community.
	In terms of liturgy and participation in communion.
	And so it's buffered.
	Like I said, it's binding.
	It's not just someone, you know, doing something to get some insight, but it ends up being this binding of the, like what Bishop Barron was talking about, all these monks sitting together, doing the rosary together, and then maybe going into liturgy and taking communion together and working together.
	And so there's something more than just the kind of Psychological or, you know, personal experience or personal healing from this or that problem.
	But it's, yeah, it's a holistic thing.
	I hate using that word, but it's a holistic process, let's say.
	Well, because both ways, right?
	The insight isn't just propositional.
	It's perspectival.
	And procedural.
	And I think mystical experience is the most profound version of participatory knowing.
	I mean, I think it can make a very strong Neoplatonic argument.
	And I think I agree with you, Jonathan.
	I think, I mean, you see this in some of the things I've been doing the ethnographic work on, what people do with the circling.
	You can get shared insight flow that doesn't belong to any one person.
	It belongs to the community as a whole.
	And people, right?
	And I think that's That's very important for, as you said, making sure that this doesn't...
	I mean, it's so easy for these experiences to become a magnet of narcissism for people, right?
	And so the de-centering that happens when we are immersed in something larger than ourselves, which I think helps cultivate the virtue of reverence, I absolutely agree with you.
	I think that absolutely has to be the case.
	And I've argued repeatedly for that.
	I hope I'm not coming across as trying to say it's an individual personal thing that I'm talking about.
	That's not fundamentally what I'm talking about.
	I'm talking about it being systemic in the individual and systematic throughout the community.
	Jonathan, I'm curious about this.
	Your cautions are duly noted on my end.
	I see what happened, say in retrospect, when the hallucinogens were introduced to Western culture.
	It didn't work very well.
	Look at what happened to Timothy Leary.
	For example, I had his old job at Harvard, by the way.
	Oh, I didn't know that.
	Yes.
	Many people have pointed that out to me, Jordan, by the way.
	Jesus, of all the weird things.
	In any case, you know, Mircea Eliade also believed that the true shamanic tradition wasn't psychedelic-driven.
	No, and that was an aberration.
	I think he was wrong.
	I really do believe that he was wrong.
	And I think that...
	I'm also not entirely convinced that the practices that you're describing can produce experiences that are as intense as those that are produced chemically.
	Maybe they are.
	But even if they are, they're not available to the typical person.
	They take a tremendous amount of training.
	So that's a big problem.
	Is that a problem or is that a feature?
	Well, I don't...
	Yeah, look, it's a feature too, Jonathan, because maybe you need to do all that training to handle the insight.
	And I'm not trying to look for a facile solution here, believe me.
	But the church has a hard time attracting people at the moment.
	And I don't know what's happening in the broad church with regards to the sort of work, for example, that Griffiths is doing.
	And it's not like I have the answers to these things, but I... We shouldn't look to the psychedelics as a savior, certainly, but they should also not be discounted because they are the means by which people can have the sorts of experiences that the scientists have.
	The followers of scientism discount.
	It's right there.
	It's right there as proof in some sense.
	I'd be more at home, though, with using the wisdom tradition, Jordan, as you've been doing.
	I mean, the fact that you're drawing a lot of people back toward Christianity through the opening up of the Bible and the wisdom way of reading the Bible, that to me is a great way the churches can start drawing, especially young people, back.
	It's obviously working.
	In your case, you know, we've got our problems, and some of it came from the scandals, certainly.
	But some came from an exaggerated attempt to be relevant to the society and to sort of dumb down our language and to make it sound like an echo of the culture.
	That's what did us in, I think, in terms of attracting younger people.
	But what you're doing, opening up the scriptures, that's what the church fathers did.
	And people are flocking to that because they find in that the wisdom tradition.
	And through the wisdom tradition, they're finding mysticism, authentic mysticism, a contact with God.
	So I think that's the route to go.
	We have to deal with our moral issues.
	We have to deal with the scandals, that's for sure.
	And we have to deal with this dumbing down of the faith and this flattening out of the faith.
	That's, I think, what has really compromised our mission.
	Could I pick up on that?
	Sorry, go ahead, John.
	I think this is part...
	First of all, I want to challenge two things you said, Jordan.
	I've had both experiences, and I've had...
	Peak versions of both, and I can't find them ultimately distinguishable, like through a contemplative practice and taking a psychedelic.
	And when you look at the research, people say they can be the same.
	They tend to orient a little bit differently.
	The psychedelic mystical experience tends to, on average, be a little bit more impersonal.
	The contemplative one tends to be a little bit, on average, more personal in the ontology, but no deep differences.
	And the other thing I would say is, You know, I don't know how much we have to rely on them.
	I take your point that it's instructive and I think the science should do it.
	I think it's immoral to not investigate these substances because of the clear evidence that's mounting for their ability to alleviate, you know, untreatable addiction, depression, a host of issues.
	And so I think we should keep doing the science.
	I'm not...
	But, you know, the research sort of reliably indicates that 30 to 40% of the population have these transformative experiences.
	That's what Taylor says.
	I think the problem is not an absence of the experience.
	To go to Bishop Barron's point, I think it's the absence of a wisdom framework.
	That allows people to properly appropriate and metabolize these experiences.
	So I'll do this in my class.
	I think I mentioned this to you, Jordan.
	With my students, I'll say, well, where do you go for information, the internet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Where do you go from knowledge, science, maybe the university?
	And I'll say, where do you go for wisdom?
	And there's a deafening silence.
	And wisdom is not optional.
	Well, you know what?
	I don't care about being connected and overcoming self-deception and harming other people because of the ways in which I'm willfully...
	Of course, it's not optional.
	Wisdom is a necessity.
	It's an absolute prerequisite to religion.
	Yet our culture...
	It has no way in general of providing people with a sapiential framework to process these experiences and also to have properly cultivated a prepared character for them when they do emerge.
	So I would argue that that's where the problem lies.
	It's not in the absence, I think, of these experiences for people.
	It's the absence of a framework and worldview that allows people to properly process them.
	And we've had a few centuries of Christianity really kind of falling into the trap of materialism, first of all, trying to constantly justify its stories through history and some statuette found in Palestine or whatever, like all these strategies to try to constantly justify the stories through these scientific methods.
	And at the same time, focusing on the idea of being saved or going to hell and going to heaven rather than the more mystical tradition, which is there.
	It's all there, right?
	It's all there and it's all available to us.
	It's just that the emphasis has been, I think, the wrong one in the past few centuries, but it is possible.
	And I think it's happening now.
	And like Bishop Barron said, I think, Jordan, one of the things you're...
	Forcing a lot of Christians to do is to reconsider what this has to do with my life, how it binds it together, how it connects us together.
	And we have the church fathers that just right there, it's all there in their teaching.
	And it's there in the liturgy itself and the imagistic vision of the chants and the iconography and all of this is, it's all present.
	We just need to kind of go back and help people connect things together so that they can have true experiences.
	But we forgot a lot of our own tradition, or we underplayed it.
	I'll give you one example.
	When I was coming of age in the Catholic Church, so you're now late 70s into the 80s, the way we were instructed in the Bible, so those of us preparing for the priesthood, right, to be preachers and to be spiritual counselors and soul doctors, it was pure historical criticism.
	That was a method of biblical approach that emphasized very much what was in the mind of the human author as he wrote.
	And so using...
	Very rationalistic methods to kind of break the scriptures down, break them apart.
	But the whole idea of meaning, of what the scriptures were telling us about God, about our relation to God, the mystical dimension of life, that was all very muted.
	As a result, our preaching, and I accuse my own generation of this, our preaching became very flat, often very politicized, maybe psychologized in the worst sense of that term.
	But the mystical depth of the scripture, we forgot.
	We didn't read the church fathers.
	Jung himself said the first psychologists were the church fathers.
	It's dead right, it seems to me.
	So we share a lot of this blame here.
	By we, I mean the religions themselves.
	We forgot our own best traditions, and we allowed this scientism to hold sway.
	And that's why people are struggling.
	So I've been trying to figure out I mean, I really don't know how to...
	I'm stunned at the popularity of the biblical lectures.
	I can't wrap my head around it, you know, no matter how hard I try.
	And I can't even judge their significance.
	So, small or great, but they've attracted a lot of views, so we'll stick with that.
	So then...
	Assuming that they have some significance, I've tried to figure out, well, what was it that made them work?
	Why did people come and listen to what I was saying about Genesis?
	And I think partly it was because I wasn't exactly telling people what I thought about them.
	I wasn't saying, this is how you should read these stories.
	I was trying to investigate something I knew was beyond my comprehension.
	And I was doing that on my feet.
	Now, I talked to someone this week who is quite explicitly religious, and I could hardly listen to him because he kept telling me what was right.
	He kept telling me the dogma.
	It's like...
	Are you so sure you know that?
	Who the hell are you to tell me that?
	There was just no meaning being revealed from that.
	There was no investigation.
	I approached the Bible as a psychologist in some sense, but as if it was something I really didn't understand.
	A strange artifact.
	God only knows what it is.
	It's this book that's been around forever.
	It cobbled itself together.
	In a manner we can't understand.
	It's lasted for a very, very long period of time.
	It's had an inestimable impact.
	It's full of extraordinarily strange stories that That we understand very little about in some profound sense.
	And it was an investigation.
	And I kind of pulled people along with me during the investigation.
	And that seemed to...
	And maybe when I go to church, do I see that?
	Do I feel that I'm being led along an investigation into the structure of deep meaning?
	And the answer is not usually.
	I usually feel as if I'm being told what to think or told what to believe.
	And that's just...
	That doesn't seem to work.
	But the church fathers preached in exactly the way you're describing.
	And we luckily have some of these sermons, like of Augustine, that he gave, we'd say, off the cuff.
	There was a secretary out in the crowd who would take them down.
	He would probably polish them later.
	But you get a sense of someone...
	Who's doing what you're saying?
	I think thinking through with the text as he goes.
	He was theologizing, philosophizing, but he was trying to draw his people.
	He was a pastor, Augustine.
	He wasn't an academic.
	He wasn't a professor of theology at a university.
	He was a pastor trying to draw his people closer to God.
	And he learned the method, by the way, from Ambrose.
	When he goes to Ambrose in Milan, he's a manichae.
	He's not even a Christian.
	But he heard that Ambrose was a great rhetorician, so he went to hear his rhetoric.
	And while he was there, he learned the method of reading the Bible, which is this more allegorical spiritual method.
	That's what Jung appreciated.
	That's what you're doing in many ways.
	The young Augustine learned it from Ambrose, and then he bequeathed that to us in his sermons and biblical commentaries.
	But trust me when I tell you, we didn't study that.
	We didn't study that approach.
	Ours was a very scientific, rationalistic approach to the Bible, and that's why preaching is relatively bad, I would say.
	So you've, in a way, stumbled on something that's very old, but still has enormous power to transform people.
	There's also something important, Jordan, in understanding that at least the traditional churches, at least the liturgical churches, that you don't...
	Like, for example, in the Orthodox Church, they always say, if the sermon is more than 15 minutes, it's pride.
	It's like, keep your sermons as short as possible, because you're not there to encounter pride.
	Obviously guilty of that.
	You're not there.
	I mean, propositional understanding is fine, but it's participatory.
	Church is participatory.
	So you enter into the church, like imagine an Orthodox church, even a traditional Catholic church, you have a space which is structured as the hierarchy, ontological hierarchy of being.
	And then you see these images which are patterned and are revealing to you these mysteries that are beyond words.
	And then you participate in the singing, these processions, and it is a participative thing.
	And so if you go there to kind of get knowledge, it's not the same type of practice.
	And as you're singing these songs and as you're hearing these hymns, all of a sudden, two images connect together.
	And all of a sudden, you know, these things start to connect inside you in somewhat, in almost a kind of Super rational way.
	And the insights you get, sometimes you have difficulty explaining them, but they're very deep and they're embodied as you bow down, as you kneel, as you eat the body and blood of Christ.
	These are different types of participation than just...
	And Jonathan, I'm totally in agreement with you.
	And what did we do in our Catholic churches in the West?
	The same time we were presenting the Bible in this flattened-out, historical-critical way, we also were flattening out our churches, emptying out our churches of just that mystical cosmic symbolism, the angels, the saints, color, the cosmic dimension, and we flattened them out, and we made them like empty meeting spaces.
	So there was a terrible rationalism that descended upon the church, and it dried us up in many ways.
	You know, so this is, again, my mea culpa as a Catholic.
	I think we passed through a period that was really problematic.
	And recovering the sources, you know, we say, right?
	Recovering the great sources of the Bible and the fathers.
	That's what we're talking about.
	What the Bible had by its nature, what the fathers understood, that's what we need to revive the church, I think.
	So, look, Bishop, you're doing something right, obviously.
	You're attracting some online attention, some substantial online attention.
	And Jonathan, the same is true of you.
	Well, John, it goes without saying for you, to some degree, because you're a professor and you have that whole world at your fingertips, in some sense.
	And you've been very successful at that.
	But in the more specifically religious domain, the more specifically Christian domain, you two are having some public success.
	What are you doing right, do you think?
	I'll let Jonathan go first.
	I think Bishop Barron and I are doing very similar things, which is why I've always felt akin to what he's doing.
	I've written for one of his publications.
	I always felt we're close in the approach, which is, first of all, a Avoiding just argumentation, but rather this kind of presentation of beauty.
	Bishop Barron also, even in his publications, this desire to kind of have a beauty-first approach, this kind of encounter with these powerful patterns of being, and how they kind of point to Christ.
	And I think that showing the deep coherence, the deep narrative coherence in Scripture, and then pointing back out to the world and saying, this deep coherence in Scripture You're going to encounter it in movies and in all these cultural phenomena that you're going to see.
	You're going to encounter the same deep patterns that you find in scripture at a lower level, we could say, but that all of these kind of culminate into.
	And so it really is like a meaning first approach and a beauty first approach, I think, which is attracting people because the insights they get at first, they can't.
	I have people who watch my videos for two years.
	And tell me they don't understand what I'm saying.
	And I'm like, well, why are you watching my...
	How can you been watching my videos for two years if you don't understand?
	And they seem to express that they get these insights and they can't totally explain them.
	And then it keeps them kind of wanting to continue on this path, let's say, towards...
	Ultimately, a lot of them end up moving towards Christianity and entering a church at some point.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, my thing has been beauty and truth.
	I mean, so don't dumb it down.
	I lived through dumbed-down Catholicism, and it was a pastoral disaster.
	You look at all the surveys.
	I studied them very carefully, why young people are leaving.
	The scandals come up.
	The scandals will be mentioned, but by far the most prominent reason is I don't believe the doctrines.
	I never had my questions answered.
	It's in conflict with science.
	It doesn't make sense.
	They're intellectual problems.
	Well, yeah, I get it.
	We dumbed the project down for about 50 years.
	So smarten it up and reintroduce people to this tradition we've been talking about.
	The second thing is the beautiful.
	We also, as we dumbed it down, we also uglified it.
	We de-emphasize the beautiful.
	So one example, you know, we put out this Word on Fire Bible, so the text of the Gospels, but it's a bit like an illuminated manuscript idea that we surrounded it with glosses from the fathers and the popes and the great theologians, but also lots of artwork, lots of color.
	So I want to reintroduce people to the Bible, but not in a flat, rationalistic way, you know?
	So that's what I've been trying to do.
	Well, I was certainly attracted to Jonathan to begin with because of the quality of his artistic endeavor.
	This absolutely beautiful and archaic, traditional, let's say, not archaic, traditional, this traditional medium that he was revitalizing in such a stunningly beautiful way.
	And that was the entry point into getting to know him.
	Getting to understand his thought.
	Yeah, and beauty isn't the thing you can't argue against today.
	Beauty just smacks you, and that's really something.
	And you can also help people notice that.
	It's like, well, notice, beauty brooks no argumentation.
	What do you think that signifies?
	What's it pointing to?
	Is it pointing to something higher?
	It certainly seems to.
	What might be higher?
	We need to figure that out.
	Well, it's the least threatening of the transcendentals in the postmodern context.
	So people today, you say, here's something that's true.
	Who are you going to tell me what's true?
	I got my own truth.
	Even worse, here's the way you ought to live.
	Here's the good.
	Who are you going to tell me how to live?
	But the beautiful doesn't preach in that negative sense.
	It just is.
	It shows itself.
	So it's more winsome.
	It's a less threatening way into the project.
	So that's why I've tried to lead with it.
	Especially in a world that's ugly.
	Like, our world is just so ugly.
	The modern world is just so banal that, you know, there's a reason why tourists go to cities and visit churches, even though they're not Christian and they don't care about it, because they go someplace and they're looking for a beautiful beauty, and then they end up in a church rather than in a mall.
	Yeah, and that's definitely worth thinking about, you know, and the incredible value that's to be found in those unbelievably beautiful constructions.
	It's like, what is that beauty?
	And why do we experience it there, those lattice-like creations of stone and crystal with color and the addition of the music?
	That all goes to your liturgical point, the drama that's part of that.
	And the celebration of beauty, which is definitely absent in the modern culture.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	When I was a student in Paris, I'd go there all the time.
	And Chartres, to me, is the most beautiful covered space in the world.
	But I remember this years ago, I brought a classmate of mine, so a priest from Chicago, to see Chartres.
	And we walked through it, and I explained everything.
	We looked at the windows and all this.
	And he said, gosh, it's something...
	It's just too bad it's so liturgically off.
	And I knew what he meant because I was formed in the same way.
	You know, the church would be in the round so we could see each other and there should be clear sight lines and, you know, should be brightly lit and all this stuff.
	I'm like, man, you just said Chartres Cathedral is liturgically off.
	It's like it's the supreme liturgical space in the world.
	But that shows the quality of the bad quality of the formation that we got in my generation.
	My experience with Christianity has been different.
	So I was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian family.
	I very much was traumatized by that.
	And I think if you talk to some of the nuns, N-O-N-E-S-s, I think there's a mixture.
	Like you said, I don't think the scandals, which the media likes to focus on, are not the primary factors.
	Right.
	Not what the research shows.
	One is this issue about intelligibility, and I want to talk about that.
	And the other is that I meet...
	A lot of people are attracted to my work because they've had similar histories, not just specific to Christianity.
	I'm not beating up on Christianity.
	I've had people coming out of other traditions, Islamic, Buddhist.
	This is possible in all of the traditions I've encountered.
	So, I think there's two things I want to say, and they're not intended to be pushback, but they're intended to open up questions, which is, and this is where Jonathan and I also, we rub up against each other, but it usually creates a good friction and good sparks.
	And maybe it'll call forth a response for you too, Bishop.
	I think the project is not to try and resurrect Neoplatonism or the Neoplatonic structure.
	I mean, Aquinas, sorry, Augustine wasn't only, you know, taught by Ambrose.
	He explicitly talked about, you know, Platonus and the Platonists and the mystical experience, the Neoplatonic mystical experience he had and how important that was, etc., And it's clear that it's through Pseudodionysus and Maximus.
	And so I think the project, if I were to put it, if we wanted to reach the nuns, is to show them a reconciliation, a profound one.
	And here my ambition runs, not personally, but the ambition of the project, towards Aquinas or Maximus, which is to show, right, to revise that Neoplatonism, and perhaps it's a Neoplatonic Christianity, but I'm not going to be specific about that right now, to show how it is profoundly, you know, To do a reciprocal reconstruction between the Neoplatonism and the scientific worldview.
	And there's a lot of people doing that right now.
	I think we need a post-nominalist Neoplatonism, if I could put it that way, in a profound way.
	John, you opened that salvo with the statement that you were traumatized by the fundamentalist Christianity.
	Yes, very much.
	And that's not irrelevant to the salvo.
	And to the nature of your project.
	And it's something we should discuss, too.
	Because you also brought up the idea of reconciliation.
	So people have left the church, but in some sense, the church has alienated people from it as well.
	And some of that's the scandal, and some of it's the sort of experience that you describe.
	Yes.
	People have been left with the horrors of childhood experience that were a consequence of their religious education.
	Yes.
	Believe me, I'm not trying to attack the institutions per se, but it's something that they need to deal with.
	It needs to be dealt with.
	All of us need to deal with.
	Not they.
	There's no they here.
	There's no they here.
	We have these problems.
	We have this meaning crisis.
	It's everyone's problem.
	So there's no they in some sense, but...
	So what has that done to you, let's say, with regards to your appreciation of Christianity per se?
	Well, first of all, I want to say that those two things that we talked about, the one that Bishop Barron brought up about, and my response to it is, I think we need, and maybe Jonathan will have a response because he has this model of Christianity going through a resurrection cycle itself, so maybe there is a possibility for our discussion here.
	But I think we need a reciprocal reconstruction.
	We need a post-nominalist I do not think, Jordan, that the lack of that is unrelated to the trauma that I experienced.
	Because of there was no bridge, it was easy to give me an either or isolating choice.
	You're either in this worldview, or you're in that worldview, and that one's demonic.
	And if you go over there, you're lost.
	There is a deep connection between the lack of bridge between the religious worldview, if I can put it that way.
	And the scientific worldview that allowed for that kind of tyranny over my mind that I found so deeply traumatizing.
	Those are not separable phenomena.
	That's what I'm arguing.
	They are deeply interpenetrating and mutually supporting.
	That's how I experienced it.
	And what opened me up was a science fiction book that showed, it was a book by Rogers Elasny, Lord of Light, that showed the possibility of wonder and self-transcendence within a scientific worldview.
	That's what blew me open out of fundamentalism.
	Yeah, well, lots of people who are followers of scientism, let's say, find their religion in science fiction.
	Totally, totally.
	That's where literature grabs them, right?
	That's where they're grabbed by the religious.
	I mean, Star Wars is the classic example of that, for sure.
	Definitely.
	And that's worth pointing out, these rationalist atheists.
	That's fascinating to me.
	When I deal with atheists online, which I do a lot, Very often, I'd say, when you scratch the surface of a really angry atheist, you'll find, as you put it, a traumatized fundamentalist.
	At first, that surprised me.
	Now it doesn't anymore.
	That when I press a little bit and probe a little bit, it's someone recovering from just the kind of traumatizing experience that you had as a kid.
	So that makes sense to me.
	I want to be clear.
	I wouldn't self-identify as an atheist.
	No, no, I wasn't jesting that.
	But I think just to your point, I understand the severe reaction to it that people would have.
	What did you think of the point that I made that there's a deep connection between the psychological trauma and the fact that it was facilitated by this gap?
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Religion and science.
	That is very much the Enlightenment grammar that we've been given, right?
	And you see, what I find attractive about the Neoplatonic tradition was the idea of rationality and the mystical being deeply interpenetrating.
	But we can't leave it as it was, is what I... No, I'm sure.
	I think it needs a fundamental reorganization, and it needs to connect to this fundamental...
	There's a huge thing happening in science, at least the science that I'm aware.
	The fundamental ontology is coming into question the way we have seen since the beginning of the 20th century.
	There's a golden opportunity here.
	There's a golden opportunity.
	What do you see happening?
	I mean, what are you seeing?
	Because you're far-seeing, so I want to know.
	Like, what is it that you're sticking up?
	Oh, boy.
	I don't know if I want to take that.
	But thank you for that.
	Well, what I see is this.
	I see that we're moving back to the understanding that we need the emanation with the emergence.
	Not throwing out the emergence, but we need the emanation with it.
	Let me just give you one example.
	So in cognitive science, even in biology, we are getting to the point, and Aristotle would like this, and maybe even more Plotinus, Where we understand possibility as a real thing.
	So for example, right?
	And this lines up with some Eastern traditions.
	So I'll do this sometimes.
	I'll put a pencil on the table and I'll roll it.
	And this goes to like cutting edge work by Alicia Uraro.
	And I'll ask my students, why did it roll?
	And they give the standard sort of Newtonian answer because you pushed it, right?
	And then I'll say, think, think, think.
	What are you not seeing?
	Think, think.
	And I said, it also rolled because there's a flat table.
	And there's open space in front of it.
	And it has the shape that it has.
	There are, in addition to causal events, there are constraining conditions that are just as real.
	And they are as much explanatory of how things operate as the bottom-up causes.
	So think of a tree.
	You have all of the events causing the structure, but the structure...
	Why does a tree have the structure it has?
	Because it increases the probability that a photon will hit a chlorophyll.
	Fill molecule.
	It's structuring possibility into potentiality, and that's just as much needed to explaining a tree as the chemical events causing it.
	We need both to explain life, to explain cognition, and more and more people like Eastman's work.
	There's a lot of people from sort of the Whiteheadian philosophy of physics are saying we need that even for our fundamental physics because we can't reconcile bottom-up quantum mechanics with top-down relativity.
	We can't do it because we keep trying to make it.
	It's got to come from quantum up to the relative, the relativistic, which is, you know, top down.
	But I would argue the fact that we've tried this strategy and we keep trying it for 40 years and it's failing is probably a reason to think that maybe we're framing the problem the wrong way.
	And we have to think about, no, no, no, we have to give up a purely bottom up We have to make the top-down as real to all of our explanations.
	That's happening in the science right now.
	Now, to my mind, and I don't mean to be insulting because I don't want to be reductionistic, but that sounds a lot like a lot of the language I hear Jonathan using And I agree, Jonathan, it's not identical, but you and I have good conversations around this.
	We can talk to each other.
	There's a chance of real communication, even communing.
	But I don't think that's specific to us.
	I think that's a very real possibility right here, right now.
	Yeah, there's an opening up of the space that's happening now.
	And I think people who are tuned to it can notice it.
	And it does have to do with what you're saying in terms of this kind of limit of science and the problem of the observer and all of these realities that everybody's trying to deal with.
	And it's almost like a zeitgeist.
	And it's interesting because your experience you talked about of being traumatized and then having this separation of the two worldviews, it really is akin to the way I was trying to describe at the outset the separation between, let's say, the religious in a very kind of moralistic and legalistic and, you know...
	And this kind of rise up above of these esoteric things that kind of came up in the West, whether it goes into theosophy, into all these different, very, very popular, you know, all the occultists, all of this stuff was very, very popular.
	We tend to ignore that, but it was extremely, had a lot of effect on culture.
	And so that's why it's interesting because some people today, to me, will say things like, oh, you're saying occult things.
	Because I'm actually trying to reconnect these things together, right?
	To reconnect these things that went up too high and these things that went too low into this top-down, bottom-up reality.
	When you read St.
	Maximus the Confessor, you really do have exactly that structure that you're talking about.
	And I think that if you read St.
	Gregor of Nyssa, and especially the more mystical fathers, I think that You talked about pseudo-Dionysus.
	There are some interesting theologians right now that are positing Dionysus' theory as a solution to the problem of complexity and emergence.
	They don't want to come on my channel yet because they're still working on their papers, but it's happening right now.
	People are talking about it and thinking about it.
	Yes.
	Can I suggest something?
	This comes from Cardinal George of Chicago, who was kind of a mentor to me, and he was a brilliant guy.
	And he used to say, we start the religion-science thing the wrong way because it's too much of polar opposition, that we should work on the recovery of philosophy as a rational path.
	And what I think he meant was, a lot of people, especially young people, think the only rational path is the scientific one.
	Those are simply coterminous.
	To be rational is to be a follower of the scientific method.
	And so if religion isn't that, well then it must be irrational.
	Well, it introduced philosophy as indeed a rational path that the most brilliant people in the tradition have...
	I've practiced it, but it's not a scientific path.
	It's rational without being scientific.
	And that might open the door, Cardinal George would say, to thinking about religion as also a rational path that's not scientific.
	I think it's hard for younger people even to imagine what that is.
	Rational means scientific.
	Well, we can help them out to some degree.
	I mean, I titled my first book Maps of Meaning for a very specific reason, is that this narrative structure, It's a map.
	And what that means, if that's true, and I do believe it's true, and I studied a lot of the early work on hippocampal function from animal researchers, and they made some real fundamental discoveries in the field of cognition.
	It's like, we need a map to traverse the world.
	It's not optional.
	Without a map, you're lost.
	And to be lost is a terrible thing.
	And so, and there's rationality in the development of a map.
	There better be, because otherwise it doesn't get you to where you want to go.
	And you certainly want to get away from being lost, let's say.
	And science is not a map.
	It's a description of the terrain without direction.
	Yeah.
	There's direction there, I suppose, but it's implicit.
	The scientists impose that direction by following the dictates of their intuition of meaning.
	But science itself doesn't offer a map.
	Well, there's no rationality outside of science.
	Okay, well, they let the irrational people design the map.
	Well, that's what's happening with the politicization of our culture.
	And so the religion, and then the rationalists, you know, they say, well, if we weren't religious and we weren't superstitious, well, everyone would be rational, wouldn't the world be a better place?
	And I think, no, the religious would drop into the political.
	And then you watch what happens, and we are watching what happens, because there's no domain for the religious now, no specified domain.
	So tiny things become imbued with religious significance, because there's no proper place, right?
	And that's not good.
	And so, it's not impossible.
	I mean, I don't see a flaw in this claim.
	I can't see a flaw in it.
	It's like, don't we need a map?
	Well, can science provide that map?
	I've never heard a thoroughly critical, scientifically trained, deep philosopher make the case that Science can provide the direction for ethical behavior.
	And that's the map.
	What's good?
	Where should we head?
	So what do we do with that?
	There's nothing?
	There's nothing?
	There's no map?
	No, and that's why I objected so much to that claim that science belongs in the highest place.
	That physical sciences are the queen of the sciences.
	That can't be right.
	Because that's saying, the one that can't provide the map is governing all the other ways of knowing.
	And that can't be right.
	But I think we have lost a sense of that.
	And again, I think as a religious person, I'll take some responsibility.
	I think we have not been great at providing the map.
	And we have to recover that for sure.
	Well, Bishop, I... I think this follows from what you and Jordan were talking about.
	One of the problems about invoking philosophy is which one do you mean?
	Do you mean academic philosophy or do you mean the philosophy that Pierre Hadot has brought back?
	That one I think is better.
	It's a way of life.
	Well, yes.
	And what I would point to is that that points us to a kind of, what's the difference between the academic philosophy, and I have training in that, and philosophy as a way of life, and it goes to, you know, points that Jonathan was making about, you know, how much the transformation.
	Look, the Cartesian claim is...
	That all truths are available to a method.
	You go to earlier, you know, the Neoplatonic tradition, right?
	It's like, no, no, no.
	There are some truths that will only be disclosed if you go through fundamental transformation.
	And then And so we have to talk about the rationality of transformation, which is about, you know, the procedural, the perspectival, the participatory transformation.
	And the thing about this, and this is what's really exciting, is a lot of the work is showing that, you know, I've got a series I write with Greg Enriquez and Zach Stein, that...
	You can't infer your way through transformation.
	I mean, the person who wrote the book on this is L.A. Paul.
	I know Laurie.
	She's a great philosopher.
	Tight analytic argument to make the point.
	You can't infer your way through a transformative process.
	And so you have to ask the question, okay, is it just willy-nilly?
	No.
	What do human beings actually do?
	What kind of rationality?
	Agnes Kallar did this in her book on aspiration.
	She calls it proleptic rationality.
	What is the rationality?
	What does it look like when people are going through fundamental transformations in order to conform to reality?
	That's their way of getting at the truth rather than marshalling a method.
	And so I go back to my point again.
	We need to expand the notion of rationality.
	The way it was exemplified in Phileo Sophia rather than the way it is exemplified, I would say, still to a large degree in academic philosophy.
	I went into...
	Yeah, I agree.
	Can I invoke your...
	The academic philosophers have the same problem that Bishop Barron described about the priesthood.
	Yeah.
	That's how it looks to me.
	Could I invoke your countryman again, Lonergan?
	You know, we had those four imperatives.
	If you want to know the world, you've got to be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, and be responsible.
	And he describes all four of those.
	But his point was, we tend not to be those four things.
	The mind has fallen.
	It falls away from attention.
	It doesn't see what's there.
	Or even like, John, to use your stuff, it doesn't maybe make the right siphoning moves to say, let me be attentive to the right things.
	It's not intelligent, which for him meant it doesn't have insights.
	So it doesn't discern intelligible form.
	It's not reasonable, meaning it doesn't make judgments.
	So I'm looking at a phenomenon, I say it could be this, could be this, could be that, but I never make the judgment to say, no, that's truly what this thing is.
	And then finally, it's not responsible, meaning it doesn't follow up the implications of its judgments.
	But what he was getting from his own Christian tradition, I think, was the deep sense of the fallenness of the mind.
	The mind is—it's not a wreck, but it's compromised, and it needs to go through a disciplinary process.
	It has to go—and that's, I think, what Pierre Audeau and those people are recovering from the ancient world, is you had to go through— Plato's Academy was not a classroom where you sit and take in Plato's theory of the forms.
	It was a way of life— And you learned a manner of being and knowing and so on.
	So I think that's true in any intellectual discipline.
	You've got to be converted.
	And you have to acknowledge, and we have to acknowledge your sin in a way, that your mind is not what it should be.
	And you've got to go through a discipline.
	Well, gentlemen, we've passed our two-hour mark.
	And so I think, and I'm starting to drift somewhat, so I'm going to call this to a halt, I think somewhat arbitrarily, unless there are pressing issues that any of you would like to conclude with.
	Maybe a concluding statement from each of you might be a nice thing.
	Jonathan, I put you on the spot.
	Do you want to say something to close up?
	Sure.
	I mean, I think that, first of all, Jordan, thank you for the opportunity for us to speak to each other.
	I never met Bishop Barron.
	I had some admiration for him and obviously for you and for John.
	And I think that these discussions are very fruitful.
	And I think that These, especially as people watch them, it's because it's obviously not just happening here.
	People watch them get engaged and kind of people who haven't listened to John's things or haven't listened to Bishop Barron's things or mine, you know, to kind of see what is the discussion happening now because a lot of the things we brought up are really on fire in terms of subjects in the world.
	And so we need to be continuously explored and we need more people to dive in.
	And so thanks for the opportunity.
	John?
	I want to reinforce what Jonathan just said.
	It's been wonderful.
	The two hours flew by for me.
	It was wonderful to meet you, Bishop.
	And I think we could have some wonderful conversations in depth.
	Love it.
	About, you know, the project of perhaps integrating Neoplatonism and science.
	I think Lonegrin would be helping, you know, insight, of course, was crucial to that.
	So I really appreciate all that.
	Yeah, I just wanted to say that...
	I take the meeting crisis very seriously.
	And I think COVID has made it worse.
	I've got a lot of evidence for that.
	And I think it's a vain hope that everything's just going to go back to the way it was.
	I think that is not where we should place our existential or epistemic bets.
	And I think we need to ramp up the project of getting the call to a sapiential framework and a way of life to people out there.
	So that's what would be my final word.
	Yeah, mine again is just to thank everybody.
	I enjoyed it immensely, and I agree with John.
	The time flew by, and I found it fascinating.
	Yeah, the recovery of the wisdom tradition over and against this deadening scientism, the recovery of value over and against this equally deadening culture of self-invention, that I just generate my own values.
	I think that, I mean, bores me to death.
	Good luck trying that.
	No, it bores me to death, and I think it's killing people spiritually.
	So the recovery of the wisdom tradition, the recovery of objective value, culminating, speaking as a Catholic bishop, in God, the supreme value.
	That's the key to meaning.
	Well, thanks very much, guys, for participating in this.
	I really appreciate it, and I'm sure we'll, I hope, I pray, all of that, that we'll have a chance to converse again, and that people who are listening are benefited by this, and that we do this immense technology that we have at our fingertips, so surprisingly, ethical justice, and help dispense whatever wisdom we've managed to cobble together to as many people as we possibly can.
	And invite them along.
	Thanks.
	God bless you all.

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