The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life - John Vervaeke

given that we are biological creatures why do we need meaning why do humans need to do all this extra work in order to be satisfied with life well uh I have to tell you that um I've been going through a uh since the publication of the book I've been going through a serious reflection on this question again uh and going uh deeper into it um there's many levels of answering that question at one level uh meaning has to do with sense making it has to do with how we properly pay attention to the right kind of information that can allow us to reliably solve a wide variety of problems and a wide variety of domains and that's one aspect of meaning that sort of agentic aspect um but uh consonant with that is we've we need to be connected to other people because most of our problem solving is done in connection with other people so there's an initial sensemaking Dimension this is often talked about as sort of coherence in the meaning in life literature does your world sort of is your sens making making sense to you is is how I sometimes put it like uh the sense making is what you're doing sort of automatically and when you reflect on it you go yeah that makes sense my my world isn't absurd or things like that and then um we need to feel connected to other people because most of our um problem solving uh is done via other people that's our great superpower individually biologically as you framed it we're pretty pathetic animals you know a really angry dog can take us out um and so our superpowers we can coordinate together um and and you know get some train some of those dogs and sharpen some of those sticks and then kill anything on the planet uh and so we need to be connected to other people and that brings with it its own special problem the my friend Greg Enriquez made sort of prevalent um we developed the superpower of connect and coordinating called language and language does something really really powerful in in helping us coordinate but it also does something really novel it makes uh our the content of our minds uh accessible we're sort of exposed to each other in a way in which no other organism is exposed to its con its fellow uh creatures and so we have to also develop this way of balancing between coordinating with other people but not being Overexposed so we have to develop relationships of trust and forgiveness and belonging and we have to balance between being individuals and having an individual identity and a group identity so that's all Central to uh meaning and then uh beyond that uh we fall prey in both of those domains to massive self-deception um I don't pay pay attention to the right things I misf frame you I'm biased in my attitude towards you and so uh we have to do a lot to correct that we have to try and ameliorate that and what that means is we also have to be connected to standards by which we can correct ourselves standards about what is most real what is best what what what is most beautiful um and that that's a deeper kind of connectedness that's kind of a connectedness to what we consider ultimacy so I've tried to show you how all all of these things are all important dimensions in uh why we have to pursue uh meaning in life I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the standard psychological construct cult meaning in life to measure and talk about all those all those dimensions in a in a in a coordinated fashion can you talk to me about the sort of established body of work when it comes to meaning and how you diverge from that or what you would suggest as an improvement yeah so um the standard met tricks are around sort of four dimensions really three uh one is coherence which I mentioned which is does your sense making make sense to you um uh another one is purpose that's not well posed uh because if you think standardly of how people think of purpose purpose is you're working towards some ultimate goal that's a very dangerous way of framing meaning because if you never reached a goal your life was meaningless and if you reach it going forward you're pretty meaningless and I discovered that way back in high school and that sort of really bothered me and um so I think they're what they're talking about more is orientation and then orientation is a a more important way people have to feel not disoriented but oriented in the world um and then uh the next one they talk about is significance that you have things in your life that aren't transitory ephemeral shallow uh but that seems to be just sort of one side of this this deeper thing which is called mattering you need to feel connected to something people typically use the metaphor bigger than yourself I want to be connected to something larger than myself right um they don't mean that literally because that would be ridiculous uh you know attaching you to a locomotive engine doesn't give you a profound sense of meaning in life so what's going on there is I would argue something like this there's a deep connection between the sense of bigger and more real and let me try and give you an everyday example of this when you're in a dream world you're in this little world and it seems so real to you and then you wake up notice we have all these waking up metaphors and Enlightenment metaphors you wake up and from that larger world you can see how the earlier world the smaller world is limited in biasing you and warping and thwarting you uh in in in in you trying to uh get a flourishing life and I think that's what people are really struggling with when they're talking about mattering about being connected to something larger than themselves and it's this sense of uh realness which I don't think is properly captured uh just by the psychological notion uh of mattering um and here's the fundamental thing I mentioned that uh meaning is a has to do with being connected to something that's more real uh than yourself in some important ways because it helps uh make you feel more real to yourself now that's a problematic notion to think of as just purely I'm just describing something like a psych like a standard psychological phenomena this is actually if you'll allow me one technical term this is a normative term uh meaning is a meaningful life is not a descript when I say your life is I'm not just describing it I'm praising it I'm saying there's something fundamentally good to it it's meeting some standards of evaluation but those standards of evaluation are completely absent from the standard psychological model that would be the Crux of that's one of my two main criticisms um and and so in a very deep sense the meaning in the standard meaning in life um psychological model is completely divorced from the cultivation of wisdom and virtue and if you look across all the religion and philosophical traditions that's not the case they're deeply wound you know wound together bound together right the cultivation of meaning and the cultivation of virtue and the cultivation of wisdom are profoundly intertwined stoicism in fact said they're exactly identical um which tells you how strong some positions have been on this and the psychological model is missing all that the second one is uh the psychological model and this is ironic because it's talking a lot about connectedness but it doesn't talk about the connectedness what I mean by that is it only talks about the individual agents attitudes it doesn't talk about how the world is showing up for them so let me give you an example of how this can go wrong you can ask somebody you know H and you ask them the standard sort of questions on meaning in life and they have friends and they have family they have work projects so their life is pretty meaningful above average but you ask them do you think your world's very coherent do you think the world makes a lot of sense you have a lot of trust in the world is the world presenting itself with a lot of beauty and depth to you you'll get no you'll get people saying exactly the opposite and and see and then if you ask people is your meaning in life actually bringing you a lot of peace is it really integrating you well as a person is it reciprocally opening you to reality like no because people are experiencing a lot of burnout a lot of [ __ ] and a lot of betrayal they're losing trust and faithfulness in their institutions and in fellow people right and so they there's a famine of people being able to get into the Flow State and able to have that basic trust and forgiveness with others fellowship and a sense of faithfulness um is massively diminishing I just saw a report that um Americans trust in the Supreme Court is at an alltime historical low it has never been so low um and of course that is only preent I think of what's Happening all throughout the Western World and so the meaning in life construct is leaving out all of this that's really bedeviling people in a very very very powerful way um and so I think the meaning in life construct gets a little bit about how our agency works and contributes to meaning in life but it's leaving out a lot let me put it one last sentence and I'll stop the issue isn't just about finding information relevant it's about can you enter into resonance this is what Rosa calls like this relationship that is so centrally lacking in most of our life this is does your meaning in life allow you to reciprocally open does it take you into the depths of the psyche and align them does it take you into the depths of reality so you feel you're meeting standards that allow you to correct yourself according to what is true and good and beautiful is it doing any uh of that that's resonance and then resonance also needs to be transmuted into reverence are you are you ultimately oriented to what you consider ultimately most real uh because that's the that's the that's the that's the judge behind everything else that we're evaluating so sorry that was a wrong question but I not at all not at all uh the realness point I think is very interesting I maybe it's a contemporary problem because of how much people are mediated by their screens maybe this is worsened by the fact that we're atomized and isolated into our little Droid boxes and we spend a lot of our time on our own maybe it's because of a lack of connection to Nature and or and Dread or whatever it might be but I would guess that a lot of people have this sense that their life is surreal and not surreal in the I can't believe how amazing it is I'm so blessed everything's going right but in a I don't necessarily feel fully connected and grounded to the experiences that I have dayto day my mind and my feet don't rest in the same location all that much you could maybe call it presence um but it's sort of it's more than just presence presence is necessary but not sufficient it's it's the connection to it it's being able to feel like I can reach out and grab it like things are happening and the things that are happening are uh they're important and I have some sort of agency and they affect me and and that they're actually going on as opposed to kind of like everything being a sitcom and it all just sort of playing out in front of our eyes so I want to I want to really dig into sort of things becoming really real and and sort of where that comes from I think that's important I I I think that is the thing that's uh uh quintessentially missing from the psychological construct that's the sort of ultimate uh Norm within the normative Dimension um because you can undermine any of this if like any of these relationships that are giving people meaning and life can be immediately undermined if there's a sense of betrayal or that that was an illusion or they were being deceived right explain ex can you think of an example of that so there's a standard one I use um so and I've done this multiple multiple times and it's never failed to work so it's not quite a scientific study but it's pretty good so I ask my students how many of you are in really deeply satisfying romantic relationships romantic relationships are the culture's current surrogate or at least one of its surrogate Idol idolatrous surrogates for God and culture and virtue it's like you're supposed to find the one and they're supposed to do everything and you're supposed to transcend yourself find familiar uh uh fulfillment in it uh which of course leads to the weird thing that people value uh romantic relationships sort of most of all right now except maybe with their kids um yet romantic relationships are the source of most suffering and a lot of mental health disorders um and so that tells you we're we're we're we're treating something we're putting too much pressure on something okay so let's take that we've got this thing this is like our cultur tells you this is where it is at this is where you find it I asked them okay how many of you're in such a really satisfying romantic they put up their hands they say okay now I'm only addressing the people who are in relationships so the rest of you sorry you're not in this now but for those of you who put up your hands how many of you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you if that meant the absolute dissolution of the relationship and almost all of them like somewhere between 95 and 100% reliably put up their hands and I say well why why like you like you could continue to go on and enjoy the relationship ship and get all the pleasures out of it and all the companionship and all the sexual gratification like what like why and here's my students and they're at the University so they're hard bitten with cynicism and postmodern nihilism and everything and all this sort of stuff and they without a beat say to me well because it wouldn't be real it wouldn't be real and then that removes all of the other ways in which it is contributing to meaning in life for them that's an example example of what I mean so good so good and intuitively everybody knows that there is this sort of sense of honesty the honesta that you need to that you expect and uh you know who was the experience machine who did the experience machine nosic Robert nosic yeah it's not too dissimilar I guess to the experience machine but it's a much more Salient example that everybody knows um yeah would you how how would your experience change you know The Truman Show might be another example of that where you know you're going around living a good life and everything seems fine but what if everybody else was an actor well I wouldn't want that yeah why the to you the sort of felt sense nothing would have changed it's the exact same like yeah yeah no but there's something about sort of intention there's something deeper there's something Beyond not just the sort of Arian what do I get out of this situation it's what what is the intention behind that what's the meaning exactly and notice his name which is really Central true man it's about truth and it's not about just conceptual truth it's about like being true to right uh true to his Humanity true to reality and of course he's willing to break through the wall right remember he's sailing on the on the little sea to break through the wall um and be and and you know and the same thing was offered in The Matrix when Morpheus says all I'm offering you is the truth right like you you um and and the villain of course Cipher which means a symbol without any depth right he wants to go back to the Matrix and and and we know that's why he's a villainous person because he's betraying the commitment to reality and to his own Humanity just lingering on what you said before about the difference a lot of people I think will use purpose and meaning almost interchangeably even though when when you think about it it's not quite but the two kind of come as a a package pair they're a twin pack of uh of values that a lot of people talk about when you were mentioning about how if you use the word purpose if you don't achieve it your life is worthless and once you do achieve it if you do achieve it what do you do next it seems to me the difference between purpose and orientation is the same as between destination and journey yes that one is moving you in a direction and it's kind of an endless game it's an infinite game uh whereas the other by Design the purpose is this thing unless you do some jiggery pokery with your purpose and create some sort of like instrumental purpose my purpose is to show up every day in a manner it's like yeah give whatever don't litigate me don't litigate me out of what most people mean by purpose um yeah it it feels like that attachment attachment to outcome yeah and and I think when you when you as soon as you talk I think that's exactly right Journey rather than destination I think and playing the infinite game rather than the finite game uh car's notion I think that's exactly what I'm trying to convey what also comes up when you when you get back to the notion of orientation uh you you you start to connect uh what can be isolated by the term purpose you start to connect back to well what like what ultimately orients you is what is what's true what is good what is beautiful um whereas purpose can be very egocentric it can be what I most want to have um H whereas orientation is reality Centric what do I most need to be in order to be in touch with reality to be deeply in touch with myself with other people uh with the world um and see a lot of people have kind of and you see this in sort of the rampant rise of cynicism and nihilism and popular media because of massive of burnout and betrayal and [ __ ] um people have sort of given up on the world in some ways um and the problem with that is that's not optional our model of who and what we are is inevitably bound up with our model of who and what the world is and um so the degree to which we find the world an incredibly scary place is a degree to which we we create sort of an ins an insular model of ourselves we withdraw and we withdraw and we withdraw and we withdraw uh the problem with that is uh that's the behavior ultimately of an organism in pain um and in distress and the fact that we don't recognize it as that isn't the central of central importance we're withdrawing um and that's the that's the move of pain and distress that's the fundamental move of depression so even if you don't feel depressed you're already behaving in a depressive uh manner what do you make of the recent uptick in depression and anxiety uh how this sort of relates to the work you've been looking at so uh Chris and I Christopher Master petro and I we talk about uh three kinds of responses to the meaning crisis one is just a reactive uh sense of like despair uh you see this in depression anxiety uh increasing rates of suicidality in places that are marked by affluence which is a very strange Paradox uh given our current cultural way of thinking about things um loneliness um addiction all of these things are uh people basically falling into some kind of drift towards despair in powerful ways the number of those friends you have is going down reliably decade by decade even though the number of social connection to power is going up exponential um things like this we're we we're obviously we're doing it the wrong way we're doing more and more that's giving us less and less um so that's one group then there's there's a replacement strategy where people try to replace the kinds of things that used to give this normatively charged sense of orientation and meaning in life and give us ways of cultivating wisdom and virtue therein me religious and philosophy people are trying to replace that with you know with things like you know the Marvel Cinematic Universe which they which they investigate they identify with they go to they often dress up as these people or put uh markers of them in their home and they they protect this universe with a religious fervor so there has been rage self-righteous rage at how Hollywood has destroyed these universes I agree with the aesthetic criticism by the way I think H has just desroyed a lot of these things but people aren't paying enough attention to why does this matter so much why do you spend hours online leging like this that's a that's a replacement strategy and of course people are also doing this can do this in the political Arena uh they can do it with pseudo religious ideologies they can do it with this weird amalgamation of conspiracy theory and spirituality called conspir ity on both the left and the right neither pole has any Monopoly on foolishness um so there's a lot of that um and then there's a replacement strategy which is where you see hopeful responses uh to the meum crisis you can see the rise of an ancient Roman philosophy sism becoming super important you can see um uh the PS adelic Renaissance the mindfulness Revolution the rise of biological practices in communities around the world all of these are are showing that um there was also a healthy response what was interesting is how Co was such a cleaving point right because it showed that how many people have what lack what's called existential resilience soon there the normal routine that keeps them busy right buy unto death uh soon as that gets disrupted they are confronted with some people were confronted with an ays of meaninglessness um and they dove into conspirituality and all kinds of stuff other people uh turned to a replacement strategy and they started you know attending online mindfulness courses uh starting to read some philosophy so it's it's a very it's a very complicated response uh to the meeting I'm interested in the role of the individual on their own and you know even beyond the sort of connectedness interconnectedness thing the fact that uh seeking meaning as a a purely selfish Pursuit and um I Heard a quote the other day which I loved which was after a while you just get sick of yourself and uh it really made me think um about that step change that a lot of people go through from just living for me just thinking about me to trying to serve a Pay It Forward perhaps and pass it on and that that perhaps comes along for the ride is a byproduct of getting older but yeah I'm interested in the the self versus uh um selfless element here excellent um and and this goes towards another criticism I have of the standard meaning and life construct it's completely egocentric in its orientation it should be asking questions like how much are you making meaning for other people how much coherence and Beauty are you bringing into the world and it doesn't ask those questions and that's exactly right and you see the self centered orientation is extremely problematic obviously there's ethical problems and we get you know we get the increasing uh growth of spiritual bypassing as an as a growing psychological problem uh so people pursue to spirituality um as a way of avoiding their important economic and ethical responsibilities and obligations and I think and you know and and spiritual bypassing is an offshoot of this large this growing group of people spiritual but not religious so if you look into the academic literature on spiritual but not religious like people who do the anthropology and sociology of religion what they'll tell you is spiritual means the spirituality means the religion of me that's what it means it's you're doing all the standard religious Behavior but you're doing it uh toward for you and towards you and by you and evaluated by you and that's extremely problematic because um autod didactically we're really bad um so have you noticed for example you're very good and this shows up metabolically in terms of even of of cognitive effort you're very good at pointing out the biases in your friends and other people you're really good at it you are by the way you are really good at it the objective evidence shows you're really good at it um and you do find it relatively easy and what that evidence also shows is you're really crap and I'm really crap at doing it for myself I'm really bad at finding my own biases my own self-deception now that doesn't let's be clear what I'm not saying that doesn't remove the responsibility for addressing those from me of course not but that that I'm not saying that you we are still always individually responsible for our vices so I want that clearly stated but what what it shows is and this is something you know that we've known since Socrates and and we emphasize until recently in current scientific practice you are my best source of self-correction and I am your best source this was supposed to be the engine of democracy but we've lost that uh too and so the degree to which we become withdrawn and self-centered is the degree to which um we are going to uh fall prey to self-deceptive behavior and the degree to which uh we might not pray pray proper attention to the Deep interconnections between our spirituality and our responsibilities how can people work out if they're being self-deceptive by Design we're good at deceiving ourselves yeah uh but we're also really good at uh uh determining it in other people that's the counterbalance uh so you have to you have to practice a lot with other people um and then you have to imitate what it's like with other people with yourself until you get good at doing it by yourself um and then there's a lot of things you can do to that do that so something that might not seem obvious that actually relies on that mindfulness mindfulness practices like meditation are a good way at becoming aware of how you are biased in how you're paying attention but how did you get that ability well you got that ability by doing the following right when you're a kid you imitate how adults because you trust them they're credible to you you imitate how adults are taking a perspective on how you are taking perspectives in the world and allowing them to correct you and you imitate that and imitate that and imitate that until you can take a perspective on your own perspective that is corrective that's metacognition to use the technical term and that's what you're exercising in mindfulness but that's that's a broad lesson to be learned you practice dialogically with others until you can do it internally and reflectively the whole point of uh of of Socratic philosophy you hung around with somebody like Socrates and you did all of this Socratic you know question and answer and Exploration with him and then eventually you got to the ability where you could do it by yourself an tanes who was considered the foref founder of stoicism when when asked what he had learned from Socrates he said well I learned how to dialogue with myself he didn't mean talk to himself because we do that automatically all day long he meant that he had so practiced it and imitated it so that he had internalized it so he had an inner Socrates that was quite competent and pointing out to him his own [ __ ] and self-destructiveness what we we sort of touched on it earlier on but I'm interested in how how contemporary of a problem a lack of meaning is and you also said about how as people become more affluent or as Nations become more affluent uh problems of meaning seem to increase I mean what what what uses are in us all trying to attain chase after affluence if all that comes along is a heavy side order of meaninglessness that's a good question uh Rosa talks about the fact that we're in kind of what he calls Dynamic stability um I talk about it as a frenetic frozenness we have to put more and more effort in not to make things better but to make sure we don't fall behind or miss out um of course and this is what's predictive of the massive amounts of burnout and Han talks about how how we we've we've become we're not so much oppressed and exploited by other people as we are exploiting our elves and oppressed by ourselves it's the Red Queen fallacy right yeah exactly exactly um and and so I think again if you asked people and you use the standard metrics they'll tell you well I know I'm I have connection to I care a lot about my kids and I care a lot about my friends and work's important to me you know blah uh and so you'll get that but if you ask them like and we know burnout is arising the number of close friends you have is going down people's sense of trust in others and in institutions is massively declining so again that's why I keep pressing on this you have to ask this question really really carefully uh and I think around those issues of burnout and being busy unto death um and uh you know sense of ever increasing [ __ ] and betrayal I think that or or if you want to put on the other way a famine a famine of wisdom scarcity we don't know where to go we we we find it very difficult to get into healthy flow situations we have addictive and Ma and maladaptive forms of flow uh generation like video games um we we we lack Fellowship Fellowship isn't friendship we've lost the whole category of getting together with people uh that we basically trust because we all participate in something that we all are committed to together like what used to happen in the church or the mosque or the temple or the synagogue Etc we've Lo we've lost all of those things and again we've lost faithfulness we we've become increasingly short term and so it gets harder and harder for us um to be faithful which means sticking in with things staying connected to things because of their realness even though it's at times very unsatisfactory to do so um and so you know this shows up in the fact that people are finding it harder and harder to maintain long-term relationships you mentioned there about kids and I'm going to guess that most people would say a source of great meaning or one of the greatest sources of meaning in my life has been kids have you guys considered the base rate reduction in the age of people becoming parents and the number of people becoming parents that I I've got it in my head a friend uh messages me semic consistently when I do uh q and A's on the show uh and he's very interested but he's a dad of two uh an old school sort of Irish guy and uh he says so many of your audience just need to have kids like they're asking questions and as am I about fulfilling my higher purpose about you know enacting my Logos forward about how why why can't I give myself a break why is it that I never really seem to be connected to the achievements that I have in life etc etc etc uh and I think you know what the sort of subtext of his point is lots of those problems are fixed or pale into insignificance once you have children uh I guess two questions then first off meaning crisis and associated with uh declining levels of um people becoming parents and then the second one is there something wrong or shallow or or compensatory about leaning on your children to provide you with me meaning in life yeah this first of all excellent question Chris eat and how the West really loved How the West really lost God talks about the fact that the countries that are the most um secular in their orientation are all are are is predicted by how much people are living atomically individually Alone um and whereas more religious communities uh uh tend to be related to people who live uh in more extended family kinds of uh situations uh this goes towards a lot of research that puts I think puts to nail uh in the coffin of the idea that people are religious because they're stupid um and intuitive and not rational um so uh some of the best research done by Jas and others who by the way are atheists shows that's not why people are atheist or religious that's not what predicts if people are atheist or religious in fact you get weird anomalies there's kind of a very weak correlation between how analytic people are and how irreligious they are but you get important anomalies like in the United Kingdom uh analytic thought is more predictive of being religious than non-religious and so the the whole Enlightenment mythology still espoused by people like Dawkins uh and others um just doesn't that's not what matters what matters is how many remember the kid we were talking about earlier and how you get metacognition you have to trust right you have to trust you have to entrust yourself to Credible others people that you trust because you can't believe this but you have to trust that they can see things you can't see and and what seems like senseless behavior to you actually has a deeper you know meaning to it a deeper function right and that requires you know typically uh you know uh We've relied on families to give us those kinds of entrusted relationships but we've we've narrowed the family down to the nuclear family the nomadic nuclear family um and that has seriously eradicated a lot of ways in which we could get meaning in life I think he your friend is right uh in the sense that children are are are very powerful indicators especially of how meaning in life is not about wealth because you have a child and your wealth goes down man uh the other one is it's not about subjective well-being uh especially at the beginning having a child crushes all the measures of subjective well-being you're not sleeping you're not eating um you're wet all the time you're under high stress because the baby's crying the person who you thought loved you the most in the world hates you right now your partner uh uh and yet so that shows you the two things our culture tells us are necessary and sufficient for meaning in life are neither necessary nor sufficient for meaning in life so I think having children is important children or Orient you non- egocentrically you have to go from how is everything relevant to me to how am I relevant to somebody other than myself um and I think that's a big that's those are important moves uh for meeing in life uh although isai as I've been arguing not captured by the current uh psychological measures um now I would say he's wrong and you're right about uh we can turn our children into Idols too and we've Di that uh Jonathan you know hate has made a good career out of pointing out how an idolatrous relationship to our children uh in which we made them the be all and end all of existence and helicopter parenting and uh you know and trying to wrap uh you know protective layers around them so they never suffer hurt or pain has actually you know destroyed them in some very important ways and he's got a ton of research to show this I know most people don't like caring that uh but um it it seems to be the case and so we have to be careful about that I think be having children is a powerful way of reorienting you I think our meaning in life uh the way I've been talking about it evolved out of our capacity to be parents uh but it's not enough to be a parent because if you're just a parent and here's my point that I've already made you're still withdrawing into your own little circle and you can be having K children uh and not really caring about the world now what's interesting of course is children make you care about the world or at least they should make you care about the world um and then that's my final point which is being able to care about things in the right way and really focus on what's the really real I mean that's wisdom um and your friend sounds like a good person so for whatever set of reasons they probably were wise parents or at least wise enough um that's not that's not necessarily the case so you could get sort of intense feelings of meaningfulness but you could be an incredibly foolish parent and I think that's very problematic yeah the I had Dawkins on the show maybe four months ago something like that and we had a live event we had a discussion in uh in Austin Texas where I hosted him and he was lovely uh but I I got stuck we both got stuck twice in two nights in a row first live on stage in front of his his audience and then again the next day when we did the podcast and I mentioned how derating the St story behind religion whatever it is that people choose to follow because you can't prove it or it can't be proven in the manner that you want it to be able to be proven doesn't reduce its Effectiveness it doesn't make it any less useful even if the level of truthfulness the bar that you want it to reach is something that it can't do and uh I've been obsessed over the last couple of years with things that are literally true but figuratively false and figuratively true but literally false and um yeah I I kind of feel I get a sense in the Zeitgeist that people are sort of turning away from the very hard cold sterile uh well it doesn't matter it has to be literally true at at at all costs uh that that doesn't seem to quite be the case and I wonder whether that is born out of a we kind of had a crack at this we tried to simultaneous equation our way through coming up with answers to Big questions and maybe I just need something that works even if I Can't Describe to you why it works okay well that's a tall order but uh I I I I do want I do feel I have a responsibility to respond um you have to be careful about um uh this notion of Truth um it's very one-dimensional uh that's being used by Dawkins um it's about uh evidence that convinces you that a proposition uh should be believed um I think that's important I'm a scientist and that's what theories are built out of scientific theories in the in the scientific sense of theory not in the everyday sense which is completely opposite to how scientists view the word theory so I think that's important and Dawkins is a scientist so of course he values that but of course that's not the those are not the primary ways we feel in contact with reality um um so evidence isn't the same thing as relevance um so your skills are they have to be true to thing like your aim has to be true it's a different sense of Truth you have to be able to make things present to yourself and you have to be able to like interact with the world in a way that reliably uh gives you some degree of agency in the world that's really important to you in fact I would put it you that if you had to choose between your skills and your beliefs you'd give up your beliefs rather than your skills um and they're a big part of how you sense what's real this is knowhow and this goes into your procedural memory but you talked about it a bit earlier and and this is important um we also have like what it's what I call perspectival knowing what it's what it's like to be you here now in this situation in this state of mind and that has a different this is knowing by noticing it's knowing by being present um it's how you're sizing things up what's your take on things how you're framing things all that sort of stuff now notice uh so my partner she she was gone recently because she was at a yoga retreat getting her certification to be a yoga instructor uh we're going to run Retreats when we're both retired and so um now I still had all my beliefs about Sara I still belied that they were all true right a and I still have all my skills for interacting with her in place and everything but she wasn't present to me and she that's oh and we you there's a sense of that lack of presence really matters to us and there's a sense and you can just feel it right now there's a sense of this is real because it's present it's present there's this power of presence that matters to us that's not captured by propositions I could State all of the propositions all day long about Sara that didn't make her present to me I wonder whether that's why longdistance relationships are often difficult exactly that's exactly right and then beneath it is this this what I I've called participatory knowing this is knowing by sort of imp placement being in place like you have a like you have you belong it's not just a space it's a place you belong you fit the space and the space fits you so it's a place for you right and and and and this is often very unconscious but you you lack it uh for example when you're homesick um or or or you lack a certain version of it when you're lonely um and this really contributes to your sense of real have you ever gone that thing where you've traveled to another country and it's all exciting and interesting but you don't really feel like you're properly in place you're getting a bit of culture shock and and then it starts to feel less real to you it starts to feel surreal to you to use your and see so what Dawkins is is forgetting he's forgetting all of those other aspects of realness that matter um if what we want is to be in contact with reality and secondly right it it it's not that that he's forgetting all of those he's forgetting that our access to those nonpropositional kinds of knowing is largely done through What's called the imaginal okay so for example I'm present to you I hope okay do you can you literally see into my mind no you're imagining it now it's not Imagining the way you're imagining a sailboat where imagination is taking you away or distracting you from reality you're looking through your imagination because you're trying to have Insight look into my mind now let's make it even more freaky that space inside your head where you are aware of yourself is that a literal space nope is it just a a fable is it just false no because you get real self- knowledge in fact that's Central to you being a rational being so that's imaginal it's fictive or Richard Dawkins open a science book oh look here's on page three here's the solar system Sol Solar System model of the Adam that's almost completely false yet we teach it to kids why do we give them this image because the image trains their perspective taking gives them skills so that they can get to the place where they can then get the deeper propositional knowledge the imaginal is irremovable from the way in which we need to train the nonpropositional in order for us to get those proper connectedness to reality that allows us to find the causal patterns that establish the propositional the the scientific kinds of claims what about people that think meaning is a thinking problem a lot of us spend a lot of time in our heads we're learning this is somewhere between philosophy psychology sociology all of these things I think the only place I have to experience these things is is in the head a little bit in the body and that gets fed up through my head as well can we fix this by just thinking our way out of the problem no I mean especially we think of thinking as just running a lot of propositions together and making sure they're coherent and Computing with them that's not going to work as I said most of this most of what we're talking about here when we're talking about this kind of connectedness this sense of belonging the sense of implacement is happening right it's happening in an a completely embodied fashion it's happening non propositionally like your skills you have the skill of swimming can you get access to that skill without swimming or doing something imaginal no you can't right what about you know what your State of Consciousness is like you have a kind of memory for that episodic memory like did you take a shower this morning and you sort of remember and you sort of you relive it for a moment right that's different from your knowledge of our cats mammals you don't relive that right you have to like there's whole aspects of you that you can't get access to unless you're doing it imaginary and that means embodied like this is all dependent on the fact that you're embodied The View that that this is just sort of a matter of not having the right propositions look look here's how it's fun here let me give you a concrete example this is from Thomas Nagel all of the arguments for reality being absurd aren't actually good arguments this came out and uh you know really I think the movie is really good by the way everything everywhere all at once but all the all the arguments in there are well everything all at where you know everything everywhere all at once that makes your life meaningless well how well because there's so much it makes this insignificant but if it makes each part insignificant how can the whole have significance that doesn't make any sense do you if if all these little individual parts are made insignificant by this huge collection of all the parts how does the huge have a better standard by which it renders all the parts so meaningless like well I'm so small if I blew you up to a Galaxy would that make your life more meaningful well you know what I'm doing now doesn't matter won't matter a million years from now so that means what's happening a million years from now shouldn't matter to you now like none of these arguments actually work they're really bad arguments they self-destruct that's not what drives absurdity what driv absurdity is right when there's a clash between your perspectives when you have this Thomas Nagel tells this wonderful story and he wrote this way back when when we used to the dark barbaric days where we had answering machines that were actual machines that were actually in your home and things like that because we couldn't carry our telephones around with us and he tells this thing about you know uh Tom who realizes he loves Susan and he and he he calls Susan up and the he hears some the receiver get picked up he says Susan don't talk I have to tell you I love you I love you I love you and then he hears Susan is not here right now right and notice she laugh and laughter like humor is that there's a contrast between the two perspectives there's the personal perspective of his of his life and the impersonal perspective of the machine and there's a clash there humor is when you're when you're on the cusp of authority and I got to meet John C by the way what sort when you're on the cusp of absurdity and Monty Python was brilliant at that right they could take you to the edge of absurdity and then what you do is you have a weird Insight that relieves the absurdity but if I if you can't relieve the clash between perspectives with an Insight because that's what Insight does it relieves a clash between perspectives then you will experience absurdity now I ask you Chris can you think your way into an it huh I don't know well if you have you ever needed an Insight yeah and realized it just wasn't coming yes many times Insight doesn't work that way Insight doesn't work propositionally you can't infer your way into an Insight in fact it looks like the the parts that are responsible for insight and the parts that are responsible for inference are kind of like an opponent processing with each other let me tell you why I say that when we're doing bad inference that's because we're jumping to a conclusion that's Insight Insight is when you jump to something when you like it you call it Insight when you don't like it you call it jumping to a conclusion you see they're like insight has to do with changing your perspective altering your perception and attention but also participating in a process that is self organizing you don't make an Insight you don't just uh receive an Insight you participate in a self-organizing process so so this is why you can't think your way through these things thinking matters don't misunderstand me propositions matter I'm not saying they don't but it's not just a matter of running good arguments because that's not where the P the primary problem lies I remember you saying that uh some truths are only knowable through transformation oh totally and uh I was having a great conversation last night and we came up with this term of unteachable lessons and an unteachable lesson one of the best unteachable lessons I think is money and success won't make you happy yeah and you know it is a unique category of lesson where nobody gives the people trying to teach it sympathy uh they're derated in a manner that uh no teacher would typically accept and I'm yet to I I I I know of nobody who has arrived at that realization logically they've arrived at it experientially um I was trying to think about some other uh ones that are not too dissimilar I think um don't don't be uh suede to falling in love with somebody who looks very pretty but has no morals or anything sort of deeper to do with you you know it's very much the thing that I kind of came to realize at least with the some of the unteachable lessons I'm sure there's a million um but the ones that I'd found were ones that sort of lyic were very seductive in one form or another they were about status they were about ACC claim they were about resources they were about sex they were about power and um that was so Salient that what you end up with is this you're at War there is one Higher version of yourself that goes ah I remember the last time that got into a relationship with a girl that was pretty and kind of didn't really have much to say and we didn't really have much to do or whatever and you know that that didn't end too well but you know she's just so hot I can't not think about and then you know the same with yeah everybody else says that sort of money and success didn't change any of the internal voids that they had but that was them I I will be able to thread the needle in a different way and uh I just I thought it was so funny that uh unteachable lessons came to me last night uh knowing I was going to speak to you today and the some truths that are only knowable through transformation I thought that was a nice uh a nice parallel that's powerful I like that um yeah la Paul's work on transformative experience uh that um yeah be because we don't know who we're going to be and what's it going to be like to be that other person until after we gone through the transformation so we can have all the propositions we want we can even have some relevant skills but the perspecti The perspectival Knowing knowing what it's going to be like the participatory knowing who are we going to actually be we won't know that until we undergo the transformation and so we draw very poor conclusions uh because uh we've been sort of educated for quite some time since dayart um that truths are just accessible to calculation we should just be able to calculate all possible truths um and that was to overturn an older religious idea that no no many truths are as you're indicating very powerfully many important truths are only disclosed to us after we commit to undergoing a fundamental transformation I and I think that's I think that's deeply right um now the issue around this is well if you're ignorant what do you do and then here's where the imaginal comes back in right um so let's use one of La Paul's powerful examples having a child you don't know what it's like to be a parent until you're a parent and we were kind of talking about that a few minutes ago you can read all kinds of books but they really don't help that much right and you can even practice some skills uh sort of in your head or on your friends or something um but what do people do then well what I've noticed is a lot of people do and some people are even noticing that other people do this is they get a dog they get a dog and they pretend but it's not really pretend because it's actually a dog it's an intelligent living being that needs your attention and your care and it's very demanding and I'm helping to raise a dog right now and you know and so they get a dog and they treat it like a little person they name it and they talk to it and they you know sometimes they'll even give it its own room and have family pictures and the dog is included um and so this is what's known what I've been calling serious play what we do is we set up this Lial place that wincott talked about this this transitional place where we're neither fully apparent but we're not just single anymore we're in this like Lial place where we're doing this very serious play by this kind of imagining through the dog not imagining a dog but imagining through the dog what it would be like to have a child that I'm responsible to now the thing about the dog is it's still an element of pretense because it's not a human child and so you can do things with a dog like you can say after 3 weeks no I'm not up this isn't really for me and then you can find a new owner for the dog and nobody thinks you're a particularly immoral person but if you do that with your kid now I'm three weeks in no no this isn't for me I'm gonna find another here do you want my child people think there's something and and as they should there's something dramatically wrong with you so we use we need serious play which is an imaginal practice in order to try and get a taste uh for uh so that we can properly commit ourselves to the Transformations that will disclose those unteachable truths so let me give you more concrete example that goes back to your your first thing I'm going to use myself as an example so I'm going to make myself vulnerable here I've not been what I would call successful in my romantic life I have lots of relationships some of them very long term but um in many ways they um they did not bring out the best in me and I did not act my best within them I'll I'll put it as succinctly as I could so after my second isn't that a point of vulnerability second marriage fell apart I'm on good terms with both of my exes by the way um but um I realized that I had been doing what you were talking about I had a type that I found particularly attractive and this was probably driven largely by genetic darwinian factors we sound like Plato now with the monster in our genitalia right um and I decided I was going to change my attraction radar I was going to go not go to as a women that immediately were Salient to me sort of physically um and instead um I tried to break against my type which wasn't Easy by the way especially when you're like feeling so vulnerable and that you'll never be loved again because the relationship is ended and all that crap that that little thing says in your head and I found this woman when she found me and she wasn't my type and because of that and because I really wanted to be different on how I entered into relationship I allowed myself to be attracted in ways I hadn't be attracted before and I fell in love with her soul and then only did I realize and now to my great joy do I realize she's actually a very physically attractive woman um and my type that I find attractive has completely shifted because of that um and that was powerful for me um and I'm not holding myself out as any kind of Exemplar for relationship advice um I'm saying that sometimes we have to be willing uh to overcome um our automatic salience uh projector um Salient what grabs our attention what arouses us right um if we want to actually find deeper connection and meaning um and and um this woman and I SAR and I we have made a lifetime commitment to each other uh because we have found that we reliably bring out the good in each other which is actually the basis for a relationship um and we realize that that is what you should base a commitment on not is this person satisfying all of your wants and needs not is this person you know helping you with all your projects and helping you to self-actualize and all the stuff that we say in California um but is are the two of you reliably bringing out the good in each other such that I I I I texted her today and I said I love that I get to know you more and more and while realizing that I'll never completely grasp you and so that that is something I would I did not have access to As Long As I was going according to what I typically found Salient it's a beautiful story and uh I've been thinking a lot recently about um why do you think that you know what's best for you like why is it that you have you know you had this assumption I have a type I have a type I have a type and uh there's a a need for control there's a desire for control there you know I have a predictive model of how things are going to unfold I can therefore have a good example of the the trajectory I know exactly where this is going to come into land kind of is and I know that maybe a couple of times this evidence has shown you're actually denying evidence especially if you've had a couple of these things occur and you go well ah those ones didn't quite go the way that I wanted to uh and this is something different well maybe different could lead to a different sort of an outcome it's like ah no I I I'm pretty sure that the same will somehow lead to a different kind of an outcome and um yeah as in a world where people want to control they do not like the idea of not being able to fully predict where things are going to come into land uh reminding everybody myself included that you are not necessarily the best judge of what is best for you you don't actually always know you can't always predict what's best for you and that's a a lovely example of a time where perhaps you were you were right to be wrong in that regard yeah thank you for saying that I mean one of the Hallmarks of modernity given to us in the from the period of the European Enlightenment is this U sort of uh putting on a pedestal uh uh enfranchising autonomy uh self-government it's con biggest virtue um and and there's value in that again because autonomy reminds us that uh we are are we are simultaneously our best friends and our worst enemy um and and we are responsible for um the content of our behavior and our thoughts and and our affect and so that's important and I don't want like I I don't want to just go back but it's also given us this and there is no other word for it a lack of humility it's given us an arrogance that we always know what is best for us um and that's simply not true in fact we are really bad at Discover bring our own self-deception we are really bad at affective for what's called affective forecasting we're really bad at predicting what will make us long-term happy and what will be make us long-term really really sad we're really bad at that we're really bad at it um we we're really bad at it because we fall prey to hyperbolic discounting that's a fancy sounding term it means we find present stimuli very Salient and long-term stimuli very nonsalient this is why it's hard to lose weight and it's hard to study and all those kinds of other things because the chocolate cake is there or the party is there and health and you know the exam or would off in the future um and by the way you can't argue yourself away from uh that hyperbolic discounting it doesn't help uh uh giving people lots of reason and evidence uh for why for example why they should save for their retirement doesn't really help them do that but if they do some serious play by imagining their future self as some a family member that they've always loved and taken care of and they form that effective bonding then they'll start to save for the retirement kind of thing um so there are lots of ways in which we are not um the best Authority we have to we have to we have to become adults in which we've right in which we take responsibility but and that's important and I don't want to denigrate that but that's only one half of maturation John rusen I think is uh right when he talks about the the the main part of maturity is facing up I like that phrase it's beautiful facing up to reality um and facing up to reality is humbling you're looking to something when you're looking up that's a humbling stance and you're facing it you're confronting a reality that is making you look up right and so that is an attitude in which you realize that you don't know best um so how's for example as things started to succeed for me um I you know I uh I had the Veri Foundation but I I was blessed by terrific people but I asked them to act as a count a constant check on the fact that I could fall prey to you know self-aggrandisement all hubus arrogance all the proclivities we see in social media people um and they and I I I I I committed them to this because I did not trust that I would be a good enough person for determining that issue and this and there we've done things specifically uh like we pivoted away from voices with REI and I was doing all these videos and we just do now a couple videos a month and I've become very clear we now have What's called the lecturn my role I'm a teacher teacher people are not my fans they're not my followers they're my students if they want to study what I've what I'm teaching that's my role that's who they are and I'm emphasizing quality over quantity um a lot of things to try and prioritize uh virtue over success and that initiative wasn't my initiative it was the initiative from uh uh Ryan Barton and Christopher MTI Petro at the Veri Foundation but as soon as they said it um I recognized that it was true so thank God for that this is one of those moments my my background when I first started the show was a sort of productivity bro uh world I was very much trying to Wrangle chaos and have the right notion template and the morning routine and time blocking in the calendar and all of this stuff trying to create some sense of organization out of what had been a pretty sort of messy 20s and um it's funny that even in things like this you know we're talking about Transcendent we're talking about you know uh accounting for the various machinations and ways that your ego is going to pervert the incentives and you know your higher calling and what how do we really pay this forward in the best way and so on and so forth and what it comes down to in some ways are an operational set of principles like that you need some hard and fast rules you need to actually put some bright lines in the sand and sort of draw those around you and um I've got it in my head sort of thinking about uh people for whom that approach is very seductive uh I would probably put myself in that category that um again if I just have the perfect to-do list template then all of my problems will be sorted etc etc let's say that somebody is operationally pretty effective when it comes to that sort of stuff what are some of the practices that you like that you use the most yourself to get you out of that kind of mode to get you out of the mode of logic of reason of rationality of logistics of operations and get you into a more embodied or dread Joy kind of sense because I feel like that's important so we've been talking this ultimately goes back to sort of a compilation put together by Nathan Vanderpool who I was wor working with we talk about dime uh we talk about these four dimensions um the dialogical I'll come back to each one in a minute the imaginal which I've been talking about a lot uh the mindful both meditation and contemplation SED and and moving and embodiment um so you need these four dimensions you need practices in all four of these dimensions and you need you need sets of practices because there is no Panacea practice uh practices have uh uh strengths and weaknesses and you need to align them so they're correcting and compensating for each other so one of my standard examples is meditation is training attention meditation is you're stepping back and looking at the lens through which you're normally looking through at the world you're trying to pay attention to your mental framing this is meditation the problem with that is you need to determine if any intervention while I stilled my mind well does that allow you to see better into the world and you have to do contemplative practices where you look out and see if you're seeing the world more deeply more clearly that you have to to and fro between them you have SE seated practices where you're sitting right but then you should do moving practices where you're trying to carry mindfulness into your movement so I do like taii Chan um and things like that you need imaginal practices where you're engaging your imagination not in for entertainment uh but you're doing that serious play that allows you to taste what what it might be like to be somebody other than who you currently are and uh what how you might uh What uh how you might ident uh identify with that um and and those are very important practices uh so um biological practices we have a bunch of those we have U oh let me give you an example of uh an imaginal practice lexio deina which is reading a text in an imaginal fashion you're not just reading it to get information you're trying to create the you're trying to take up the text as a serious play as something imaginal through which you're trying to see the world differently Pi a different way taking perspectives you haven't taken before and what and taste what the transformation might be like that that text is providing you that other voice that other perspective the sage that you're reading is like a parent to a child as the adult as a child is to the adult the adult is to the sage and you're doing this imaginal work uh in order to try and undergo a transformation that's that's a kind of imaginal practice lexio deina uh you want to do diic practices we have a whole bunch we've been teaching on um the awaken to meeting platform where you can go now and there's a whole uh website where yeah where you can do all of the practices you can take courses there's drop in things U my good friend Taylor Barrett by the way that is now running autonomously separate from John Riki I get nothing from that other than the satisfaction of knowing that some of my ideas have been put into practice um and Taylor's a good friend of mine um and so we have what a practice called dialectic into dialogos which is how can you talk how to how can two people enter into this Mutual midwifing this Fellowship where they're trying to give I'm trying to help you to give deeper birth to yourself and you're trying to help me we're trying to do that in a reciprocally opening fashion and how can we do it with like three three or four people so that sort of gets into a a shared Flow State where we start to be drawn into those kinds of lifegiving conversations which we've all had that because they take on a life of our own and they take us to places we didn't think we could go to and we don't necessarily end up agreeing but we all say wow I never thought I could get here and I couldn't have got here on my own we we those kinds of practices uh we're we're just putting the final touches on a practice we've been working on cultivating developing for the past year or so uh in which you teach people a Socratic practice of go into something a deeply personal problem you're hopp and then how can you go through a set of with the help of other people's a set of Transformations on your perspective and also on your sense of identity so that you can go from it being your personal problem which is just yours to an existential dilemma that is probably shared with many people and then once you get at the level of existential dilemma the tradition can talk to you and tell you what virtue might be relevant to the existential Dimension and then you can then address that part of it and then that you bring that back into and transform your personal problem uh we're doing uh things like that uh where where can people go where should they go if they want to check out more of that uh awaken to meaning uh.org it's a a platform that last thing which is called the socratic search space we're just going to roll it out in the next month or so uh the dialectic and dialogos you can do that philosophical Fellowship you can do that you can learn about lexio deina meditation contemplation uh various other kinds of practices that's so awesome John I appreciate the heck out of you I really uh I have to say as well it's it's beautiful to see you smitten uh and uh it's it's really it's really lovely it genuin is mate uh you know I I think uh good people deserve good relationships and I'm very glad that you've managed to find yours so uh what can people expect next you've kind of rounded out this chapter you I how when was the first meaning crisis video put on YouTube uh February 2019 okay yeah so a good half decade Journey on one thing well the book is only part one there's part two coming out uh which is the second half um that'll have even more revisions in it because all the scientific work on relevance realization has gone through a lot of revision and and collaboration with other people publishing papers like this year um and stuff like that um the uh the next thing is um well I've got a bunch of books coming out I've got a book on while I'm working on Einstein and Spinoza's God um and then a book called reimagining religion um and then uh book by Greg Enriquez uh we're we got a lot of that written on U on Consciousness that's coming out uh the big project is um the philosophical Silk Road which is going to be my next big multimedia Endeavor um it's going to be sort of at four levels of PR presentation one is well it it's based on this thesis this is what's next I I made a fundamental mistake in uh Awakening for the meeting crisis um I thought you know the the solution was to engineer an ology of practices a religion that's not a religion failing to realize that's exactly the framing that I was criticizing throughout so I felt prey to a very serious performative contradiction um because I realized like what like like that example of the living conversation the sacred you can't manufacture it you can't engineer it it has to show up with a life of its own or it's not the sacred it's not that that Fountain of rejuvenating meaning that is deep transformative of individuals and communities but what's happening and what I've seen since all of the connections were that were formed by Awakening from the main crisis is communities around the world and and things happening in in academic uh cognitive science and philosophy and psychology and and biology what I call the Advent of the Sacred it's like sacredness is trying to be born in a new way for us I think as a response to uh it's the I'll be Hegel here for a second so this is my only technicality this is the velt gist the spirit of reality that's challenging the Zeitgeist the spirit of the times of the meaning crisis and so I want to do this I want to in fact it's not I want to do this I feel called to do this one of the things I'm going to do is I I I want to try and teach by undergoing a pilgrimage I want to go to the various places in the world world where the sages of three great Traditions that sort of built comprehensive ways for people to deeply dialogue with each other the neoplatonic tradition that runs through Christianity and Judaism and Islam so I want to talk about right I want to talk about you know Maximus the Confessor or Nicholas of kza I'm gonna go there or Clement of Alexandria or Sardi the the Sufi right I'm going to go there and I'm going to walk and and talk and live um and and really undergo and try and make myself vulnerable to hearing these people I'm going to go to India you know with all of the vanta and everything wrapped around it and Van is like wrapped with Tantra and jism and and original Buddhism and then uh I want to go to Japan uh because there's Zen because Zen integrates Buddhism and dosm and Shinto and and get all three of these like what would it be like to do the philosophical Silk Road create a lingua philosophica so we could engage in these not just an Ecology of practices but an Ecology of tra traditions where we could really deeply talk to each other and people can travel and and transform and maybe return and recover their home or travel and find a new home that's going to be the up the upper level then below that is going to be a lecture series like Awakening from the meeting crisis where I go through each one of these thinkers H and and explain them in great detail and then below that is going to be specific video essays on uh more technical topics like comparing the non-duality in vidanta to the non-duality in in in Zen for example or neoplatonism and then below that we have What's called the Codex we have a whole Bank of volunteers taking all of my language and they're like a a Wikipedia of it where there's and it's at it's it's being written at multiple levels of accessibility somebody in grade 10 uh completed High School all you know all these levels there's cross referencing there's diagrams there's practices you can undertake to get a deeper understanding of the concepts and so there's going to be these four tiers and there's going to be like a narrative structure and an argumentative structure right and a reflective structure it's going to be this and and and the hope is that that and that a lot of the teaching will not go just in what I'm saying but what I'm undergoing and and how I'm being transformed um there's going to be people that are going to travel with me at various places and meet me at various places um and the hope is to open people up to the Advent of the Sacred so they can uh properly Orient to receiving it so that we can um really uh transformatively Trust each other in the way we need to in order to address the meeting crisis well I'm glad after taking on such a medium-sized topic you're taking it a little bit smaller for the next fil very very reassuring that you're going to keep it keep it nice and Niche uh John I appreciate the heck out if you may I can't wait until you get whatever you've got coming out next out and I would love to bring you back on whenever you're ready uh I'll always come back and talk to you Chris uh thank you for very much and thank you for allowing me to shamelessly plug my new book which I really appreciate everyone should go and check it out I appreciate you mate thank you thank you so much Chris do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a God is able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself well the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you bespoke so go and go and check it out