A Body with Many Selves

We have to quit viewing man as a single psychological entity, that in fact his psychological self is a multiple self, that he has a variety of mental systems. existing in his brain. They have emotions, they have memories, they have incentives, they have destinies, and they're able to control the motor apparatus by which I mean they're able to make movements, they're able to actually...

precipitate behaviors on the part of someone. And once those actions are completed, here comes this verbal system in to give an explanation and to propose a theory to itself to explain why these actions were carried out.

Greetings friends, I'm Arnold Schroeder and this is Fight Like an Animal. Find episode bibliographies and other texts at againsttheinternet.com. If you'd like to support this work materially, please check out patreon.com slash biological singularity. If you would like access to the Worldtree Discord server, please write to me and tell me a little bit about yourself. And I am currently going through a significant backlog of emails and actually responding to them.

unfinished correspondence which has haunted both my dreams and my waking shall haunt me no more so write to me for any other reason at all if you feel so inclined let's do this

I'm organizing an event in Portland, Oregon, sometime roughly centered around the autumn equinox, let's say for the sake of argument, somewhere in between September 19th and the 23rd or so. If you are interested in participating, write to me and when I have a more solid... set of promotional materials. I will send them your way. If you've already indicated interest in Portland area events, I'm aware and will be sending you something.

broad outlines so far as i can discern them at this point are that i will be presenting a lecture that i'm just calling a survival ecology for portland oregon previewing some approaches to an energy system and a food system. that could conceivably scale up to constitute municipal policy or something like that, but could also be pursued by individuals or small groups, something we don't have to wait to try to do.

then I believe that we are going to do a participatory workshop, which I am calling Stashes and Escape Routes. We'll be sort of imagining the moment that you get a text saying that there's some people at your house that you'd really rather not see and you're not carrying anything with you, but it suddenly feels like it's time to leave town.

So imagining a sort of hidden infrastructure of places to be and things to access that can be hidden away and can also... function as kind of implicit meeting spots for people who share knowledge of these sites and can allow us some fluidity, give us a few options in how we navigate the ever escalating landscape of repression regardless of who's in office and then there will be some kind of ceremony i think that there will be a tree planting ceremony and uh perhaps

a considerably more elaborate affair of that nature and we will also we'll rage we'll build a fire it's going to be in this very beautiful spot under some glorious cottonwoods on the Willamette River, sandy beaches, and, you know, we'll do something rocking. We'll go long into the night. Maybe we'll still be there at sunrise.

But probably starting in the evening, probably starting when there's still light. So yeah, if you're interested in that, please get in touch with me. That will be on the Equinox. begins this cycle or i i guess it's probably fair to say at this point continues it maybe started who knows when it started but uh of trying to do at least eight events a year on the solstices, equinoxes, and the points in between.

Okay, so we are going to continue discussions that we began in the last episode, kind of also continuing in this format.

Although to a lesser extent, I'm certainly far less sleep deprived and intoxicated than I was the last time I podcasted. But in this sort of... new new approach that i'm adopting where i just feel kind of burdened by all the outlines that i have and i'm kind of trying to move through some of this material in a way that is quicker than i've done in the past so i'm spending less time meticulously structuring outlines or looking up the one perfect quote to illustrate my point

And more just going through this massive compendium of research and citations that I already have. So I'm going to be continuing to riff on the outline that I was working from in a world with many centers. But today, I'm going to start by speaking in terms of this very strange world we inhabit. as partially a function of some dark correlations between attitudes and aptitudes between

how people see the world and what they are good at doing. Attitudes and aptitudes is about the best I can come up with for like a catchy, you know, a punchy way of phrasing that.

after having spent years thinking about what would be a good punchy way to phrase it. That's the best I got, and I'm just going to call it there. But so here's like a few fun facts. that about the world that we will try to explain, examine the significance of, and make some inferences of.

in this episode as well as tying it back into a whole bunch of themes from last episode uh let's see the by far The most common professional backgrounds for elected officials in the United States Congress, House of Representatives, and the Senate is either law or business.

in contrast there has not been a physical scientist in the united states senate since nineteen eighty seven so that means that every time that climate and earth system scientists present their terrifying results to Congress, they are presenting their highly technical, fabulously complicated mathematical models of the global crisis that we're into.

Lawyers and business majors who kind of can't do math, you know. Let's see what else. Engineers are 17 times more likely to participate in authoritarian political violence than would be expected. by their presence in the population at large conversely humanities and social sciences graduates are vastly more likely to participate in egalitarian forms of political violence

than would be expected from their overall presence in the population. Scientists and mathematicians participate in political violence at a rate that would be expected by their presence in the overall population.

A while ago, I wrote and published a scientific paper. I'm honestly not sure if I've ever mentioned that on this podcast, but in, I think, 2023. I published in a kind of like experimental scientific journal, but it is searchable. It has a DOI and is searchable in scientific literature databases, but a journal called Seeds of Science. I selected it because its logo is a tree, you know. And the title of the paper was Scientific Theories and Their Psychological Corollaries.

the ecological crisis as a case study in the need for synthesis. And so this was me. I think that I really tried to do too many things with this paper.

But this was me presenting some version of a thesis that I've also presented on this podcast that at a certain point, scientists need to stop presenting their terrifying results to... people within institutions of power and start having a meaningful scientific dialogue about why those institutions of power behave the way that they do and a meaningful dialogue about power in which they acknowledge that

the dialogue isn't going anywhere and if they want to try to save the world they're going to have to attempt to intervene in a more direct fashion there's a variety of reasons why i think that

people within scientific institutions are kind of uniquely placed to influence a certain subset of variables that shape the world we're living in. Obviously there's at least some technical aptitudes and abilities there that aren't present elsewhere but also in terms of appealing to in terms of kind of storytelling and trying to pull off the interesting and complicatedly related to existing institutions of power

of asserting parallel institutions of governance and decision-making. I do feel like people within scientific institutions are uniquely positioned to appeal to those who feel like they really need a room full of adult to feel like there's a room full of adults somewhere making decisions to appeal to psychological needs for stability and security basically

And to some extent, even though it's really not so much my thing, to appeal the psychological needs for a sense of institutional authority, even if they're not trying to exercise any... coercive uh any any form of dominance let's say um you know perhaps emulating some of the state's administrative functions but not necessarily its uh

subordinating coercive functions um and so you know it's me making the case for that and there is some subset of people within the academy there there have been a handful of interesting papers published from various you know conservation biologists earth system scientists climate scientists and whatnot kind of tending in that direction i'll put a few in the bibliography there's

a couple scientists who uh are calling you know calling for a new discipline called survival ecology which is a scientific dialogue not just about the the ecological crisis but about what to do about it because clearly the existing models of how you how you influence that are wrong um so you know there's like a handful of people out there who are doing something vaguely in that direction

But I think that very quickly what would come up is that there's just core differences between people in how they perceive the world even if they happen to be in the same scientific discipline. and indeed even use the exact same research methods and basically have the same bibliographies in their heads, have been exposed to the same information presented in the same ways. And so that's kind of, that was a lot of, you know, it was almost like I kind of hastily got through. I used the...

World Scientist's Second Warning to Humanity, which I think was issued in 2017, but followed up on the, I think it was 25 year anniversary. of a first open letter to humanity that scientists wrote saying this is all going quite badly and we should do something else so you know i kind of like begin with this quip of okay well what's what's the theory here that you know if getting

Hundreds of signatories to the first letter wasn't adequate. Getting a couple thousand to the second should do the job. If science is supposed to be responsive to empirical reality, at what point does it say this doesn't work? So I try, you know, it's like I try to do that and even like set up some methodologies for identifying ecological thresholds beyond which we should, in fact, say this definitely didn't work past tense.

But then that's kind of like this hasty, you know, then I get into this question of like, okay, so what are these fundamental differences between people who inhabit these same scientific disciplines? And what I'm arguing for is a research paradigm of just correlating variation in scientific schools of thought.

with core psychological traits and referencing some existing psychometrics, but also kind of pointing to this landscape that overlaps with a lot of different ways we think about individual differences.

is a little bit of a different conceptualization and saying here are some of the major differences that I see like here are kind of some of the the kinds of minds that i see in the academy and how they are pretty robustly associated with to some extent with different disciplines but then because disciplines so often fracture into different schools of thought

Here's the way these kinds of minds are associated with different schools of thought. So I don't know whether I did a good job or not. That paper exists.

And I doubt very much that the authors of this paper I'm about to talk about read my paper and were like, oh yeah, we should totally do that. But pettiness compels me to mention. that I did publish at first and a couple of years later. And a huge shout out to Daniel associated with the World Tree Project for bringing this to our attention.

A couple of years later, this great paper came out called Why Do Scientists Disagree? And they are making a very strikingly similar set of arguments to the ones I made in that paper. So these authors assessed a number of controversial topics in psychology and then asked a pretty large sample of researchers for their opinions on these controversial topics.

asked them to take some psychometrics, correlated the results of the two. The strongest correlation was with a psychometric called tolerance of ambiguity. which, like it sounds, if you've been listening for a while, it's somewhat related to need for closure. so many different psychological surveys that kind of get at some of the same things and they always any of these scales can conceivably divide it into even more acutely targeted subscales, but also they tend to overlap.

with other scales that are trying to get at different questions there's just really no clear way like place to definitively draw these lines one simply does the best they can but To read a little from this paper, Why Do Scientists Disagree? Our findings provide evidence for the idea that science represents an ecology of diverse perspectives on contentious themes not straightforwardly resolved by the accumulation of more evidence. Researchers often disagree.

These disagreements can stem from differences in knowledge, training, and expertise, but access to the same data and use of common methodology do not guarantee agreement. disciplines often fracture into schools of thought with diverging stances. We focused on divisions among researchers in psychological science, asking them about their stances on 16 controversial themes.

These included far reaching issues such as the importance of the social environment on cognition, the connection between language and thought, and the utility of computational metaphors and mathematical models for human cognition. where researchers stood on these topics was correlated in both expected and unexpected ways with what the researchers study and how they study it.

for example use of neuroimaging was associated with having a lower belief in the importance of social environments this suggests that it is not simply harder for those using neuroimaging techniques to study social groups They are also less impressed by theories that view social context as foundational for understanding human cognition.

more generally the use of specific research methods comes bundled with foundational beliefs about what is important and what signifies plausibility and ultimately truth itself differences in researchers stances on our controversial themes were also associated with individual differences in various cognitive traits ranging from tolerance of ambiguity creativity and breadth of interest

to the need for cognition visual imagery and deliberation just to briefly elucidate need for cognition is Essentially, how much time you want to spend thinking about something, how much you're willing to keep problem solving, even if you maybe have an answer that could kind of... semi-plausibly fit the data. And then visual imagery is about the extent, how vividly you tend to visualize things and to visualize different things.

Visualize objects as opposed to spatial relationships and stuff like that. So getting into some really core differences in how minds work and how this not only influences. sort of like initial intuitions about research paths that one might take and plausible models of the world, but also the tools that one uses to find out more about the nature of reality.

And just to continue with one more paragraph from this paper, our findings suggest that psychologists have different attitudes regarding what solutions are epistemically satisfying and worthy of contributing to the canon of psychological fact. These divisions run deep. Insofar as many such differences in foundational beliefs are often hidden, one of the goals of this project was to make these divisions between visible and available.

oh they had it they had a typo that's not me misreading this it's a preprint you know it should be these divisions between researchers or something like that but one of the goals of this project was to make these divisions between researchers or whatever, visible and available for public evaluation and critique. We do not imply that certain cognitive traits are associated with worse science.

but demonstrate how they influence the approaches and answers that psychologists obtain in their research and could slow, sidetrack, or indefinitely stall the resolution of truth claims within psychological science. In the worst case scenario, cognitive differences could be exploited to prop up or even canonize an evidently weak position that is intuitively attractive to researchers in positions of power drop the fucking mic

okay so that's that is exactly some version of that is exactly what i was saying in my paper that at a certain point You know, we can only have so many nature versus nurture debates or whatever before it just stops being interesting, before we're committing the ultimate sin in a consumer society and we're just... boring ourselves and other people right and that what be what is interesting at that point is to ask why do we disagree and to begin evaluating where these fundamental differences

reasoning processes come from and what they're correlated with and then of course if you're interested in power and the nature of politics and societies then to ask what the relationship between attitudes and aptitudes is here and how that shapes the landscape of power we inhabit.

So what I want to note about that paper, even though they don't really explicitly draw it out too far, is when they're talking about... neuroimaging being associated with a certain set of perceptions and core assumptions about how human behavior and perception works. They're talking about a technical skill set that's associated with a certain set of beliefs. And that is very much something that I got into in the paper that I wrote.

And that I really have to shout out Frank here for turning me on to this book, Engineers of Jihad, The Curious Connection Between Education and Violent Extremism. sort of like more extensively discussed in this book. And then I'm going to rely on my own book for notes to summarize those findings.

I'll just go ahead and read from it rather than summarize it. However much they disagree, scientists have a shared incentive to downplay their differences. Credibility is often predicated on consensus.

as a result there is a tragic lack of psychological research on the different kinds of minds present in the academy and why they see the world so differently what little work exists has produced intriguing results In their book, Engineers of Jihad, The Curious Connection Between Violent Extremism and Education, Diego Gambetta and Stefan Hertog summarize the correlations between psychological questionnaire results and academic discipline.

among european male graduates noting three statistical clusters first those who specialize in engineering law medicine economics and business this population tends to score high on the psychometric need for closure and its subscale traditionalism as you can by now perhaps guess this predicts authoritarian attitudes second those specializing in math and physical science have scores that are not significantly different from the population at large third those in the humanities and social sciences

score low on need for closure and traditionalism. Naturally, this predicts egalitarian attitudes. Theory in this case predicts reality. Participation in terrorist groups. I'm using the term here without judgments about political violence to reflect the author's phrasing, strongly correlates with academic discipline as well.

the most striking of these results were that islamic terrorists in gambetta and hertog sample were seventeen times more likely to be engineers than would be expected from their proportion of the general population engineers were also the most overrepresented group in western authoritarian contexts like the nazi party while social science and humanities graduates were heavily overrepresented in egalitarian cohorts like the red army faction

Science and math graduates participated in non-state political violence at the rate expected by their presence in the overall population. in addition to the psychological clustering of their participants these disciplines cluster in terms of three distinct approaches and objectives the authoritarian leaning of these which seems to reliably end up in state power regardless of its ideology stalin after all complained that all the socialists had been replaced by engineers

is concerned with the application of existing knowledge toward a utilitarian end engineering is technical law is intentionally arcane and business and administration are pragmatically lowbrow Thus they are not necessarily seen as cohesive, but psychologically, politically, and in terms of their relationship to knowledge and its application, they are.

Let us call this cluster of psychological and political tendencies technics. Technics is a group of social role specializations which tend to be inhabited by a distinct political personality. it is concerned with self-assertion the application of practical knowledge the reduction of reality to a utilitarian model and the imposition of hierarchy

Okay, and then now I will move on to just kind of summarizing it. The math and science cluster here is kind of, is the... dynamic integration of open-ended inquiry into the nature of reality and practical application right so we don't see that fragmenting into things you know into utilitarianism on the one hand or the creation of meaning on the other or let's say hierarchical utilitarianism and egalitarian speculations about the nature of reality on the other

The science and math cluster dances on that precipice, but of course, there's the whole politics of not getting political, which seems to particularly influence. people within those realms of the academy. And so I read a quote from Jeff Schmidt's book, Disciplined Minds, about this. There's still this... fracturing of selfhood occurring in those realms of the Academy where you're allowed to produce all these super compelling results.

but you're not really allowed to embody them or apply them in any way because that's seen as getting political and somehow it's not seen as getting political to just Do a bunch of work and give it to the existing power structure and divest yourself of any agency and how that work is utilized. But then, of course, you know, this this third.

statistical cluster that they're assessing in this case in European graduate students male European graduate students from a few rounds of this really large sample size social psychological survey called the European Social Survey.

The social sciences and humanities are, I'll say, I'll quote again, moving to our third and final cluster, we must note... with considerable horror if you are anything like me the relationship between pragmatism and political orientation in the final of our academic factions the humanities and social sciences comprise many diverse tendencies

All of these clusters are statistical constructs, of course. But certainly, an avowed disinterest in practical applications characterizes many social scientists and humanities scholars. It is also, very unlike the science cluster, disinterested in producing an internally consistent, integrated body of knowledge. Often, it opposes any such effort.

humanities and social science are often characterized by a kind of fatalism about knowledge in attempts to undermine interdict or deconstruct any attempt to speak truth with elaborate literary texts pointing to an infinite set of open-ended possibilities so let us call this cluster literary experiments i say we should note this with horror because

long before i read engineers of jihad i was constantly and painfully aware of the lack of practical knowledge and pragmatism in general within many of the social movements i inhabited so yeah so i give these names to to try to have concise terms for this correlation between aptitudes and attitudes, calling the clusters techniques, science, and literary experiments.

If you spent time in the academy or you read a lot of academic stuff, this should be kind of familiar. And again, this is not... In the case of... Gambetta and Hertog's work, they're correlating it with academic discipline, and that works well enough that that produces striking enough correlations to observe a pattern.

But I would say that these differences, as the authors of Why Do Scientists Disagree are getting into, really also transcend and subdivide academic disciplines. You know, for instance... There's very much what I would describe as a kind of technics-science divide in biology, and this is something that I come back to over and over again, is you have this... one kind of biology that doesn't really have a whole lot of biology in it, the sort of selfish gene, let's make out of the...

towering greatness of our disembodied thought processes. Let's just contemplate the nature of reality and how evolution must work according to these axioms that we've devised. And then let's just do a bunch of mathematical modeling and insist this is what's going on without really condescending to look at actual organisms and how they actually function.

And then there's a more integrative approach to biology that is very much the ascending paradigm within the field, that old kind of what I call the imaginary gene paradigm. or the gene for wholesale trait, like adventurousness or intelligence or empathy or whatever, like that, that really is, it's essentially died in the field of biology or it's in very sharp decline.

it's still very much one that let's say the reading public you know people who would tend to have any kind of perception of the field from outside of it uh it's still one that really burdens like the the public perception of what biologists are saying so you know that that's one example sort of like a predictable a predictable set of correlated perceptual tendencies there the the more techniques model of biology is very much about parts over holes it's about saying that organisms really aren't

The agents aren't really units of selection, don't really have any agency in their own processes of evolution. genes these much smaller subcomponents of organisms are kind of essentially essentially like dictatorially controlling them And then there's also a kind of like stasis over motion. So, you know, it's like, and these genes that are in control of organisms.

as if manipulating robots or something they only change very slowly through random mutations so whatever whatever behavior you're seeing now in an organism you can expect to see over the long march of millennia then there's a model over reality component you know like we figured this all out by just sort of introspecting

on the nature of biology and we're sure it's right because the logical perfection of our model is more beautiful than the reality it purports to describe yeah so you know these are These are correlated perceptual tendencies that we return to over and over again. We could say broadly they characterize the reductive as opposed to the holistic worldview or the mechanistic as opposed to the animistic worldview.

So, you know, so that's one example of where there's a pretty like clear dividing line in a scientific discipline that is.

conspicuously maps to these three tendencies. It's a technics-science divide. And then I would say anthropology. has a science literary experiment divide going on. And I think that should be like fairly familiar to anybody who's seen the critique. I think the quote from Tubi and Cosmides, Classic 1992 essay, The Psychological Foundations of Culture, is something like certainly one of the most highly rewarded talents in anthropology is the ability to turn the...

humanly familiar and to the unintelligible and the exotic right but you know the this uh this way that some people are kind of like trying to understand humanity which It doesn't mean ignoring any particular context that any particular humans are in, but it's not like you're not going to note it when there's some consistencies across different cultures or basic human tendencies that...

again like transcend and subdivide any given social grouping that you can find this of course has huge pertinence to the way we talk about politics and political power in the world we live in now because it's such a It's such a counterpoint to identity politics where we're supposed to be able to predict the way people perceive the world and behave in it based on this.

really small set of identity variables, but of course we see the same kinds of people in all these different groups behaving in very similar ways. We see the same basic human tendencies surface in context after context. And so a real discussion about how to how to.

bias the dynamics towards certain human tendencies and away from others has to be able to acknowledge the variability where we find it and not just traffic in these idiotic generalizations about groups of people as insanely you know not that these variables aren't important they're just insufficient on their own you know variables as an insanely general as rich or poor black or white man or woman etc um and so

But then, of course, there's people in anthropology who are actually trying to do something we might call science, which could be very helpful for projects of global survival. And so you see these different sort of these three very broad tendencies, and I am obviously so aware, and the paper, Why Scientists Disagree.

should point us in the direction of some of these kind of like infinite nuances and sub tendencies that would exist within any of these tendencies but I'm just pointing out how these three tendencies can be correlated with discipline with academic disciplines at the coarsest scale like at the courses statistical scale and then we can see divides within disciplines if we look a little closer.

and then at some point you know you can always you can always refine your maps of individual difference until you're talking about actual individuals or like tiny little rooms full of people in particular academies somewhere or whatever but you know looking at it like this gives us this sense of the broader tendencies and how they play out and how they end up not just sort of being venues for the expression of

different kinds of minds and the way that they're good at different things, how different academic tendencies are not just venues for the expression of the correlation between attitudes and aptitudes. but how at a certain point they're going to really tend to amplify these different kinds of these different tendencies we see in different people. And one piece of research I'll point out very quickly that validates this is a couple papers produced by

one of the authors of which is the guy who created a major psychometric for evaluating political difference. It's called the Social Dominance Orientation Scale. And he has this schema of hierarchy enhancing and hierarchy attenuating disciplines. And he looks at the correlation between the scale, the SDO scale.

and different academic disciplines and uh does so asks people in different disciplines you know finds these sort of which should hopefully by now, he's working in the US as opposed to Europe, but finds what should now hopefully be somewhat predictable correlations like engineers tend towards a higher social dominance orientation. But he he administers these questionnaires as people are entering professional training and after they've been there for a while and does indeed find.

that the psychological tendencies that cause people to self-select into these different professional pathways also amplifies those very psychological tendencies.

Now, it never ceases to amaze me the extent to which I really do find the need in trying to understand the world and how we've gotten into this.

uh uncannily terrible situation that we're in how often i feel the need to point out things that are happening or have happened in the academy or critique certain tendencies within the academy but it's less so my case I mean what's important about this set of correlations between attitudes and aptitudes we see in the academy in terms of how it plays out in professional social role specializations.

is obviously less like, you know, there's certain kinds of people involved in different political violence with different professional backgrounds. outside of institutions of power what really matters to me is that it's a certain subset of psychologies that the that the technics orientation tends to be the people within institutions of power, how you have what I like to call the narcissists and the technocrats coming from engineering, business, and law, or broadly speaking.

inhabiting a psychology that tends to select into those disciplines and has a very map over territory, self-assertion over participation way of looking at the world. So that is important. I mean, that truly is worth noting and thinking about and thinking about how to counter. I would say, considering the striking convergence of outcomes in terms of the way that political institutions with ostensibly very different ideologies, this is kind of the...

the James Scott seeing like a state critique, you know, considering how systems of power with such different self descriptions have converged on the same outcomes. I think it really is worth talking. about systems not only in terms of what they say they believe or are about or trying to achieve but in terms of what kinds of people exercise what kinds of power in them very recurrent theme in

the book but i also want to get into this notion that what how you know this process of fracture we see in the academy this amplification of individual differences and the correlation between attitudes and aptitudes is not at all unique to the academy, but it's where it's where it's most discernible.

And the reason for that is partially obviously because the Academy is a place where people are, you know, producing very explicit bodies of... knowledge or whatever it is they're producing but you know are are generating explicit stories about the world of some kind or another um

But what I think is also true is that it's just where a process we are now seeing throughout the entirety of our society happened first. I often think about how The first time that I encountered an anarchist journal, it was in a bookstore when I was 12 in Vermont, and I read it and then kind of immediately...

became a social theorist right you know so now i'm writing something for this journal which i never submitted but kind of finding out like i can so distinctly remember this moment of noticing um that I wasn't really just writing about something that I had already explicitly formulated and thought about, that I had this sort of set of intuitions.

this you know like like it was in fact the case that i wanted to write for an anarchist journal and not some other kind of journal but that so much of the of the so many of the explicit claims i was making so much of the explicit characterizations of the world that i was producing i was kind of coming up with in the process of writing So this gets into the whole kind of Ronald Englehart self-expression values thing that we've talked about way back in some of those like group mind podcasts.

But generally, we can summarize this as just saying that communications technologies is how Inglehart would have put it. We can say phones and social media and corporate platforms in general. The Internet doesn't really exist so much, you know, let's call it the corporate platform complex or something like that. All that stuff has kind of put a whole lot of people.

who would have gone through life without ever undergoing a process like that one that i went through when i was 12 years old of initially being like huh i'm kind of finding out what i think about the world by trying to articulate a set of positions there's a very entangled process happening here a whole lot of people who wouldn't have bothered to do that who never would have felt compelled to scribble away on their manifestos for obscure political journals.

given a certain set of tools and a certain connectivity to the world, find themselves doing that. And so the liberal narrative, of course, is that there's such a thing as experts, they all... hang out at universities they all basically agree on the nature of reality and um for some reason that Nobody can seem to understand. Surely it has nothing to do with people telling other people that...

Their kids have mental disorders because they listen to heavy metal and smoke weed. Surely it has nothing to do with experts claiming that there's weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or that clear cutting is good for forests or anything like that. But for some, just totally incomprehensible. I think that's just so wrong. Just so, so.

so very wrong and it's really kind of the opposite it's like what happened in the academy was a precursor to what's happening now and that's that really is the right way to understand it And so here is where I want to talk about how we can see this in terms of... The themes I was talking about in the last episode, which if you didn't listen to it, I can still, you know, briefly articulate how these notions of a loss of agency connection.

and a sense of participation can be thought of to robustly characterize all of the different worldviews for as much as they are superficially massively divergent the the different worldviews that we find in the academy or just among people at large to talk about kind of like what that process the process of differentiating from one another into these modes that are so conspicuous for their lack of mutual comprehensibility but also you know and therefore for their lack of a capacity to

engage people in any kind of collective endeavor, a sense that we could all participate in something that might make life a little better or annihilation a little less imminent. and yeah to like really talk about more the internal subjective psychological realities at work here and ways that we could try to be less fractured beings and i guess where i'll start probably the the most important foundational premise here

is that individual differences are differences in thresholds for the emergence of a particular perception or behavior. And that's kind of the core. The book that I wrote really utilizes that as a core way of looking at different... socio-political situations and strategies for influencing them it's this question of what intensities of what kinds of stimulus or you know conditions material conditions, circumstances people find themselves in, what intensity of a given condition will elicit a given

behavior or perception in different kinds of people and so mapping different response curves across a spectrum of the intensity of some condition whether it's being threatened by with violence by somebody who has a lot of capacity for violence or being exhausted from toiling in miserable conditions day after day or whatever it is, you know, what will elicit a... an act of defensive aggression or an act of submission or

What will cause people to kind of shut down and be numb from all the exhaustion? You know, all of these different questions that people exhibit such different response thresholds with respect to.

an example and and this this kind of gets into What kind of life you have lived? I think there are people who feel much more like however convincing scientific arguments to this effect are they feel like they have always been more or less a person who has one more or less cohesive set

reasoning processes and priorities and tends to pick out the same set of variables from a situation and ignore the same sets of variables and then You know, if life puts you in situations that elicit what we might just call other selves, you can sometimes really see how... you truly do contain multitudes how there are these different people inside of you um an example that i may or may not have used on this podcast before but one that

that I think about all the time because I really don't feel like I would have intuitive insight into how intense this dynamic is were it not for this one experience is uh without going into a whole lot of detail there was exactly one time in my life where i was in a situation where there was really like a whole lot of money on the proverbial table you know where There was really like an opportunity to kind of get rich quick. And I was truly shocked.

by what i would say i experienced was not that i became this kind of person but that i was definitely observing the emergence of this person within myself who had you know and it's all this stuff that i've talked about generalizing about these kinds of people on this podcast before. This person was characterized by this extraordinary, one could perhaps say heroic, constriction of vision.

where that objective became really the only salient variable in the world, or all the other variables that were discernible or meaningful were... subordinate to it they were they were all related to the question of how do we get that fucking money you know and uh yeah it just it just gave me such a sense of what uh is actually happening in in the heads of the people who are destroying the world and um

I'm so bothered by it to this day because it is that correlation between attitudes and aptitudes where, you know, I say a heroic constriction of vision, but it was also like a heroic... level of motivation and I really saw the ways that you know if this is familiar at all if if you feel like the people who are winning are just kind of practicing exactly, you know, there's exactly one response that they have to any given situation they find themselves in and it's just blind self-assertion.

The answer to any problem is always blind self-assertion, just uncomprehending pursuit of self-interest. If that sounds at all familiar, I could really see that and see how... It could easily defeat other modes of being that are more lucid and coherent and certainly a lot more likable.

that just aren't as, I don't know, fucking ravenous, you know? And I do have like different ways of visualizing this or describing it metaphorically or semi-metaphorically. I sometimes think, well... I'll mention one that I know is out there circulating that I like okay. And that's this analogy of the self as a bus full of passengers with one driver. So there's... There's a self who is actually driving the bus, actually, you know.

operating the behavioral apparatus if you want to sound really mechanistic and alienated about it or just moving around and doing things in the world if you don't um But then everybody else on the bus is kind of observing what's happening and should the need arise could get up from a passenger seat and start driving. I like that one okay. I sometimes think of, I think of it, I call it council consciousness, where I think that, you know, the same thing, there's kind of...

There's many selves within us and I imagine them all as this kind of this like wheel of faces. They're all your face or my face when I'm thinking about myself. that are kind of inside of you and they're all talking to each other and observing what's happening with the self that is at the front but that the wheel can always spin you know that the one in front is at least somewhat listening to what all the other ones are saying.

and that the wheel can always spin so that another one becomes primary while still listening you know while still integrating the input of the others so to say this in less abstract language it's like if you are the same person when you are defending a phd thesis or saying something to somebody you're falling in love with or getting into a fight then you're doing a couple of those things badly

But when you're doing any of those things, it's like you've become this particular kind of person who really does have... a truly different way of reasoning about the world and finds different forms of stimulus salient or irrelevant and all that sometimes talks very differently moves and you know has different modes of embodiment and we we can map all this all the way down to neurophysiology and hormone levels and patterns of brain activity and all these other things uh this is

very you know this is not speculation this is very much biologically real um but you know it's kind of like in a moment of behavior it's like if if you're at a party the the guy who would come to the front if you were in a fight is is just kind of like hanging out in the back you know just sort of like watching the party happen and that's good that's definitely better than than

than not and uh but then you know it's like if you do get into a fight that guy comes to the front but the actual experience of navigating all the possible all the behavioral possibilities in that moment of violence is heavily mediated by all these other kinds of observers who are interacting with each other and uh you know and kind of being like yeah

don't don't do that though you know like like you're doing what you're doing makes sense to but but don't don't do that you know stuff like that and so there's this real question if we if we look at ourselves as people who because of the correlation between attitudes and aptitudes have failed in some really meaningful and profound way to develop the capabilities necessary to

assert a different kind of power in the world than the one that currently exists we can kind of think about the different selves we contain and the thresholds for their emergence and practices of essentially allowing us to cycle between different modes of selfhood in a more fluid and adaptive manner.

So now this ties in with the book we were talking about in the last episode, Madness and Modernism, Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought by Louis Sass.

Because I think that this process essentially involves the ability to experience... different selves within the same body as a fundamentally real phenomenon to acknowledge that that is in fact what's really happening without the uncanny sense of emotional horror that sometimes characterizes those experiences, particularly when people are experiencing some form of psychotic illness.

So what I would say is that we could place schizophrenia and related forms of psychosis on one end of a continuum and mystical experience of the variety where There's a sense of unity with something that is broader than self, but also is self. So it still has that quality of self-regarding self as self. unified but distinct overlapping selves, all that kind of stuff. So the continuum is really not the logical structure in both cases.

there's this experience of multiple selfhoods examining one another from within the same body or selfhoods that extend out into the world but still you know are kind of like peering back at the self that peers at the self that is the world and All that infinitely entangled stuff. So the continuum is not... any difference in that it's really just a continuum of the emotional and psychological valence that that experience has so in other words that can be a source of uncanny terror or

profound bliss and so lewis sass talks a lot about the uncanny terror variety of it in madness and modernism saying that for as much as schizophrenia has these extraordinary diversity of symptoms that an underlying feature of so many of them is sort of introspection consciousness reflecting on consciousness reflecting on consciousness this hyper reflexivity as he phrases it that feels very disturbing and uncomfortable

I would relate it to an experience that I may or may not have described before. Sometimes in one phase of me going more intense with the practice of meditation, every time when I would start, right within the first say 90 seconds of it i would have this moment as i was observing this uh perpetual stream of is it dialogue is it monologue but the stream of language in my in my mind and i would have this moment of thinking you know who is talking to whom here and which one

And that really could be quite frightening. As Sass says, describing this phenomenon in general. There is a potential for estrangement in every act of consciousness. To become aware of something, to know it as an object, is necessarily to become aware of its separateness, its non-identity with the knowing self that one feels oneself to be at that very instant.

to perceive something is ipso facto to cast it outward into the domain of not me that lies at the farthest reaches of the experiential universe And since this is an essential fact about consciousness, it must surely apply to self-awareness as well. To know my own self is, inevitably, to multiply or fractionate myself. It is to create a division between my knowing consciousness and my existence as a perceivable individual who interacts with others.

or subsists as a body of flesh and blood and so he talks about we touched on this in the last episode about schizophrenia Really either just maybe not existing at all or being very uncommon in non-industrialized societies, although other forms of psychosis, which are not common in industrialized societies. were very much present, or are in some cases. And he calls them more transient and socially engaged forms of psychosis, transient in the sense that they tend not to last as long.

But socially engaged in the sense that often these were forms of psychosis that were associated with becoming a prophet or something like that. would be sort of like vocational callings that would compel people to be extremely gregarious in certain ways. And so to be a prophet is to wander around saying, I know something that is true that matters to everybody. This is a shared truth. Maybe not everybody has come to see the world this way, but it's relevant to everybody.

And we should engage with this truth in some way, that there's some sense of collective participation in this truth that one is trying to promote or whatever.

And he brings a great deal of evidence to bear in support of this claim that... with industrialization becomes this new form of madness that is far more introspective that has way more of this quality of consciousness examining itself and then all the uncanny horror that that implies

uh will occur you know for instance he talks about how i i i cited other arguments in the last episode but just just to toss another one into the mix he talks about how Physical proximity to urban areas in New Guinea is... proportional to the the incidence of schizophrenia per se there's more and more of it the closer you get to the city how recent immigrants to the uk from non-industrialized societies

show rates of schizophrenia that seem to be fairly proportional to the degree of isolation they're experiencing in the neighborhoods they settle in. If they have a community of people they speak the same language as.

stuff like this what what he what he describes as a proportionality to the extent of social defeat they're experiencing which obviously is a salient way of characterizing it for our purposes And so this stuff is complex and I might not totally succeed here in conveying what I'm trying to convey or being... completely convincing that what I'm trying to convey is real but a thing that I want to note is that again

acknowledging that we're talking about things that happen in the academy because they are diagnostic of what is happening in the broader society. But for as much as what we are calling the literary experiments tendency within the academy, loves to talk about reductionism, and that's kind of their dirty word that they use to dismiss any kind of physical science explanations of pretty much anything, at least if it involves human behavior.

And how it is pretty easy and how we've kind of done some past episodes pointing out these similarities between certain technical and scientific modes of reasoning. the mode of reasoning in what we're calling the techniques, the techniques domain, um, and certain forms of psychotic illness that the literary experience experiments genre.

really is like just a different kind of manifestation of the same underlying set of tendencies so bear with me i'm going to try to do my best job here to to make that case um so to real quick because because We already did this in episodes like philosophy or schizophrenia, but I'll use a different example real quick to give some sense of what I mean when I say that there's sort of a fairly extensive literature out there.

pointing to convergences between the reductive mechanistic worldview and psychotic illness.

a whole lot of schizophrenic symptoms because of this quality of observing observation of consciousness reflecting on itself can just go in all kinds of different ways and the more The more one stares at one's own mind, the more kind of strangely alien it can become.

like the man was saying so in the book he quotes a patient saying psychic manifestations occur with the awareness of their not being mine of being alien automatic independent arriving from elsewhere right so eventually as you stare at your own mind it starts to seem foreign and that becomes uncanny and terrifying so we can juxtapose that with a quote from richard dawkins from the selfish gene a book about biology that is very you know

absolute exemplar of the Technics paradigm, in which he says, now they, referring to genes, swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots. sealed off from the outside world communicating with it by torturous indirect routes manipulating it by remote control they are in you and me They created us body and mind, and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. So that's like, you know, that's really like somewhere on a line between organisms are machines and...

Organisms are like things that have machines inside them that are manipulating them by remote control, right? Out of pettiness again, I have to acknowledge that I got here on my own, but in reading Ian McGilchrist's... the matter with things our brains our delusions in the unmaking of the world his successor to the master and his emissary the divided brain in the making of the western world which we've talked about on this podcast quite a bit this is like his enormous you know

twice the length of the master and his emissary book where he's really just going into copious detail about on the evidentiary foundations of The brain hemisphere hypothesis, the hypothesis that an imbalance in modes of perception between the two brain hemispheres has hugely, hugely influenced the world we live in. But he's also kind of breaking down. I mean, so that really struck me reading Master was, you know, how you could apply this to all these different domains of science and whatnot.

And it would be a very productive way of explaining a lot of things. That's exactly what he did. So he got here first. He also goes into a bunch of Richard Dawkins and shows exactly these parallels that I'm...

that I was just drawing out but you know whatever pettiness compels me to mention that I found it on my own and so you know this This quote from this patient of psychic manifestations feeling like they come from elsewhere is probably... is easy to relate to what is probably still one of the most famous kind of like diagnostic case studies in the schizophrenic literature uh schizophrenia literature which um

is about a patient describing and drawing something they call the influencing machine. But same thing, it's this sense of the self as... somehow foreign or alien or alienated and being moved around or shaped or influenced by some external thing in this way that you know again this is kind of about emotional valence because obviously we are in fact interacting with external forces but in a normal integrated participatory experience of reality we have this

sense of self and sense of world and we're not feeling a breakdown between the two in a way that feels terrifying but then when we're in the mystical experience we are experiencing a breakdown between self and world but it's just awesome, right? That's the thing I was getting at. Okay, and so that kind of establishes this idea. Again, this is something, this really is kind of complex.

If all of this, if I don't totally, totally nail this and you're like, did that entirely make sense? The answer may or may not be yes. I just, I'm... gonna just do my best but so now we've kind of established um for those who hadn't listened to relevant past episodes that there is this kind of robust literature comparing the uh mechanistic worldview to forms of psychosis. But what I want to try to establish is that techniques and literary experiments are both...

different manifestations of the same underlying dynamics. So I'll read a couple, I'll read somewhat extensively from SAS here. This is from a section in the introduction called Dehumanization.

or the disappearance of the active self the development in the twentieth century of what has seemed a higher sophistication about human consciousness has been accompanied oddly enough, by a certain fragmentation, passivization, and sense of depletion, by a loss of the self's sense of unity, capacity for effective or voluntary action, or even And then he's going to describe these two different variants that I think correspond, broadly speaking, to...

literary experiments and techniques respectively. One variant of this tendency might be termed an impersonal subjectivism or a subjectivity without a subject. In this form of dehumanization, common in novels by Ford, Maddox Ford, Virginia Woolf, and Natalie Sarate, among others, A fragmentation from within effaces reality while rendering the self a mere occasion for the bustle of independent subjective events, sensations, perceptions, memories, and the life.

The overwhelming vividness, diversity, and independence of this experiential swarm fragment the self, obliterating its distinctive features, the sense of unity and control. And so just quickly before we move on with a whole lot more of this, you know, fairly dense language, what I'm relating that to is the literary experiments tendency, which is.

wrought such absolute havoc on social movements of this kind of ceaseless introspection about the self-examining self thing where you're always asking how you know what you really know and what unconscious frames of reference you failed to inhabit and you're kind of breaking yourself apart and uh not really trusting like he says that you have

a capacity for effective or voluntary action because you're breaking everything down in this way that is both very introspective but also creates this real sense of impotence.

And then we can contrast this with something that's more externally oriented, but also tends to come with a sense of omnipotence, which I would relate to the technics mode of being. Sass says... a second variant of modernist dehumanization seems by contrast to indulge the most extreme objectivism here Human activity is observed with the coldest and most external gaze, a gaze that refuses all empathy and strips the material world of all the valences of human meaning.

Though less common than the fragmented subjectivism just mentioned, this kind of dehumanization has nevertheless held an important place throughout the 20th century. Obviously there are radical differences between derealization and unworlding, the subjectivist and objectivist variants of modernist worldhood, but there are also important affinities.

In both cases, the ego or experiential self is depleted and pacifized. Either it becomes an impotent observer of thing-like yet inner experiences, an impotent observer of thing-like yet inner experiences, of sensations, images, and the like, derealization. Or else, it is transformed into a machine-like entity placed in a world of static and neutral objects, unworlding.

In both cases the objects of human experience are reified, turned into opaque or intransitive entities that can do no more than manifest their own mere presence. When the objects in question are subjective phenomena, they seem incapable of referring to a transcendent external world. One experiences experience, as it were. When they are objective things, They seem unable to evoke or convey human significance or value. One perceives meaningless bits of matter.

again i know i mean maybe this is actually like landing and i'm just breaking it down too too much or whatever but just again to relate this rather you know rather ponderous language to what we're talking about. We can say this thing about literary experiments when the objects and questions are subjective phenomenon.

they seem incapable of referring to a transcendent external world. One experiences experience, as it were. So, you know, we're constantly introspecting without this real sense of agency or participation or meaning or connection.

when we're talking about the external world, then we're kind of going out of our way to point out how we have all this... exquisite technical knowledge here think of the passage from dawkins about gene swarming and huge colonies manipulating us by remote control we're talking about how the external world

is something we have all this exquisite sort of like technical comprehension of, but that that very comprehension negates our agency connection and meaning. You know, so... a radical divergence but this sort of like very very fundamental shared emotional psychological valence and set of implications for how these two ways of being actually make us, you know, what they're actually manifesting, where they actually come from in terms of our developmental experience and technological mass societies.

The kind of stuff that they make us good at doing, the kinds of experience they make us attend to, what they help us see or not see. And I think really the point, the best point I can make is that... they're all fragmentary in some sense. They all, none of it involves this sort of sense of participation in reality where we can bring our whole selves to bear.

And so you end up with people who are broken in one way or the other. And then to relate this back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the episode. Which way you want to be broken, how you want to be wrong, which set of tendencies within yourself you want amplified and which you want to allow to atrophy kind of depends on.

your thresholds for the emergence of different behaviors and perceptions. One self-selects into these different forms of fragmentation and then they amplify that very process of self-selection.

And so I will again quote from... my own book to kind of reiterate these points just pointing us once again our attention once again to the fact that The literary experiments mode of reasoning has come to really profoundly dominate within social movements while technics dominates within institutions of power.

So I say, Technics makes the world more simple in service of physically manipulating it. Literary experiments disregards physical action to hyperfocus on the world's complexity, contingency, and particularity.

if technix says out of the disembodied rational perfection of my model i can know everything literary experiment says owing to my ceaseless attention to perception itself i can know nothing for all their superficial divergences both technics and literary experiments are characterized by self-contained logic in service of a strangely passive kind of power

Schizophrenic delusion, along with narratives generated by technics and literary experiments, involve the free interplay of feelings of impotence and omnipotence. When technics tells us that... By mathematical modeling alone, biologists have determined that humans are robots manipulating the world by genetic remote control. We simultaneously learn of their awesome powers of comprehension.

and of their complete lack of integrated agency or selfhood we see everything including that we are mechanically subservient to an essentially alien force when literary experiments tells us that the humanly familiar is incomprehensibly exotic it is announcing its power to undermine our sense of reality but also that knowledge and meaning lie forever beyond its own grasp. We see everything wrong with what others see, and thus we also see that truth is unattainable to us.

And so again, referencing how all of these diverse worldviews and modes of reasoning, whether in schizophrenia or in the academy or in society at large, all kind of derived from this loss of a sense of connection, agency, and participation. So I'm kind of pointing out for all their superficial divergences how... These different academic tendencies can be pretty meaningfully characterized as powerful sets of tools for calling other people idiots. How they all affect to have some access to some...

secret knowledge or hidden meanings about the world that negate the possibility of participating in collective endeavors towards collectively beneficial ends. And I say, These concrete but abstract, impotent but omnipotent conclusions, for all their logical divergence, are often presented in the same tone.

that of sneering contempt for anyone who does not already understand their validity you think you know something about this world and you want to act accordingly that's just genes for particular behaviors operating outside of their evolutionary context which negates the meaning of your experience or it's just your socially constructed frame of reference

which also negates the meaning of your experience. Either way, you're an idiot for participating in life rather than stepping back from it in evaluating the secret meaning of things that only we see. sas is speaking of the convergent tendencies of schizophrenics and modern artists when he notes a distinctive combination of superiority and impotence combined with at least a hint of desperation But we could equally apply this description to techniques and literary experiments.

and superiority and impotence combined with far more than a hint of desperation are arguably the most prevailing emotional themes of social movements in their ceaseless crises endlessly reflecting on themselves endlessly critiquing the efforts and attitudes of others while doing nothing in the world. Okay, so while...

I'm emphatic that we have been essentially kind of talking about one thing here, and that is how we've become too fragmented. to both be people who understand the world and can exercise power in it. How we can think of technics as people who can exercise power but do not understand the world.

literary experiments as people who I don't know maybe sort of understand at least certain aspects of the world but certainly can't exercise any power and how there's this These forms of fracture we see in the academy are also present in the world at large, and particularly how we can map those two academic tendencies to institutional power.

whatever very limited forms of power social movements tend to exercise. So what this has all been about is this adventure that we're on of attempting to become more integrated beings. capable of more fluidly cycling between the different forms of selfhood we possess in service of uh somehow maintain you know exercising a kind of power in the world that is based on comprehending it. That's the unitary thing that all of this has been about. But admittedly, we have woven a fairly tangled web.

To get there, the world is just complex. And sometimes when we try to tell simple stories, it's essentially equivalent to saying that we're trying to tell wrong stories. but now i want to finally relate this to this question of how the experience of a multiplicity of selves within us within a given body or whatever, all kind of evaluating each other. The sensation of self-regarding self is, I think... is necessary for human cognitive evolution and for the kind of experiential maturity

we need to affect this form of integrated power I'm speaking of. And that the question becomes not how do we avoid that sometimes you know potentially quite disorienting and terrifying experience but how do we shift its emotional valence and in so with reference to that i want to return to The ritual processes or movement processes or healing processes or however one chooses to phrase it.

of shaking that I was describing in the last episode and you know I just kind of spoke about very briefly this sort of conversion experience this very singular experience in my life that I had maybe about I don't know, 10 days ago by now. A little less than that, actually. And I still feel really unclear on... how to talk about it. I've had some pretty earnest searching conversations with people who I feel know about this stuff or work in some kind of practice.

helping people go through intense experiences heal and things like that uh definitely carrying this sense of having something that i feel should belong to everybody and that i want to share And also really being kind of confused or confused, but just, you know, wanting to carefully assess how to do that because there was a sense of this being something. It could maybe make the analogy to psychedelics. It could be amazing or it could be something else. And so I'm going to just describe...

No, what I'll do is I'm going to read this little passage from... uh the book that i was reading from last time shaking medicine the healing power of ecstatic movement but a different portion in which bradford keening describes his uh his conversion or the the phase immediately after his spontaneous conversion experience mine being elicited by reading this book although there were many precursors this had been something in my life

in a less intense form for many years um but so you know he's just describing this big revelation he had where he shook for hours and

You know, all the things that happened when one does that happened. And he says, though i was extremely grateful that the sheik had come into my life and believed that it was the greatest gift i would ever receive trying to find its place in the world frustrated me where do i go to sheik in public whom can i share this with can i make a living with the sheik i felt like i had the secret to the universe but i would sound inflated or crazy if i opened my mouth and articulated the enthusiasm

I had for shaking ecstasy. Fortunately, the shake brought with it an inner voice and guiding force. If I shook and listened i would be given inner guidance you can call this enriched intuition spiritual guidance ancestral help divine teaching god's instruction channeled directions or unconscious wisdom

because it was happening to me with strong authority i didn't need a name for it in fact naming it seemed to be unnecessary and absurd And then he goes on to describe how kind of like listening to this inner voice. guided him through his pathway into the academy, becoming a researcher of these various practices in these different cultures that all are variants on this.

form of ecstatic shaking and you know how it took them to black churches and to the kalahari and to japan and all that good stuff um So one could certainly see how having a revelatory experience involving an inner voice and that inner voice guiding your behavior and indeed your career path and all that.

Again, this is just a question of emotional valence, right? That could be beautiful and amazing, or that could be psychosis. And the difference really is kind of in how it feels and how... how your behavior manifests to others, like whether you seem lucid and coherent and integrated in some fashion to the people who are around you.

And so I'm really not ready to, or maybe it's just not necessary that I ever do. I still really don't want to talk in a ton of detail about what happened to me. It also just feels kind of ponderous because... as is the case with revelatory mystical experiences it was everything right you know it was just it was all of it it was the love and the rage and the pain and the everything um

But there were a few really unique aspects of it. I guess I will go ahead and just describe three things that happened to me that I had never experienced before. Just in like real... fleeting detail the last of which really relates to this kind of like sense of a multiplicity of selves or whatever um so what i briefly touched on in the last episode is that I had never felt as unafraid as I did in that experience. And there really is some radical difference in how I'm experiencing the world.

Pretty familiar to a lot of people, either from their own experience or from descriptions of trauma, but there was always a sense of experiential distance that I had that I was very aware of.

that stems from early traumatic experience this kind of this isn't happening this isn't real that was sort of always there and if i reflected on it or tried to you know transcended in some fashion the mere sort of presence of myself in whatever environment and situation I was in would feel really threatening and overwhelming there's just something scary about

this sense of like i'm really here this is really happening and that has gone away that has gone away that went away that night and it's it's just gone um The other thing that I experienced that I never had before was that for as much as I've had many sort of... senses of extended selfhood and mystical experiences and whatnot people have you know i've i've heard endless accounts of people describing of

people experiencing this sense of universal love, of being immersed in infinite love. And I had definitely never experienced anything like that before and after the shaking proper, you know. After the sun had come up and I had been shaking for hours, there was a phase where I was very much still in it but no longer shaking, where I was just laying on my back with my arm extended to the sky, feeling immersed in this.

flow of infinite love quite quite remarkable experience but then the thing that is pertinent to what we're talking about here is that i very much very much had this kind of inner voice thing that he's describing and so a thing i'll relate it to is One of the cultures he discusses in this book that does this is the Bushmen, Kalahari hunter-gatherers. He uses the term Bushmen, and so do they. And so maybe that's just really a better way to say it. But they have this kind of...

They have an ecstatic shaking tradition that might be about as old as humanity or a little older, right? And within that tradition, not everybody does this. This is something... while everybody can shake there's only some people who go into it this intensely is i think how it works but there's this sense that people will get at some points that people that there's too much that the person is going into too

intensive of a frenzy or whatever and they'll kind of come and put their hands on him it's usually him and and sort of like help they say cool the person down they say that the person is getting too hot and they're helping cool them down um but you know sort of like calm down this

infinite vitality that's flowing through this person and there was a phase in there where my behavior was like getting pretty epileptic you know it was pretty crazy frenzy happening and then it really was like i don't know how to say it but you know it was like a voice said okay calm down and

I just did, and the thing that I'm trying to point to here is that the voice felt... really just infinitely you know exactly like exactly like he said i don't feel like i need a name for it or anything but it felt infinitely wise and mature that's really the right word it felt very very developed and very just aware of a lot a very vast benevolent maturity and wisdom those are the words and it felt quite undeniable you know it felt

good to listen to it but what i'm trying to get at here is that there was this subjective sense of it being kind of like wiser than however we want to say it wiser than me or wiser than the selves that I'm the many different selves that I'm usually manifesting like this was a vaster more integrated self that was kind of off you know giving some input or something like that so in a way it felt kind of foreign and at the same time it felt utterly

continuous with myself and that is sort of like the essence of the mystical experience is that you're you're having this sense of connection with something that has to be other um Or else it's just literally you in your body. And that can still, that doesn't feel like connection. That doesn't create that sense of participation and connection that we so desire.

So it's like a sense of connection also requires a sense of separateness. I guess that's the best way that I can put it. And that was happening in this way that just felt so... fucking good um and it was like uncanny in this way right i was like wow who's like relating it to the meditation thing like

Okay, who is talking to who and which one is me? Which one am I? And so that is kind of the thesis of the episode. Again, at some point I'll have to kind of do more on the subject of ecstatic shaking when I feel like I can, when I feel like I'm ready. That's sort of the thesis is that to become people who are both capable of understanding the world and exercising power within it, we need to be capable of fluidly navigating.

the multiple selves we contain, which means having an experience of just acknowledging the existence of all those multiple selves without freaking out.

feeling like it's horrifying and shutting down or rejecting that reality and that there are certain ways to do that where they're not any less strange but the strangeness isn't uncanny or you know the strangeness isn't terrifying um and that there are some rituals that there are probably many different ways to achieve that but that one that's really accessible

is this kind of, you know, this collective shaking thing that I'm trying to understand better and learn if I can spread it or try to spread it, and if so, how. And that obviously there are many other things that we have to do to become more integrated beings, like going shooting, unless we're already really good at that, or learning public speaking.

we're already really good at that um you know that there's all just kinds of practical sort of undertakings that relate to this broad theme of becoming more integrated but that there's a need for a sort of meta framework for navigating the experiential qualities that come with understanding how complex of entities we truly are and how many different selves our bodies do in fact contain.

We have to quit viewing man as a single psychological entity, that in fact his psychological self is a multiple self, that he has a variety of mental systems. existing in his brain. They have emotions, they have memories, they have incentives, they have destinies, and they're able to control the motor apparatus, by which I mean they're able to make movements, they're able to actually...

precipitate behaviors on the part of someone. And once those actions are completed, here comes this verbal system in to give an explanation and to propose a theory to itself to explain why these actions were carried out.