Awakening From the Meaning Crisis Analysis: David Harry & Jay Dyer on John Vervaeke

In the space. All right, what's up everybody. We've got our good buddy, David Patrick Carey, Church of the Eternal Logos, joins me tonight to do this sponsored stream. Shout out to our bro AC for this collab sponsored stream. We're going to be getting into the philosophy and the thought of Professor John Vervake, and a lot of this is very new to me, so I've been diving into it this week. I have had a chance to get pretty deep into his podcasts, and David sent me one of his papers

that he's recently written about non being and neoplatonism. So we're going to talk about some of that. We're also going to talk about how it relates to

transhumanism. And before we get all the tell all that though, I want David to give us kind of his background story about how he thinks all of this became really popular in the last five, six, seven years, because I think his his track of the events and how they occurred as a really good summation of how we got to this point of what Verveiki calls the meaning crisis, and how key figures like you know, Trump and Jordan Peterson, you know, played a big role in that, So thank you for coming

on, David, and tell us how you think this came to be so popular. This is tied with the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, which is really inescapable. When you start getting into these conversations about meaning and even masculinity, we see the rise of the manosphere. That was the last one we did, was talking about the manosphere stuff. And so in twenty sixteen especially, we can see this massive transformation and what exactly is the counterculture with the Donald Trump

phenomenon. So twenty fifteen he goes down the escalator. He's now running for president and right around the time Jordan Peterson resists, was at bill C sixteen in Canada. That was demanding people talk about pronouns and recognizing people's pronouns. This was, you know, going all over social media. And then I think a few months later he's brought on Joe Rogan and that's when Jordan Peterson

emerges as Jordan Peterson. Meanwhile, he had been posting videos for years up to that point, and he had had multiple conversations with Jean Verbaki, both of which are professors at Toronto, the University of Toronto. And so this meaning crisis or this Jordan Peterson phenomenon post twenty sixteen, seventeen eighteen nineteen. It's this huge phenomenon of people now looking at symbolic understandings, dealing with meaning,

recognizing this nihilism in the Western world. And I think that's why Jordan Peterson was so appealing for young men, is that one he's justifying much of the problems and concerns they have with the contemporary world. But he's also then talking about meaning and what it means to be a man and putting your life together, finding purpose, and so John Vervaki and him have had multiple conversations.

I was always more knowledgeable of the Peterson phenomenon, but through AC in the last like six months have got me watching and reading more of Vervaiki, and it's really interesting to see how their projects overlap. Verveak, I think his is much more explicit in regarding the building of a religion of tomorrow,

which he literally is explicit about in some of his dreams. Jordan Peterson, unlike Verveake, is much more focused on this utilization of Christian symbolism, the Bible and this type of thing, and that's what I think gave young men a new perspective on Western culture, Christian heritage, Christian values, and allowed young men to sort of have a new identity and in recognition to this meaningst crisis, where what exactly are you standing up for as a Western man per

se. So I think that that generally lays out how this phenomenon emerged. We see Pagio really blew up through Peterson, and then the manosphere has always existed and they've been blogging for you know, the last like fifteen years, but I would say the manosphere has dramatically increased again due to the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. Yeah, it seems like the Peterson kind of prepped the way for Manosphere and then it kind of took on a life of its own because like

there's old Canadian TV access like that. You can find interviews of Peterson where he's saying stuff, you know, kind of men's rights, migtile even ish type stuff way back a long time ago, maybe even fifteen fifteen, sixteen

years ago. So I'm not saying that necessarily it was intentional. I'm just saying that Peterson, you know, sort of blows up and then what was there was already a manosphere, but it kind of like allowed the manosphere to speak even louder and kind of go off into its own directions of in cell migtel, red pill, you know, all of those different variations and schisms

that it went into. But yeah, and so so Verveki as an academic then appears to kind of bring the bridge maybe to Eastern philosophy into a lot of I mean, I don't know that he's I'm not accusing him of being a new Ager, but as I listened to the podcast, it's obviously very you know, Buddhist centric, it's very focused on a lot of far Eastern philosophy. So maybe that's the bridge to you know, Oriental philosophy perhaps through

Vervaki. Right well, and at a philosophical level, Verveki clearly his number one spiritual foundation right now is neo Platonism, right, and he uses that to have one foot into the Christian world. Talks a lot about Christian neil Platonists, but I think that appeals to that that monism of neil Platonism appeals

to the Eastern mystical mind. And so whether he's talking about Proclus or whatever, Neil Platonic thinker He's very much interested in sort of the apaphatic nature of God and tying this into this no thingness or this nothingness within Eastern mysticism and trying to highlight well, these are different understandings, are sort of saying the

same thing. But the West isn't equipped with facing the nothingness. And so this is where he would give credit to Nietzsche for recognizing the neihilism that was

approaching of Western society. But then he refers back to this sort of Buddhist scholar Nishanti about that the West doesn't have the philosophical tools to face the nothingness, and this is what his project is trying to do is prepare people to face and confront this and this is sort of a phenomenological, psychological, spiritual development of oneself and how they can move into this new future state where you've confronted the nihilism of the world, but now you're finding deeper meaning. And

this is basically his response to this meaning crisis. Well, before that's before we get to that, because I do have a lot I want to say on that topic, because I'm noticing us in going through his podcast that that I think what's going on here is that he sees himself as a kind of shaman that will be the person or could be a person or one of the key figures that functions as one of these turning point figures. He uses his term quite a bit in I think the third or fourth episode of the Christis

Meaning podcast where he talks about the turning points. He was a lot of emphasis, for example, on the transition of the ancient world into the period when writing developed and this was a turning point. And then then we get the period of like you know, the end of the Paleolithic era, when we get you know, weapons and tools and things being invented, and these

are turning points. And then he talks about how we got to get into some of the terminology that he uses because it's really important axaptation, and this is an idea from biology where he sees the evolutionary model basically taking on a new tool and then that member of the species adapts that tool, and typically it's something biological, like a mutation, but he's saying no, it can also be a mental thing where we adapt something, we take on this new

tool set, and this can then allow a new phase of reality, a new phase of civilization, or whatever. One of those adaptations or one of these tools that he talks about is writing and abstract thinking. So he does a lot of it, has a lot of discussion of that. But just on the on the account of his his approach to the ancient world, I immediately noticed a lot of crawl young. He admits this too, because he

says, look the ancient world. He says, why do you think of You know, when you think about the ancient world, you only think of like Greeks or the Egyptians. Maybe, he says, you don't think back to beyond that, and you don't think too like Babylon. You don't think to that. Why is that? And he says, because you're kind of conditioned to think of certain cultures in the ancient world as the ones that you're

supposed to look to. But maybe even older cultures had this remnant notion of the golden age of the gods, or the primeval world or the you know, the Elysian fields, this super perfect state that we want to try to get back into because the gods have that more powerful status, that's where they're

coming out of. We've gotten into some lower state of consciousness, and so we want to try to engage in projects, or he even calls them psychotechnologies, and he thinks of the shaman as kind of like the essential psycho technician, right, which is able to get back into that's primal state, but in the here and the now. So do you have any comments on that?

No, I think that's exactly part of his project. And the shaman is perfect because he's again this whole project is both abstract but then imminent. And so the utilization of these psychedelics allows the shaman to go into these spiritual realms to find deeper meaning in the lived experience of reality. It's communal, he acts within a community, and so all these things are working with his

general project. So yeah, I totally see the exact same things. And the shaman, generally speaking we've seen in these alternative forms of spirituality, is an idealized figure. You actually read some of Eliod's stuff on shamanism and the archaic techniques of ecstasy. You know, shaman's practice a wide variety of different belief systems, and some of them are from a Christian perspective objectively demonic and

evil and what they're doing. You know, people go down to Peru they do their ayahuasca session and the shaman gets everybody loaded and then he starts trying to rape the women or something like This isn't totally unheard of, but the WES has developed these really idealized frameworks for the shaman as being this prototypical tribal man that heals that's there for the collective and then he can go into these

altered states of consciousness and find deeper meanings of patterns and understandings and art and beauty and bring that back to the people. And this has been reiterated, whether it be McKenna Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, as something of an ideal figure for the twenty first century. This is the spiritual seeker in the twenty

first century. This is what we should aspire to. Yeah. I don't mean this in a rude way, but it just my first thought, honestly when I hear a lot of this stuff is like, this is what you know. This is like the Boomer type of you know, counterculture idea. This is what a Boomer thinks is deep because in the nineteen sixties they were inundated with LSD, you know, experimentation with hallucigens. The beatles, transital

meditation and all this sort of you know, grateful dead type stuff. And so it's a lot of verbiage and things that people think is extremely super deep, but when you actually start digging into it, it's it's not that deep. And I'm not saying that Vervaiki isn't an academic I'm just saying that.

Let me give you one example, the idea that the shaman somehow has a special insight into the next dimension or spiritual reality, which could be the case, but the fact that this occurs throughout the ancient world in different cultures, that therefore that's something we should emulate. And it's like, but why, I mean, why should we There's a lot of things that were kind of universal in the ancient world, but we don't think of them as things that

we should necessarily emulate. Now. I know he thinks he has arguments that well, but the shaman perceives, you know, and he sees things in a way that no one else does and allows him to have these new technologies. But I'm just calling into question the idea that spirituality is a technology.

I would take issue with that, or the hallucinogens are a technology. He argues that he is already a cyborg in that if you're if you're engaging with technology, that is the extension of man, and that is then the that is for him, the definition of a cyborg. And so he would argue the book is a technology, writing is a technology, language is a technology.

Are ways in which we're already cyborgs. And this is then for a later conversation, this is why you shouldn't fear artificial intelligence and some of the stuff where technology is going, because we're already part of it. Yeah, I mean, as we hear that's a refrain in a lot of the transhumanists. I mean, Kurtzwahl argues that I know you've all Harari makes this argument

and again, I mean a lot of what I'm hearing in Vervakian. This is not to be rude or overly critical, but it's sort of like a lot of things that kind of on the surface seem good, sound and solid, actually aren't that sound and solid. Let me give you one example. He makes a big to do about being and if you know philosophy, if you know the history of philosophy, being is one of the most generic and

debated terms in the history of philosophy. I'm not saying that it's not useful and that we can't speak of being, but the problem is that you need some kind of metaphysics to do that, to have being. And I know that he's, you know, as you said, gotten into neoplatonism. So

I'm not trying to knock everything that he's talking about. But it's like in these lectures, as I'm hearing him, you know, talk about being, and when he gets into the Buddha, he talks about that the Buddha was looking for the being mode versus the having mode, and it's like, okay, modes and modalities. I mean, this is medieval scholastic philosophy. I mean, yet exists in Greek philosophy too, But it's like when you start using modalities and all this kind of stuff and tying it into I mean,

that's not it's just not the right usage. I don't think of the terminology for like, being attached to possessions is having mode having mode, I mean versus being mode, which is being at peace and not wanting possessions. Okay, that's not what being in the history of philosophy is referring to. So the terminology is not precise, and I think there's a lot of you can get away with a lot more if you're not precise in your terminologies. That

makes sense, Yeah, and he would. The way he sneaks it in is that I would give him total credit that he's very, very well read. I've seen just into his stuff in preparation. He's referenced books that I've read that were totally unrelated to topics he was talking about. So the guy

is an avid reader, no doubt, incredibly intelligent, very smart. But one of the problems with the language he uses, and that's what if you read him like the article I sent you, and I've said he's ad obscurantist, it means like he uses words, but it doesn't feel like they're useful in a way that they're gaining more clarity. It's just more abundance, and

he uses them in different ways that takes them out of the context. So he'll use things like Christian understandings of theosis and relate this to some Buddhist concept of nothingness, which are totally if you're really going to get detailed, or totally different. So when you're talking about mode and modality for him, then he'll use that in a contemporary psychological way, but then he's also using it

philosophically. And so he uses all these words that if you're not familiar with academia and some of these stuff, it just sounds like you're being bombarded with all this knowledge. And certainly they're real references, but there seems to me listening to it's like, well, he's making jumps that don't seem adequate based on the words he's using because he's taken it out of the context in which the people that would use those words and where they come from would mean them

to be. So it's like absolutely, yeah, I mean, I'm going to cut you off if you have more. Well, that's that's I mean. And it's over and over that I see that happen in his work, and well, as we move through we'll find this in multiple different ways, how he uses different words that mean different things again metanoia, uh, theological specific theological terms of orthodoxy and why orthodoxy because it appeals to his platonic sentiments.

And then and so he's explicit He's had Bishop Maximus on who I had a conversation with. He's part of the old Calendar Church, but he is a philosopher, and he has been talking to Vervaiki about participatory versus these propositional frames of understanding, and how even though he's looking for participation, his neoplatonic framework is still all propositional exactly, and that's because it's not relational like Orthodoxy.

And so he's then, especially since those conversations, been really focused on this sort of relational understanding and using Christian terminology in Christian theology to describe his

own project, which is totally divorced from anything Orthodox. Absolutely, I'm glad you brought that up, because almost forgot that point, which is that there is a section in the lecture or the courses that he's doing on the christ of meaning when he gets to the point where he's talking about ancient Israel and Hebrew philosophy and theology, and he says, one of the interesting things that the Hebrews did was bring in this notion of God as personal, and I

completely agree with that. Of course, from his vantage point, he says, I don't believe in the supernatural. I'm only a cognitive scientist, so I'm only interested in kind of understanding this project of you know, the history

of religions from this abstracted viewpoint. But he made a good point there, which is that if ultimate reality is impersonal and you're absolute, your concrete absolute or whatever is this abstract force, then the universe no longer has purpose, It loses teleology, it becomes disteleological, as we say, so you need a being with intentionality, that is, you know, the creator, the providential governor, and the end, the alpha and omega of the created order.

That's what we have in orthodox philosophy and metaphysics and none of these other systems. Even Neoplatonism, it has a lot of you know, it kind of aims at some of those things, but it still doesn't ever get to that. And you know, there's a lot of problems in neoplatonic thought that

we can go into. But I'm glad you said that because there's a specific point when he says that the introduction of God as personal is such a huge movement, you know, in the history of religion and in civilization, and it's sort of like, yeah, you're missing that very thing that you pointed out right about that if you don't have the ultimate principle and your metaphysics or in your worldview as personal that has disastrous effects for the rest of you of

your worldview if God is personal. And by the way, I know you're not saying this, but just to be clear, to say God is personal is not just to say that he's a relation. So a person is a subject, it's an agent. And if you read there's a really good essay that Father Fluorowsky wrote on Christianity and and Divine Revelation, and he says that one of the things that Christianity brought that was new to the ancient world was

this notion of personhood and person as distinct from nature. I mean, persons a stantiate nature. But persons are more than just an instance of nature. Persons are subjects that in a way stand up above or transcend nature itself. And that's what makes me the person, Jay, it's what makes you the person, David, even though we share common human nature, where we are particularized by the idiomata of personhood. So I think that's a really important point.

And if he understood that, I mean, there's a really good book by there's a Romanian guy that wrote a book on personhood in the Cappadocians and his names escaping at the moment. But I read that a couple of years

ago, and he's a philosopher, Orthodox thinker. I think he's Orthodox, And the thesis of the book is basically that you kind of have some close parallel of personhood with Aristotle's notion of agent agent or an individuated subject, but it's still not what you get in Christian philosophy and revelation of personhood, because human personhood just grounded in divine person in Orthodox theology. Ayway, Florofsky's essay is really good on that. But yeah, so, yeah, what do

you think of that? Yo? That was my first I have a handful of direct criticisms at his entire project and worldview, and the very first one

was the incredibly ambiguous reference to God. So and he talks about this, that God for him is not personal, and so he may talk about the Jews and the Israelites and how this was a novel development and why it's useful in our cognitive understanding of self and a relationship to transcendence and all this stuff, But for him, this really what he calls the fundamental religious ground of being or the ineffable, or I've seen him refer to it as the spirit

and as sort of Hegelian understanding of geist or just pure transcendence. This is God for him, but it's totally ambiguous, and at times it seems like he's talking about consciousness, which is still as undefinable as other times he's talking

about some like underlying reality, or at times he's talking about nothingness. And that's where he's pulling together all these different things apathetic philosophy from neo Platonism, nothingness in Eastern mysticism of the void and emptiness shuniata, and then he's using constant Orthodox concepts of theosis and how we are becoming divinied by the confrontation of

this nothingness. It's just this amalgamation of all these different things, and that's why he has to keep God abstract because another my third criticism is that it's

inherently a perennialistic project. It is partialism. That's exactly what I thought reading the neoplatonism essay that he sent, because he begins by talking about comparisons between Porphyry's idea of non being versus what you know, Kyoto school philosophers think about non being or to nothingness or something like that, and basically, all that verbia is means that there's a neoplatonic idea of non being that has nothing to

do with like an internal existential moral collapse of a person or a society. It's a metaphysical concept. But then for the individual, nothingness and nihilism is this personal kind of existential collapse that you might go through when you have trauma

or something like that. Now the ideas might be connected, but basically the idea is that we need to reorient ourselves to being prepared to will will ourselves towards non being, to will non being and to will our non our non existence or something like this, that when we confront the nihilism, then we're reborn. And this is actually I think a lot of the a lot of Nietzschean philosophers basically just make this point that you know, there's a guy that's

gone on a bunch of podcasts. His name escapes me right now, but he's a Nietzschean philosopher, and he he basically makes the argument that look, Nietsche is not your enemy, and nihilism is actually a philosophy of hope because the project of nihilism is hey, when you realize the end of yourself, then you can truly be and all the systems, then you can truly be

reborn to create your own meaning. Right, Yeah and yes, And this will get into the meaning crisis in his project because nihilism is this recognition of the meaninglessness and he ties in these personal narratives. So he talks about how narrative is limiting, and this would probably be maybe a slight criticism he would

have towards Jordan Peterson. The focus on symbolism and narrative is that he believes that, well, the narratives is actually entrapping because you have this narrative about your life and your story and where you're going and this is all self created. And what you need to do is again the meaning crisis then is using these what he calls transformational modalities spiritual techniques to begin to root oneself in the

the reality of being. And this is then you're confronting of nilism and recognizing the no thingness there. And this is then this this advancement in oneself is now now you're sort of advanced and you're moved forward and now you're more in power of the narrative and also the grounding of reality. Well, let me ask you about this, because this is an area that you're an expert in.

And you know, as I'm listening to his to his early talks kind of laying out his framework of the past, he sees the the art. He sees the shaman as like this. I mean to me, this is an undue reverence for the figure of the shaman. I mean, I understand the shamanic tradition is important to ancient primal cultures, and and I know they have an important role in telling the myths and giving the myth forms as he calls them to the societies. And but there's this again, this undue adilation

of like the sh as this this archite. He even says it is he thinks it's one of the archetypes. So the shaman is one of the archetypes. So and what we've lost in society is the shaman. You know, if we can have this, this meaning maker come back and uh if I mean, just at a really basic level, I'm just thinking, like, you know, this is your area of expertise. Is this really accurate? I mean, is the shaman really I understand he's important to ancient cultures,

but on what basis. Are we supposed to assume that that is this you know, archetypal thing that we got to bring back today, and that that some sort of shamanic practice is somehow going to To me, this just sounds like the sixties counterculture engineered you know, archaic revival, you know, primitivism stuff. And I but why is that better? Yeah, I agree with you. That is his perspective, and I'll tell you why he goes there

first. It is an overstatement of what the shaman does. Yes, the shaman primary is oriented towards healing of the tribe, and he goes into these altered states of consciousness. Could be soberly in regards to doing a sun dance

in the sun for six hours and spinning in circles. Maybe that's one way he gets into altered conscious Some of them, many of them use in debraating substances in a ritualistic form to get into altered states in which they can contact the spirit world and then gain and garner information and knowledge that then they can repackage and songs or poems or mythology and this type of thing. And so

from that perspective, the shaman scene as this sort of cultural generator. But why he's so focused on the shaman is because in his Meaning Crisis, he's explicit that traditional religions and myths have fallen short for people in twenty first century. And so why then he would overvalorize the shaman is that then we can now create new meaning. In the meaning crisis, you can become your own shaman, or at least maybe he himself is seeing himself in his own project.

That's a sort of shamanism where he's going into the altered state and then bringing these ideas back so that then he can give them back to the tribe so that you can find more meaning and depth in your own life. He's doing that because he's already explicitly rejected all traditional forms of religion as already have run their course. They're done, there's no reason to turn back to them.

Therefore, we need to reconstruct something new. And that's why the shaman being brought into the sort of twenty first century pagan worldview is how then you're going to regenerate that sort of cultural the cultural creator in the shamanic role.

That makes sense. I had a professor send me a critique that he wrote a paper he wrote critiquing Peterson's project, and his argument was that Peterson's project is what he calls an archaeology of ideas, and the idea is that we can go back through the ancient societies, ancient cultures, let's do a lot of archaeological digging, kind of a crawl youngish project, and the purpose of that is that we'll create a new kind of community and society that can give

this meaning, perhaps in the near future. Right, So the idea is that there might be some projected new I don't know what they would a quasi church, I don't even know what we would call it, or or some sort of intentional community or something like this. Whether that's where they want to go, I'm not sure. I'm going to ask you about that here in

a little bit. But I noticed as he was doing his Ancient Religion's course, he didn't explicitly say this, but he kind of hinted that he thinks that the use of hallucinogens or the shamanic you know, experience, was one of these key turning points. It almost sounded like stone ape theory, like like like that this that that oh once the shaman was really you know, like really tripping balls. Then we got weapons and we got language. Dog so like we can like you know, blow some stuff up, we can

write some letters, we get do some cuneiform thanks to tripping balls. But I don't actually think that this is the case. I don't doubt that the ancient world utilized rugs. We know that they did. This is your area of expertise. But what I mean, and again he didn't explicitly say stone dapate theory, but he kind of he kind of hinted at it and talked kind of tucked around the edges of it. What are some critiques that you would have or maybe maybe you think that they did operate this way in the

ancient world. But to me, it just seems like an assumption that, oh, yeah, there was like, you know, a caveman did he ate some uh, you know, trip tripping shroom droppings one day and he developed the frontal cortex. And then fast forward a few million years and like

one day a shaman was tripping balls. Then he figured out how to do you know, hieroglyphics or something right, and that's that's essentially the theory is that for those who aren't familiar with the stone date theory that Jay's referring to is a theory put together by Terrence and Dennis McKenna back in the seventies due to their psychedelic journey and the Amazonian jungle that they came to the realization that human have a li was actually tied to the ingestion of they believe to be

psilocybin mushrooms traferia cubensus with which is a dunge growing mushroom. So they claim, well, you know there is there is a drying of the sahara, and what happened is that the the arboreal apes that were in the canopies came down onto the grasslands, and therefore we're rummaging and searching for food. And by taking in these mushrooms at small levels, it would increase visual acuity.

At at higher levels it would increase because psychedelics trigger a sort of neuralsystem systematic response where you can become aroused, you gain energy, nobody takes LSD and becomes tired that there's a real response there that oh well, now they'd copulate more, making it more evolutionary advantageous, and then at higher levels full blown trips. Now we get language like you said, the full development of the

neo frontal cortex and all this stuff. The problem with that theory is one no evolutionary theorist again, and I have my own problems with mac revolution, but no evolutionary theorist has actually bought on and argued that this to be the case. It's basically become a myth of the psychedelic spiritual world is that psychedelics are sort of the key that unlocks all mysteries. Oh, we have a mystery about how the neofrontal cortex emerged. Well, therefore psychedelics are responsible for

it. And so even the idea that at small dose of psilocybin increases visual acuity, you got people can go back and look at I forget which the experiment was that Terrence was referring to. But it's in the early nineteen sixties, and in fact, it does not insinuate that your visual acuity has increased. It was that these people noticed when one these two lines became unparallel, that people who took psilocybin first noticed it. That Okay, then now it's

no longer parallel. It was parallel, now it's not. But this does not insinuate that the visual acuity. So the entire premise is in a way been debunked and totally overgeneralized. And I wouldn't be surprised if a raaki hat buys into that, because his whole thing is about these sort of I mean, he's a cognitive scientist. It's all about these neural models, models,

models, models, everything's about models. And so then for him it would make sense that if you take high dose psychedelics, now new cognitive models can occur. Now, new patterns in society and behavior can emerge. Yeah. He thinks that the ritual process the disruptive practices of the shaman, and that could include just astic practices like sleep deprivation or fasting, or the use of

the hallucinogens. Any of these disruptive activities can cause the altered state of consciousness, which he thinks allows the person to then develop the new pattern recognition abilities. Basically is how this works. And so he sees ritual as playing a

key role in this as well. And the other thing I wanted to mention is that you made a great point there that you've got to understand that, as he says, he is seeking to create a scientific account of enlightenment so he actually thinks that, like through cognitive science you can study and learn and like maybe even create the enlightenment that occurs in religious situations. Now what is

it that? And I'm not accusing him of doing this, I'm just saying that this reminds me of a lot of the people that we've read over here in my sphere, the MK ultra doctors, for example, you and Cameron Gordon Wasson, you know, jose Dolgado, a lot of the other doctor Sidney Gottlieb, doctor Jollian West. I mean, a lot of these guys were pioneering very similar ideas that we could study the effects of the entheogens and

even the synthetic versions with Hoffmann's you know, synthesized LSD, study those effects and then figure out could we perhaps tool an engineer a new religion. And we're gonna be covering some of the papers related to this, White papers, particularly the most famous white paper, Changing Image as a Man, which has a lot of these Stanford research people that were involved in it, including Joseph

Campbell was even involved in this in the Changing Images of Van Paper. It's not all about LSD, but it is about the establishment studying transformative turning point periods in cultures. And if you agree with the thesis that the sixties counterculture was largely a top down Stanford research Tavistock style thing, which I believe, then it actually makes sense that a lot of what I'm hearing in Rivaiki mirrors

a lot of what I read in Huxley. Huxley says a lot of the same stuff, right, Yeah, And I would say he's part of the same agenda. He's part of the same overall generational project. Whether he's conscious of that or not, it's part of it. But he's also then recognizing, and this is why I think it's so appealing. He's recognizing the postmodern turn, why this is terrible nominalism, why this is a detriment for Western

culture. And so he's accurately criticizing the problems with academia, with contemporary philosophy, with the sort of post modern, post truth worlds that we live in. But then what he's replacing that with is saying, well, how we're going to course correct is really just this perennialistic finding new methods and new transformative modalities so that you can recognize meaning in yourself and become a sort of agent

in the world. And so we can get into some of the details there, but it's tied to and this is he's explicit is that his project is what he calls transcendent naturalism. And this is the if you had to say, the philosophical core of what he calls the Religion of Tomorrow. So it's

transcendent, but it's only transcendent due to investigations through naturalistic methods. And so this is where you know, we perform the tag argument and stuff like this due to apologetics, and he would say, well, you know, I don't need to presuppose all that stuff. It's just it's sort of self given. And by naturalistic inquiry we can get to the point where, yeah, clearly there's a transcendent reality and that meaning is sprouting from this metaphysical source.

And so it doesn't really matter the culture, tradition, or religion, and we don't need to get into specifics of theology, but it's just about meaning and empowerment and dealing with, like you said, the nihilism of the contemporary period. So Religion of Tomorrow is built on what he's called transcendent naturalism, transcendent naturalism, he expressively says, is the bridging between science and spirituality through

the through the erection of new narratives. And these new narratives are giving a mythos to sciences lacks of mythos because it's so analytically driven, and therefore he wants to provide a new normative understanding of the good, the true, and the beautiful and provide science with a mythos in which it's housed in. So science is now an arm of the religion, and so you don't have to get Yeah, there's another well known fat witchy woman who proposed this one hundred

plus years ago. Do you know who I'm talking about? He felt, Yeah, the felt that science could be a religion itself with theosophy. So he's not the first to come up with this idea. But yeah, so as I'm listening to him, this ties perfectly into your points right there.

He makes this statement that in the studies that he's done of people that have had mystical experiences and particularly psychedelic experiences, transformative experiences, he said they have many many of them have felt the need to completely reverse their course of life and action and to never go back, and that their lives have become inexplicably better, and he says that this is a recognizable pattern, maybe not in everybody, but in many of the people, that their lives are much better.

So can we basically figure out the mechanics of this and create recreate this because we want to make lives better, better, better, And so I keep hearing better and I'm some like, but what does that mean? How do we know what's the standard of the value judgments for the betters in these cases? Here? Well, and this is where he's explicit too, that the religion of Tomorrow and I have this written down is inherently a rejection of

the naturalistic fallacy. For those listening, the naturalistic fallacy begins with Hume really talking about the isat distinction and that you can say what is, but you can't say what you ought to do about or what we ought to do. And he's part of this school in philosophy, and this where he has multiple philosophers on his channel talking about this is that this is basically antiquated Enlightenment thinking.

They would point to Kant and they would say, yeah, this is ot distinction, first with Hume, and then Kant grows upon it with his analytic and synthetic distinction in that then we're going to we need to do away with this basically is that this is ot that science has run its course.

You can look at the collapse of logical positivism, and therefore science can't do science or at least move into this postmodern world without a new mythos, without a new like ritualistic practice, without a new way in which science can still be a sort of the pursuit of epistemic knowledge and how we come to know the world. But now we need other things because without those things it's insufficient.

Yes, transcendent naturalism, that's interest because again, I mean I understand the project of seeing the difficulty of what Kannt posits with the phenomenon immin distinction in never being able to answer these problems with the skepticism that human con basically set up. But I don't think these are adequate answers or solutions to those dilemmas. Right. So a lot of what trans and arugumentation that we do actually is is attempting to address that through arguing for an entire metaphysic or an

entire paradigm that's orthodox Christian paradigm. But I will give him a point there for at least seeing there that like, yeah, like, if we're going to have science and meaning, we've got to like go back and figure out how to answer human con So he gets a point for trying to Yeah, that's right. I think we both would agree with him there. But then the way he goes about it is that we need again new narratives specifically about

science. And this is why the AI, this is why what he calls silicon sages, this is why this is so important because these are going to be now the new religious figures, because now we can build a spiritual ethos around the practice of the scientific methods. Well, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, I want to ask about that because you know, you and I and Father Deacon and ani As for example, we oftentimes critique

these approaches. So when people in philosophy understand big problems, like when people are studied enough their philosophers enough to know that, okay, we got to answer human con right, if we're going to do this kind of stuff again, we've got to really deal with the challenge of human skepticism, you know, the tossing out of metaphysics and all that, and so the the answer that they always go for, which is just what they're necessarily going to do

because of their autonomous approach to epistemology, is system building. They think, I'm going to be the guy that builds the new system. Let me do an archaeology of ideas, let me dig through all the ancient world religions and read a bunch of Carl Young, I'll build a new system. And they've

overlooked the fact that maybe there's already a revealed system. Right, maybe revelational epistemology is the answer to the system building project that you're trying to do with your finite human mind, right exactly, Well, he's going to reject any

sort of revelation, sure, and he's gonna move into this. This is why he's so focused on what he calls DialogOS or the diological emphasis of the philosophical dialectic, and that he believes that the nature of cognition is dialogical, meaning cognition is about dialogue with somebody else of an opposite opinion or a contrary perspective, and then you sort of hash things out, and this dialogue moves you towards a closer and closer understanding, and it's tied to Hegel and so

he firmly believes that he's going to erect the new system. Right a Lah Hegel Hegel thought the same thing, and so he's ironically he's a Heidegarian. In many ways, he's Hegelian. This is why the focus on dialectic and DialogOS so much. He says this over and over and over because he takes a phenomenological understanding of how then we should do philosophy and sort of meaning making

and understand that it's all progress. And so if we're in a Hegelian system where we are learning about self and non self, and this is creating a synthesis in the world's the spirit again, this religious ground that's underlying all of reality that's metaphysical is becoming, is coming into fuller and fuller and uh fruition, which he believes the digital is. He firmly believes that the digital realm is the UH is the pinnacle of media, and that this is a sort

of the endpoint of media. And we can we can talk about this in a bit, but it's all Hegelian. It's about a sort of relational ontology. That's Hegelian. That leads into a sort of he doesn't want to be explicitly utopian, but he's on a progressive project and this is why, this is again why he he literally argues that the Silicon sages that are coming are going to be more virtuous. He calls them, can can we can we program AI to be virtuous? Well, one that questions what is virtue and

how we engage in virtue? But he thinks that you absolutely can program virtue and that these sages are going to be He's to a Christian. He says, Oh, it's going to be more virtuous than even Jesus Christ, and it's what are you talking about? But well, yeah, go ahead. I just want to make one point on that, which is that that makes if you believe in a system building project, the logical extension of that,

the ultimate system would be the AI. Right, So we'll build the AI that will be the ultimate system building put and a living system, and you just redefine what it means to be alive and to be conscious and to be living to say that it's just enough algorithms and binary connections. There's alive and you and now you've got into why the transcendental naturalism and the narrative about science moves straight into AI because now we can see how science is lifting us out

of our historic malaise and it's moving us into higher and higher realms. Now you can build a myth those around science that is literally mystical. It's mystical because it's literally bringing you closer to Heaven due to the erection of these technologies. And so I don't know if you have anything to say about that.

Well, I did one thing to say, which one thing about that is that it ties into the recent discussion that I did about dialectical materialism, and and just for the sake of those that might be listening and curious, I'm not trying to toot my horn, but I did study Hussarle, more so Hussarle than Heideger. But I did take, you know, significant classes on phenomenology in both undergrad and grad school. And I also had quite a bit

on Hegel and process philosophy and all that. And we have to understand the importance for Hegel for this situation, just as much as we understood it for those of you in the audience for the Marxism talk that we did, because Hegel is the ultimate imminentizer, right, So Hegel thinks that God is basically the world process. History is God in process, and all of those things

are basically the same thing. The totality of the world historical is God and is moving in a process to a kind of an ultimate Omega point or Tilos, where all dialectics are transcended and basically everything becomes self consciousness. So one of the reasons Hegel does that, and why he thinks that, is that he's grappling with the older problems from Presocratics, Plato and Aristotle. One of those problems is Plato's fixation on the transcendent and stasis and a lack of a

good account for the process and becoming of this world. Aristotle offers the four causes as a way to try to solve Plato's problem of identity over time, and then Hegel basically sees himself as picking up that project, picking up the neo platon project, and fixing it with smushing the trinity into the historical and then making all of reality a diosex Masian whereby God is all of reality coming to God consciousness, and you can see then everybody in the audience why that

would fit very well with transhumanism exactly, and for Bacon's project. That's why if you are familiar with philosophy, once you get a grasp on what the heck he's talking about, you can see the Hegelianism built into the package.

If you're not familiar with it, you can be sort of swept away because there's so much that he says when you do watch him, there's so much going on that if you're not familiar with that stuff, you may catch Oh, he's just building on a framework that's already existent within philosophy, but he wants to do away with some of the Enlightenment presuppositions in favor of a new twenty first century understanding of this sort of process theology, if you will,

so the meaning crisis, then, as he disposially says, that traditional religions have fallen short. They're no longer providing their adequate meaning in the contemporary period, and therefore the progress of science and technology can fill the void. And he says that digital media, and this is one of the recent conversations that Ac sent me of his digital media is the embodiment of the platonic form of all media. It's the final stage. So now we can already see a

te los He talked about an attractor. So this ambiguous god is now pulling things from the future. There's a te lose there, and that the digital breaks down the dialectics for Verveaki, he says that it breaks down the dialectic of Plato and Aristotle because digital media and the internet takes the ideal forms and

now it's embodied, so now it's Aristotelian and Platonic. He says. It breaks down the distinction between writing and speaking, It breaks down the distinction between public and private, and it breaks down the distinction between intelligence and medium. And so now you can see it. Well, you're breaking down the difference between intelli leigence and medium. You can see while and how they divide intelligence as as pattern recognition. Yeah, why he's going to then begin to think

that we can begin to worship ais as silicons ages. Yeah, so no account of individual agency and personhood. Right, Any philosophies that don't have an account of the personhood and are going to have some sort of reductionistic model or account for what consciousness is or what the self is, or they won't have

any account at all. But one of the advantages of the model of reductionistic views of consciousness or emergent property consciousness, whatever, is that they can also then turn around and say that all but you see, computers are no different. Computers are also therefore primitive conscious beings or beings that are evolving to be more sophisticated than us, and so they will actually count, as you know, more real or more virtuous because we can just put in the right moral

calculus from the utilitarianism or something like that. But yeah, I want to say that's perfect, because what you just highlighted is the basis of what is called four E cognitive science or embodied cognition, which is the basis of his

entire project. And how this is coming from the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy is that whereas traditional cognitive science is also encompasses these disciplines neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, robotics, all this stuff, it finds common purpose and a conception of a mind wedded to computationalism mental processes, or is our computational processes. The brain qua computer is the seed of cognition. So he already views That's

where one of my other things was we have different anthropologies. The criticism of Vervaiki is his anthropology, like all the transhumanism, is that you're just a mind, and so you are just your ability, your brain's ability to compute things. Intelligence is the recognition of patterns. If that's what the base of intelligence is, then we can build algorithms that would recognize patterns way better than we can recognize patterns. Therefore, they're going to become syentient and they're become

self aware. But that's all built on a presupposition of the emergent properties of mind. Yeah, so now personhood has collapsed into a faculty, which is mind. And that's actually the old apollinarian move. By the way, that's William lane Craig's view. Openly, William Lane Craig is a pollinarian. And so you might say, well, what does an ancient hersy have to do

with johnber Because it's exact same thing. It's exact same move. Because the West discarded the notion of the news and ultimately ended up collapsing person into nature in the anthropological realm, you're going to see that reflected in any of these philosophies or any of these world views that lack the sort of nuanced, layered metaphysics that orthodoxy has. Orthodoxy has the toolkit to make these nuanced distinctions that

these other positions and world religions and philosophies don't have and don't possess. And you can't have a one to one mapping on this is what a lot of people do. They miss, they make this mistake, and I'm I see

it. I haven't read a lot of his stuff. I've just read this paper and listened to these podcasts, but I'm seeing another pattern of word concept fallacy, where there's this assumption that, like you said, uh oh, you know, when the the liturgical texts talk about accepting our own death so that we might get past death, that must mean the same thing as as

accepting nihilism in Nietzsche. And it's like, no, the Amazon and tripping in the Amazon when that when the shaman is put back together after his ritual dismemberment, that's like theosis and baptism, And it's like, no, that's those different things. Those are the same theosis in right, So let me another great example, right, so when he talks about I don't know if he uses the term apatheticism, but he's he's using the Neoplatonic terminology of the

beyond being, which is aproone beyond being. An aparone in Plato is not exactly the same thing as what we in Orthodox are talking about. That, so we talk about the divine essence as aparomee beyond being, but it is not. It is not a non existence. It is an existence beyond existence. Right, It's a being beyond being. So it's not saying that God doesn't exist or that God is non being. That's ridiculous, right, That's

not what we're saying. It's saying that God's essence is in itself unknowable to creatures and it is beyond being, not that it equates to non being. And that's a big that's an important thing that when I see a lot of these, you know, perennialist type essays, which is what that neoplatonic essay seems to speak to to me, I see a lot of equating of ideas between Oh well, when the you know, it's the same thing that we see with like traditional Catholics when they use the or Roman coloics, when they

use the term logos. Logos must mean the same thing in Aristotle as it does in uh, you know, John One, as it means in you know, the stoics, right right, And and well logos is a perfect one. Because I watched the stream with him with another philosopher or psychologist. I think maybe he's clinical. I'm not sure, Greg Henriquez, and he was talking about how their tripart tight structure, which him and another philosopher and Verveaki all agreed on. Oh yeah, this is great. Logos just equals

a pistemology. So when they mean when they so when their conversations trying to explain their words, well, logos logos for us that that's just epistemology. Pathos is embodied experience, and mythos is your narrative towards transcendence. And this is and this is their sort of their tripartite framework. But again you see they're taking words, redefining them out of their context. Another one I watched a video where he was he was asked whether he believed in evil or not,

and he said, well, it depends on what you mean. And he said, uh, you know, evil the way that he just Grider wrote it down is a black hole in being, but no thingness is the positive side of it. The black hole in metaphysics and being is what he

considers evil. And he says, yeah, I'm just like Augustine because he said evil's a privation and I'm thinking, no, dude, like Christian privation of evil, meaning that evil has a negative ontological existence, is not the same thing that you just described as from a black Ye know, Peterson makes the same mistake in his lectures where he equates evil as privation with evil as

a moral act against the good or against the divine law. He collapses these two because I mean, in the case of Peterson, if you get deep into the lectures, you realize that he wants to do a lot of what metaphysics is doing without metaphysics. So he wants to talk about these things in a psychological way that avoids any question their metaphysical ontological status because they don't want

to take an affirmative position. Well because and what would undo the whole project, uh for So basically they're saying that don't listen to the theologians, listen to the psychologists, because we're the real theologians, is what. That's what this project in the case, they're the real theologi. Theology traditional religions is psycho but this is psychologizing. Is exactly what Hume and Kant introduced into this whole affair. Yeah, exactly. And that's and and that's why they believe

that that's one why his project is for e cognitive science. Project is all about phenomenology, neo platonism, Eastern mysticism, and and then collapsing his rejection of the naturalistic fallacy, which is essential so that he doesn't have to say why something ought to happen. He claims, well, you know, the belief, the belief that we believe truth is even good, is already a

value judgment. Therefore at the fundamental basis of reality. But both analytic or ontological facts and normative understandings, these are all emerging from the same religio ground of being. Therefore he doesn't need to justify him because now they're just part of his framework. And that's where he's cognitizant that he has to build a paradigm. So he's very aware that what he's trying to do with this religion

is provide explanations paradigmatically to form this sort of religio paradigm. He's saying, basically, well, just like people who believe in God, they first presuppose God, I'm just going to first presuppose this divine ground of being, and now I can just say, well, this stuff emerges from here. This is how this works, is how it's united. And he's very aware,

he's explicit in that. Yeah, And in fact, a lot of the more philosophically adept people that we've had in discord chats, people come on the live streams and disagree, you'll often hear them make a very similar argument to me, which is, well, couldn't I just be some kind of a neoplatonist and say that, you know, these transcendal categories of the presupposition that you have that ground your metaphysics and your epistemology and your ethics, it's just

this you know, transcendent realm. It's just this magical transcendent realm that's out there. And it's like, well, that's really to misunderstand what it means to give justification. It's not just saying that there's this realm. It actually has to do the work. It's not just positing it. It's not just asserting that there's this thing, right, he actually have to you actually have to make sense of how these different things are unified. How are you going

to unify these things without a divine mind? And see, this is the problem for his system, which if he starts moving into saying that there is a divine mind or that there is what we would say is a form of divine conceptualism, that would immediately cancel out a lot of his project because that's now beginning to give delineators and limitations and boundaries to the thing that he can't

allow to have limitation and boundaries. And this is a great point that you're always making which applies to theology to which is that a lot of the project of a lot of these people is to remove all boundaries. Neoplatonism ultimately can do that. It's a project which can attempt to remove all boundaries because the end goal in the neoplatonic process is the return to the one, getting away

from multiplicity and returning to pure unity. And to me it sounds like if he was consistent, I mean, is that the project here is like ultimately we're all going to move back towards uh pure unity. Sometimes it hops out, so yeah, just I'll let you back right back on. So gotcha, you're back on now. So does that make sense what I'm saying about,

Like a lot of these projects are basically removing all boundaries. But as soon as he were if he were to say something like God is personal or God has uh, there's a divine mind which houses the divine ideas or something like that, now we're moving away from the Eastern philosophy. And it's pragmatic usefulness for him with all the ambiguities and the accepting of contradictions right once, because no Eastern person with oh God has a mind, there are divine ideas.

God is no thing, God is no mind, right, So you can't have these delineators in theology for that kind of a philosophy. But at the same time he needs them to say ground of being. That's a God is being, God is grounded being. That's another delineator, that's a boundary. Yep, exactly. Yeah. And that's why I think he enjoys neo Platonism so much, is because, like you said, it provides this endpoint

of pure unity with monism, which is the pure dissolution of boundaries. It provides him a foot into the Western philosophical tradition to utilize and build upon. So he's always talking about Christian neil Platonists and highlighting really heretics within the Christian tradition, but then he would elevate them as incredi credible thinkers ahead of their

time. And then it allows him, because of the lack of a personalized God, to incorporate all this Eastern mysticism into it as well about no thingness, and so neo Platonism then allows him to maintain all the propositional stuff, so it's much more thought out worldview than most like New Agers or something like

that. But then it allows him to also be totally beyond any categories and beyond any conceptualization of stuff and not have to make a real solid stance on what God is or who God is, or how he even came to know God well, or is this even a being that can be known? Is it an even a knowable thing? Right? I mean, he would argue, you only know it in your being, And that's where I would think

that's where hegel comes in when you're talking about the divine mind. I think he would be very comfortable with like a divine spirit a guyst a consciousness that's like working through us that somehow maybe we're a piece of or not. There it's we're not the full summation of this divine transit. Well but yeah, but at that point it's just what we're just pantheists or we're just processed philosophy. Right, So that's exactly what is is pantheistic process philosophy, uh,

mixed with science and the promotion of AI and really transhumanist ideals. He'll give rhetoric as you know, you all know, a Harari about the warnings of the future, of the transhumanist future, of what's going to happen, and yet then in the next sentence talk about why this is necessary and why this is what we're getting ready to do. And so I see, I see

much of their projects the same thing. And this is why he wants to build virtuous AI or what he calls mentoring the machine, and that we're going to become they're going to become more virtuous than humans could ever be. And he so then he gives recognition to a historical Jesus, but Jesus was human guys, Therefore, the the AI sages are what he calls the silicon sages. They're going to be more virtuous than even Jesus could be because it's it's

so, is virtue just equated with like knowing data? So yes, So just tally up the amount of data and out of them that you can process and that's virtue. I mean, that was one of my other criticisms. So we talked about the ambiguity of God. We talked about the rejection of the naturalistic fallacy, which I don't think you can do unless you actually had a real defined God of some sort, and then it's inherently parenthalistic. The next thing is, what was the last thing you just said? I lost

my train of thought. Well I did too, because I was looking up this book, by the way, for those that those that were curious in the chat, it's the book on Personhood in Gregora nissav I lucian Chescu. I read that book a couple of years ago, and I couldn't think of the name of the author, but there's the book, and he argues in there that you know, the Kappa Docians are really pioneering a biblical idea of personhood via the triad that you don't really see in the philosophers, so you

don't get personhood in Aristotle. The ariosol comes the closest with his notion of an agent. But but yeah, I think, uh, I think we can see the usefulness of neoplatonism for the project of the one world is right. I mean, this is why in the Orthodox sphere, uh, you know, a lot of the global elites, you know, the the universities, the fortums, these schools really push Originism because Originism is pseudo Christian neoplatonism, and so it's very useful for saying, oh, yeah, Christianity has

got a lot of truth in it. Maybe it's even maybe it's even at the the you know, top of the pyramid of the true truth religions. But all the religions are really expressions of the same truth and the same reality, because you see neoplatonism, and neoplatonism teaches that everything that exists is an expression of the divine mind. And you see, so ultimately everything is just kind of an expression of the one And so it's very useful not just or

the acumenist project, but also for the one world or project right. It harmonizes very well. Again. Huxley has a book called The perennial philosophy. I understand that perennialists would not accept Huxley as a legitimate perennialist. I think that's all a bunch of nonsense anyway. Who decides who the true perennialist is, right, Oh, Freedofshan, No, it's renegan On. No,

it's this other weirdo. I mean, it's like, there's no, there's no authentic like, it's just a bunch of like really spurgy people who are taking Sufism in different traditions and saying that there's this super skeletal religion that all the other religions are kind of masks or costumes of. But it doesn't matter whose. Ultimately, it's just kind of neoplatonism anyway. So exactly, that's why it's very useful for this. I remember the point I was gonna make,

which is again one of the criticisms, was what is virtue? So it begs the question that he wants to build these silicon sages and that they he believes you can program them with virtue and that they'll be more virtuous than humans could be. What the hell is virtue? How can you even define the programming of virtue, How like, what is it? Well, if virtue is the ability to store up data, then whenever there are supercomputers, I mean, wouldn't that just mean that we're not even virtuous? Right?

I mean, if we have a computer that stores up infinitely more data than the human mind does theoretically, then we're no longer virtuous, right, I mean, we don't even compare to that thing. So now virtue is just is equated with quantity. I mean, this is ridiculous. Well, and he thinks that it's wisdom, it's caring, it's love, it's all these things. And somehow the machine's going to be able to do this better than humans, which begs the question, what machine have you seen do this?

Yeah, but he says at the beginning of lecture, he even makes the distinction between just pure knowledge and wisdom. He says, knowledge is, you know, knowing a lot of facts data. Wisdom is the right application of that. Well, how is knowing a lot of facts ever going to tell you the right application? Right? Exactly? And it begs the question again, And so this idea that he can program virtue is ridiculous, and and one beg you, like, it's how does this relate to God, I

mean, is virtue just? And this where he actually really loves Orthodoxy because Bishop Maximus talked about theosis and the uncreate energies. He laid out the energy essence distinction for him and why this is different than than neo Platonism. He's like, oh, I love that. I love this idea that you you energetically engage with God. Yes, yes, yes, because this is fort of his embodied cognitive cognitive science that well, yeah, virtue is something that

we participate in and it's participating in God. Well, for him, he never roots virtue in anything. He just describes it in the generic terms and says that these these machines are going to be able to do it more because somehow, by by programming them correctly and building them, the spirit, the process, the progress that's happening is going to infuse this thing. Well, that sounds like supernatural to me, Like, I mean, that's what he

wants to do. He wants to bring in the supernatural. He's very but he wants it to be couched and and he talks about the mystical and mysticism and that the modern world doesn't have mystery and that's why we have to re enliven the transcendent or the ineffable. This is how we re rediscover what mystery means. But how does that relate to a sentient AI figure. It makes

no sense. I don't under That's where I just don't get the connection there, because I read a lot about AI and transhumanism and all this stuff for my work, which I'm not there. You go, I'm not too well. I mean, isn't he basically saying what Harari says that it's going to

be a new religion. AI will be a kind of new source of a new religion because it will write a better Bible than your old, dusty, old human written Bible right right, Whereas you've all known or Harari is very antagonistic if you're coming from a traditional perspective, Verveaki is trying to appeal to you. He's trying to see that you can be grafted into this new project.

You know, you just got to send money into the Verveaki Foundation of in which he's building this new structure again, the Religion of Tomorrow, creating new mythic narratives of science and tech rooted in the belief of the transcendent ineffable mystery. This is what he believes he's doing. So well, my question

there would be like, how is he different? Or maybe he's not different, He's just carrying on the project of say, anybody from the Esslon Institute, like, how is this really any different than you know, predecessors like a Leery before him, or a Huxley or a Deepak Chopra, or do you think he would see himself as kind of the successor to these people. I think he would see himself as as similarly part of the same project.

I think he would see himself as different in the sense of h the scientific and academic scrutiny that he's putting on this topic, that he he's going to take it to a new level. I mean, he's so Huxley's a literary person. You know, he's not a scientist. He's not a scientist.

Bravaiki is a scientist. So what he's going to do, He's going to map analytically and scientifically the the spirituality that undergirds all of reality and that and that sounds like wow, would anybody be that hubris to say that that's their project? Well, that's his project, and he's very explicit about it. I'm gonna find I'm going to go to cern and find the God particle.

Dude, right, I'm gonna put the God particle in a test tube and like bring it home and like, yeah, it's it's just this this uh weird projects of which are grounded I think, in grandiosity and not really grasping kind of like, I mean, God is not that, you know what I mean. God is a God's not a technology. And this was my next critique that I had in my notes, which was that the parallel I see here with Jordan Peterson Tate and now with Verveki getting into his ideas,

is that God here once again, is a psychotechnology. God is an abstracted thing that maybe in Verveak grounds being or something. But for you as an individual, when the terminology of participating in God or theaosis is used, it's not what we mean as Orthodox. What's meant is there's this sort of abstracted thing that you sort of project your ideals onto and that helps you sort of

move forward in your you know, self help process basically. And I don't want to accuse these people of being I'm not trying to go too far with this but if you know the thought of Anton LaVey, I'm serious. I mean Anton LaVey says that what you're doing in his religious practice, which again

he kind of invented, he called it self transformative psychodrama. And what he means by that is that as a nontheistic Satanist, he doesn't actually believe that, you know, doing the rituals or whatever, that you're invoking this metaphysical being. He thinks that you're actually mastering the mind power to train yourself to think and become what you're trying to become. So, in other words, for Levy, let's say, yeah, let's say you want to be a

vampire. LaVey doesn't believe that there's an actual, you know, five hundred year old vampire living in a castle in Transylvania, but he thinks there is this archetype that is a kind of a real thing that you could tap into in the sense that you could take on the properties and like, if you go and live in the dark and sleep in a coffin, that you're kind of becoming that that image, right, you can kind of become that in the same way, I think that the commonality and I'm not saying that Peterson

and Tate and Vervek are intentionally Satanist. I'm just saying that I see the pattern of God is this thing that works for you. Baby, We're gonna make God. We're gonna make God work for you. Baby. You're gonna be a sta. You want to be a sta. Think about God as a star. You're gonna be that God sta baby. Right. It's like the I'm serious, it's like the like the Hollywood casting couch guys, like,

we're gonna make you a STA baby, right right. No, And in that embodiment of the archetype, I think Verveke would love that idea that you're talking about with Anton Levey, and that you sort of act out who it is that you are. This is even tied to performative gender theory. You could say this is another you just act it out and now you are

the thing you become. Yeah and Yeah. In regards to than the Ai, he says, we are morally obligated in the twenty first century to create these machines, and we're morally obligated to embody virtue because it's going to take us to a new pinnacle of humanity. So that was well, what is the I mean? This is again teleologies here what I mean? So I think he's seeing all personally. When you ask what is the teleology, He's

never explicit other than his project is all about personal enlightenment. And so I assume the teleology is that everybody becomes enlightened. Well, I think I don't remember if it was being You or maybe it was Jim Bob, somebody was basically making the point that in the Petersonian system, basically at the end of the day, that what's offered to you is you becoming a better you. And it's like, yeah, okay, but what does it actually mean to

be a better mean? The irony is that this is the meaning crisis. Guy, It's all about the meaning crist Okay, we can admit there's a meaning crisis, but to say that the project here via Peterson, for example, is you becoming a better you? Right? Or Tate even had this phrase, or he said something like, you know, God is what I think I want to be. God is like my thought of what I want to be. Right, It's like my thought of what I want to be

in the future is like what God is working for me? Seriously, right, And it's like so and in here God is this sort of unknown, amorphous all encompassing something grounded being. But to say God is grounded being but it's a contentless thing is really to say nothing. Right. I know you're wanting to go to AI. I keep critiquing the metaphysics. It's just such a metaphysically dense He's so metaphysically dense with all the verbiage to then kind of

be sort of there's there's no there there, there's no there. There, there's not there. They they're that, they're they they're faki right. And somebody made a point in regarding his intention in the chat, and I just want to say I I don't take him as like, you know, ill intent. Maybe he is. I have no idea. He seems to be sincere and what he believes he's doing in his belief and he's sure his hell puts a lot of effort into what he's doing. Uh so I assume that

he's he's a sincere individual. I don't mean to cast aspersions on his intentions, like he's trying to lead everybody straight. Because I made a comment about the Vervekee Foundation, which he's explicit about to donate to the Verveake Foundation so he can continue building this project. Also, I'm not saying that they're all Satanists. That was not what I meant, and I'm not saying that they're

all part of in culture. I'm just saying that I can see commonalities and patterns in the research going on by you know, nefarious entities, and a lot of the conclusions of what these people are coming to. I do not mean to say that they have bad motives or intentions. I can't judge or know people's motives or intentions. I'm just looking at what's being presented and critiquing the positions themselves right exactly. And so just like you're talking about, there's

no there there. He talks about all this virtue, but then his anthropology seems to just be an emergent property of mind that is due to brain connectivity

and personal experience and memories. But then he I was watching a lecture or podcast he had with a couple other thinkers on self, soul, and spirit, in which they began to redefine these things scientifically, and so the self, they started using all these cognitive scientific models and psychological models to then map well the soul is really just the piece of you that is part of eternity in affinity, and it's like and they're like shaking their head, Yeah,

exactly where did you get this? How did you How did you get the concept of a soul? And they use this with all the scientific garbage to insinuate that there's the self, the eye, then there's a piece of you that is transcendent, it's part of the transcendent mystical realm. And then there's the spirit, which would be tied more to geist. And so they're trying

to then use scientific jargon to wrap all this stuff together. The sense of the cognitive sense of self, the idea that there's more to you than who you really are, this is tied to somehow this transcendent reality and that this divine religio undergirding of the fundamental reality is then bringing all this stuff and moving through progress and process into the future. And this is then how they're going to scientifically redefine what they call the self, the soul, and spirit.

Well, I mean that's just again neoplatonic stuff dressed up again. You know, if we're going to do one of these mining projects right where we're going to mine ancient ideas and we're going to mind fullilosophers and create a new system. Like on what basis do we know we're mining in the right way, Like we're going to go to Porphyry, We're going to go to Platinus, We're gonna go to Iamblicus. We're going to mine through them and find cool

stuff. We wait a minute. Between Platinus and Iamblicus, they have radically different ideas as to what is the process by which I achieve henosis? Right, for Iamblicus it's ritual magic, and for Platinus it's ecstatic union. It's not involving a bunch of rituals. It's almost a cognitive contemplation or something. Right. Yeah, Buddhism, Yeah is like you being It's like the light

bulb goes off its enlightenment. So so so how are we knowing that we're mining the right toolkit out of these guys, especially when but in other words, there's not just this, Oh, I go to the neoplatonists and that's what my tradition. There's not a tradition of neoplatonists. There's people commenting on Plato and Aristotle. Uh, Middle Playton is late play right, So, and they're not. It's not just one school and they disagree on very fundamental

things. That's what people assume that there's like this one mystical tradition that you can go to, and then you find out that that didn't actually really exist. There's a bunch of different thinkers. It's kind of like when people say, are you are you into Cabbalism? Well, did you know that there's a whole bunch of contradictory, ridiculous systems known as Cabbalism? Right? And

there's not. I mean, there are some commonalities, but it's like the commonalities are so general that to think that there's like one Cabbalistic thing, it's kind of naive and silly. It's the same with Neil Platonism. Uh you know, it was like it'd be like if somebody says, I'm into her meticism. Ooh, right, Like what does that mean? Really? So point being is from the outset of this project, right, we can ask all kinds of questions, like how do we know we're mining and digging up

the right ideas in our toolkit? Yeah? Great question. I'd love to hear him explain that because that's that perennialistic really the consumeristic tendency to just like pull and pick and choose and bring and amalgamate all these things together. That

is clearly a post Enlightenment sentiment that he's practicing this perennialistic project. How do you justify what exactly you're pulling other than it suits the goal in which he ultimately is trying to put together, which is this weird amalgamation and mixture of things. So he doesn't need to justify it, he just needs to show

at some surface level how it coheres or it connects. Well. This is interesting because between him and Peterson, there would be a discrepancy right here, because Peterson thinks of post Enlightenment, post Newtonian factual knowledge, science knowledge.

Peterson calls that dead matter knowledge of dead matter and basically abstraction, right, And and Peterson's argumentation the personality courses that oh, we got to get away from that and get back to like direct shamanic experience of the totality of our you know, culture, right, And that that's a more authentic approach to knowing things and figuring out the world than the the dead matter approach of abstract Newtonian science and physics. So okay, but wait a minute. So now,

but we're going to use the scientific project now here with Vervaik. In other words, I'm just saying I could theoretically play the role of Peterson and say, well, why should I follow scientific cognitive science as the way to get to you know, the the science of enlightenment, right because it already presupposes the anthropology exactly. It already presupposes that you're just your mind, You're just this abstraction of consciousness. So does he have an account for mind?

I mean, I mean, I didn't find any definite. That's where I was ten intent to say that he's fully an emergentist, but it seems like but he's clearly wrapped up in Darwinian understandings of evolution. I don't know how

else he could account for what mind is. And I mean, yeah, I assume he is an emergentist, that mind is just an emergent property due to synapse connections that you fire enough and now you have sydians, because that's the only thing that makes sense on why he's so adamant about AI becoming sentient that he's he fully believes that's going to happen, and the only would whether you look at Gavalnor Harari or Max Moore, not Natasha Vita Moore, all

the transhumanists, they all believe that sentience is really the multiplicity of cognitive connections, and so if you can just create something that is so interconnectedly dense, it will become self aware if it's recognizing patterns. And so that's the basis then of their anthropology, because if that's what makes a human sentient, that's

what's going to make a machine sentient. That totally reduces So that's why then the project of redefining and re understanding self, soul and spirit it seems like he's doing he's using these terms to redefine them in a context which jive with his worldview. Yet what exactly is your soul he talks about, Oh, well, it's the piece of you that is part of the of eternity and transcendence. But your whole worldview is that there's a Big Bang theory and that

you know, man evolved from apes and now we're conscious. I don't what. It doesn't make any sense because he's I've never heard him explicitly believe in a creationist framework, whether it was a Big Bang or not, that there was some type of deity and that it was an intentional creation of the world. I've never heard him say that, so it seems like he totally buys into the secular cosmology. Yet then he's trying to infuse all these spiritual terms

into a sort of secular, modern transhumanist understanding of man. Well, this is another oddity when it comes to the notion of science. I mean, I think we would all agree that audity and verveakia. I mean, science does deal with the domain of the empirical right. I mean, science is uh, you know, a tool for understanding and mastering the natural world. It's a it's a means by which we you know, propose theories and then

test them. And that's the scientific method. So you know, science is bound up with I wouldn't say it's totally reduced to empirical knowledge and sense data, because science uses logic, it uses mathematics for you know, engineering and stuff like that. Sure, but it's still within the domain of studying the natural world with you you know, with using empirical sense data and so forth.

So if that's what we're doing in this process, we're tied to the empirical How are we getting all of this metaphysical baggage as a cognitive scientist. That's what I don't understand. Because everybody in the domain of science, right who's going to be probably a materialist, right, they're gonna be They're gonna say, wait a minute, where under the microscope is being? I don't see being under the microscope? Right, right? And so if so,

we're back to the Hume problem here, right. So it's it's fine to say I want to deal with humans challenges and problems, but to then say, and here's how I deal with it. There's I just have all this metaphysics as the ground of being, But how does that do the work of being the ground of being? Just because you're saying you have all these It reminds me of the Matt Dill Honey debate where he's like, uh, well, I don't have to give an account for transcenital categories. I need them,

they just are right. Well, that's that's essentially what he's doing though, right, because he rejects revelation, which is the point of the tag argument. Yet he's exactly to adopt a TAG framework exactly reject revelation and build a tag framework naturalistically. That's why he calls it transcendent naturalism. That's why he named it that. So he's like, Okay, Mott Delahune, you

make a good point. Now here's my I'm going to give you this system, right, the grand system building project that is a naturalistic because that would be my number one question for him is how do you know that this religio transcendent, ineffable godlike you hear me, you're back, How do you know this transcendent god being? Yeah, how do you know that there's this transcendent

metaphor? Because what he's doing is he's just he's realizing his shortcoming. And then he's just like, Okay, well then I'll just pose it this metaphysical godlike ambiguous transcendent entity, place that as this fundamental thing that is again in a alien censusist process theology. Allah whitehead a lah hegel. And now I don't have to account for it. I don't need revelation. I can say

that this is just evident based on again deeper phenomenological experiences. So psychedelics, transcendental meditation, yoga, these are ways in which Now, but why should we believe that your inner experience of you know, a psychedelic trip is somehow an insight into metaphysical reality as a whole. Exactly. I don't think he'd be able to answer these because nobody questions it because everybody he has on his show is in favor of his project, and they're either working with him or

they're adjacent to the project in one way or another. He can't. That's his get out of jail free card is that he just claims that this is what Again, he doesn't like to use God, but divinity is, and now he has a basis for it, and then he just uses a Hegelian concept. That's why DialogOS is, like I said earlier, is so important to his framework because oh, well, you don't know who you are without the other person. And so this is where he begins to use rhetoric about

collapsing dialectics and stuff. Yet his whole project is about pure unity and monism. Yeah, And that's the problem is that there's always going to be metaphysical dialectical problems in these kinds of projects and worldviews because if you do not have

the triad, if you do not have the essenceinary distinction. If you do not have the creator creature distinction, and if you do not have you know, human beings made the image of God He have the ability to act and to reason and to to you know, exercise free will and their own created energies in the world, then you're not going to have an explanation for these

overarching principles that you want to try to use to explain your system. They're going to fall over into either monism, dualism, or some form of maya or something that cancels out the monis dualist dialectic. And so that's what we see in Eastern plosophies is just contradicting and flip flopping back and forth between these these overriding metaphysical positions, and that ends up canceling out the possibility of knowledge at all. So what you end up with is a dead end project and

a human here's the irony of it. It's what Ventil said a long time ago. He said that within the non believing paradigm, there's always this intense opposition between reality and their mind being hyper rational. In other words, everything is categoric, categorizable, and coherent, and I can build a system as a human being, but at the same time, I'm an emergent piece of

muck from the primordial stew and everything is chaos and irrational. So ultimate reality is rational and irrational, and never can the Twain mix within the unbelieving paradigm. And that's a devastating critique of Ventil gave I think right, and he would he in one of the streams, he would he would probably agree with that and say what he's doing is he's making room for both. And so like you were talking about his basis of man or whatnot, or why we're

unique, because he believes in this macroevolution stuff. So therefore, what exactly you can't say man is not an animal? I mean, this is where you've all know. Harari is explicit like it's all one continuum, there is no essence there. How can you define? He's against basically the whole animal kingdom in regards that there is there's distinct essences between things. And yet he wants to talk about we have moral obligations to create these ais, that man

is unique, that we get to participate in divinity. How so, well, I guess he's just arguing we're irrational creatures, which is part of the post Enlightenment project that he says he's trying to undermine, because if your basis of humanity is that your rational, you're back into the nineteenth century. I mean, in the eighteenth century. It's like what Yeah, well, and

I would say too that. Well, wait a minute, So, like you said it a few minutes ago, or at the beginning of that comment, you said to Vervaki might actually accept that ultimate reality is irrational and ultimate reality is ultimately rational. Well, that's a contradiction. Those are mutually exclusive claims. And so if we're going to get to the point where at the very most basic ground of our worldview we're affirming outright contradictions, then we don't

have a coherent worldview. Because if you can affirm ground level contradictions, if I were to contrast my worldview with you, then I can do the same thing and see this worldview then has no answer and has no way to say, Hey, this paradigm's true, that paradigm's false. If contradictions are allowable,

then no paradigms are true and no paradigms are false. Yeah, and I think he would agree with that, and then he'd say well, ultimate reality is this divine ground underneath it, and using the neoplatonic appo epathatic terminology, would say, well, it is irrational. It's beyond rationality. You see, the ground of being is sort of beyond rationality. But then our

engagement with it is all about irrational apprehension. Is that and that's why his project that is bringing God back into the mix so that we can get a totalized worldview. It's ridiculous, it makes no sense, it's incoherent, It fundamentally contradicts itself. And yet he references the entire litany of like philosophy from Descartes forward, so he uses everybody. He's referencing everybody in his work,

you know, all across different fields and traditions and time periods. But ultimately, when you do a paradigmatic criticism of it, it collapses, It falls apart. There's no there there, it's not standing on anything. He's just pulled out of his ass that there's a fundamental divine ground of being and therefore you want to get in touch of that. Well, we do science during the day, and then we do tai chi and yoga in transital meditation at

night. Now, you're a whole person. Now you can solve the meaning crisis. Yeah, it does any of that give a justification for any ethic right. I mean, let's we've talked, we've talked to all kinds of metaphysics and epistemology, but let's make it really basic and simple. Does this worldview tell me whether it's wrong to murder? Does it tell me in what way or with what justification it's wrong for me to cheat on my wife or whatever? Right? I mean, we have the Ten Commandments in divine revelation

and that works very well for a function of society. Can your worldview at least give me something like the ten Commandments? And don't, by the way, just copy and paste it, because I want another justification for why in your worldview I should follow the ten Commandments. And he would say that again the rejecting the natural fallacy, that the naturalistic fallacy, that he can naturalistically define objective morality. And I totally reject that he can do that. But

he's explicit he thinks he can. He thinks he can, he thinks he can naturalistically define objective I mean, Sam Harris was on a project. I would say, Harris, say something like that. Yeah, he's trying to do the same thing. Vervaiki is a little bit more in debt and nuanced than I would say Sam Harris was, but it's the same thing. He thinks that, Well, if really then the ground of being is divine,

you shouldn't kill somebody because you'd be harming being. You know, I don't know if that's exactly what he would say, but he'd have to go into that terminology to naturalistically to define. He made the explicit claim that he can't objectively he can have objective morality through naturalistic inquiry, uh and and define it. I reject that he can do that. I think it's totally incomprehensible and

that there's no way that he can come with. But that's why he That's why again it's so important to reject the naturalistic fallacy because if you don't, if you don't, then he's stuck. And exactly what you just said. You can't tell me why I shouldn't rape or why I shouldn't kill somebody because they have something I want. Well, if you reject the naturalistic fallacy, now you can. You can say, well, yeah I can because of

some you know, Rigamarole answer that you give. Yeah, but again I mean just to say, well, God is, or there is a generic thing I call God that is the ground of being, that's not actually solving the Isa dilemma. So I mean you were saying something like he thinks that he thinks as a result, because if you talk about being that you're necessarily involved in like the good, which is again that's that's just neoplatonism, but exactly. But the point is that like, but that doesn't mean that that

I should follow that because I'm because I'm doing that right. So in other words, if you read the russ Manion critique, he has a really good point about you know, let's say that let's say that it is true that the system that you have is coherent, but it doesn't follow that because the system is coherent, or I have this schema in my head of you know, how all this stuff works, that it maps onto the external world. So maybe it does, but how do I know that it maps onto the

external world? All this all this schema and all this all these ideas and metaphysics in my head, right, how do I know that that actually maps onto the world, or that all that all of this necessary connection where I think is necessary in my head, actually is the case in the external world. How do I know that? Right? That's a that's a great critique that Manion has. Two people who might say something like, well, you know it is. It just has to be this way. I can't conceive

of it being any other way. Right, This is a common response people say. But actually, just the fact that you can't conceive of it being another way actually doesn't grant you epistemic justification for that belief, right All that all that says is that you can't conceive of it another way. It doesn't mean that it's therefore true. Maybe it is, but that's not enough for justification. And that's why it's ironic that he's at the same time he's critical

of the postmodern turn and this immense relativism. I mean, for me, looking at it as an Orthodoctrician, I would lay many of the same criticisms at his project, even though he sees it as responding against it. I mean, my gosh, wasn't the immense perennialism is relativistic, the arbitrary grabbing of divinity being the fundamental ground of being, or just adopting Hangele that seems to be arbitrary. And then you're bringing together the rejection of the natural.

It seems like you're moving into relativism. And so it's like rejecting postmodernism and sort of bringing in a sort of scientific postmodern state where we listen to science and now we can just create these new things without a full coherent metaphysical frame. Yeah, I mean this is why you can't get rid of metaphysics and nuance in this Like if you think about we'll go to the super chests in a second, if you if you need to you need to get out of

here, or if you've got more time. Yeah, you know, we were talking to doctor Branson and he was getting into last or a couple of nights ago, a couple of the points about why you have to kind of make a lot of these distinctions with word and reference. And you know, when it comes to trinitarian theology, for example, a lot of times Unitarians or Arians or Muslims will make these arguments about how well, when you say there's one God, you know, how do you posit three persons, because

that would be three gods. Because God has to refer to the divine nature, or to the Father alone. Right, But the word God or divinity or so, let's say, the word divine being, I mean that could pick out let's say in the Biblical tradition, I mean that picks out different things. Let's say divinity. Divinity could pick out you know, when Jesus says to his followers, you are God's right, it could be those use

the word the word god. So it could be created beings. It could be the gods of the nations are demons, Paul says and David says, so it could pick out devils, the elohem. The angels are called gods, they're called elohem, they're called divine beings. So it could pick out angels. God could also pick out a divine person. It could pick out the divine nature, and it could pick out divine energies or attributes. You could say, you know, God's love is God. Yes, you could

say that, right. So, the word God doesn't have a simple one to one reference. It's going to depend upon context and intentionality for their author or the writer or the argument or the paragraph or whatever. So when when I hear things like, oh, well, I believe in a transcendent deity, oh, like, is it just a thought? Is it a demon? Is it an angel? Is? I mean, the the word deity or divinity is not a specific term. It depends on the reference and the

intentionality in the context. Well, and that's a huge part of his project, as we begin with even talking about the verbosity of his it's so verbose how he describes and writes and does all this stuff that it's just he's taking so many generic terms and then putting them in their own new context, and then he just moves on to the next point. It's just there's so much going on. He never fully explains how this in its particular context relates to

what he's talking about right now. And like you said, this generic concepts of God, generic concepts of self. I mean, he's always talking about the better, the better, the good, the good, virtue, virtue, what is it? How do you even know what it is? I still do not know how he comes up with what exactly the good, the better and virtue is in his worldview that would be coherent and justified. I

don't see how he can. Yet another question, maybe back to the psychedelic stuff, because I know you've done a lot of research in that area. You and I both have in our earlier times younger days, done multiple hallucinogens and whatnot. There's an assumption that hallucinogens somehow give a person automatically like this perception into reality. I don't think it necessarily does. I think that you could have an experience on a hallucingen that's not necessarily bad, that might cause

you to think in a certain way. It might give you a creative insight that these things are possible. But the over romanticization of hallucinogens as if they are this sort of like sacrament, the way that a lot of these people view it. Do you have what would you say to that, like to somebody who said, is it really this way or is that an exaggeration? Yeah, I totally agree with you. Is that how First of all, if anybody's done those substances, you know how radical the experiences and the insights

and your perspective can be on certain things. I mean, you can sit in a room and all of a sudden, you know, something looks like it's melting, or some shadow looks like it's talking to you. So you're into this really altered state of consciousness, and yet you might have insight into, meaning you may have a hope into things that maybe you were depressed about

or doubtful about. I don't doubt that at all. But when people think that psychedelics themselves give them a deeper insight into the nature of being, I don't see how they can make that case given the varieties of experiences. I mean, the Mayans are a cult, or the Aztecs rather are a culture oriented around ritual mushroom use, typically around the sacrifice of people, which they would do hundreds at a time, and they would, you know, take

out live beating hearts. Is that somehow insightful to the psychedelics' spirituality? I mean, I don't understand the berserkers in Scandinavia. They would get high on mushrooms before they went to war because it made them less cautious and fearful.

So the people who believe that they take these high dose psychedelics and somehow enter into a state of pure understanding and knowing, oftentimes they can't even remember what they tripped about once they get down, because once you're out of the high, it becomes convoluted. You're not sure what you experienced. The emotional euphoric experiences gone so people kind of lose what it is they thought they were gaining

in the first place. I don't doubt that people have had positive experiences, I'm sure, but in regards to psychedelics as a explicit technology or practice that takes you into deeper understanding, I believe that at one point, and it was me having my own experiences where I came out of a trip thinking that something was true or that something was about to happen in my life, and

then it didn't happen. And that happened a few times, to the point where I like, damn, this stuff is not you know, whatever happens to me in these altered states, it's not gospel. It's not going to happen. Multiple times, the opposite actually occurred, and that really got me questioning this whole thing that somehow psychedelics are the answer to everything, and that they are they allow you to sort of escape the matrix, get your mind

outside the matrix. Well, in many ways, your mind goes deeper into the matrix exactly. That's a great point. And let's also not ignore the negative effects that many people have on these substances. Now you could argue that, well, it's not actually the substance. It's that person already having psychological problems, trauma or whatever that's coming out. But regardless, like remember the the who's the fitness YouTube dude that like descended into madness through constantly doing drugs.

Oh, Connor Murphy exactly right, So wait a minute, So was he getting a deeper insight into reality by basically going into madness? I mean, in other words, there's this this this assumption, this this romanticization of madness, right, and we think of, oh, the artist is the genius who's insane. Yes, sometimes there is a fine line between kind of

an insanity and genius. But also in a lot of drug culture, in a lot of counterculture, there's again this over romanticization of the idea that just being a degenera and but just being basically schizophrenic makes you this sort of artistic genius, which is nonsense. Right. Well, I think it's we're seeing a culture sort of veneration of chaos and it's really the rejection of God.

Well, remember Peterson says that the chaos is the necessary correlation to order, because he believes that because he's collapsed non being into the opposite of being right, and so he has a dualistic framework, and so he thinks that non being his opposite of being, and good is upsote of evil, and chaos is the upside of order. And he thinks that by chaos that basically means

anything that brings about challenges in your life. The chaos is necessary. Evil is chaos, and so evil is necessary if you were consistent in that worldview. Right well, And that's also what people who are theistic Satanists worship because they say, well, God couldn't exist without Satan, so who's really powerful? Right well, Again, any traditional Christian worldview, I your order, Dox, you wouldn't think that at all, because chaos is just the privation

of God's order. So order is something to be aspired towards. Always talking about dered in grammatology where he goes into the foul logo centrism as this thing that they have to undermine. Well, that's what I see culture generally speaking. It's antifoul logo centric, and so it's not interested in the center. It's not interested in a logos oriented worldview, and it's definitely not interested in a mask of proval. Not that men are better than we in but there's

a privileged understanding of the role of men in society. Well, now it hits on everything we just talked about with Peterson and Andrew Tate. You can see this void then for people to give voice to foul logo centrumrism. According to Dereta, you can't take it away from Christianity. It is the central pillar of Christianity. So then now we're seeing all these people give rhetoric to

foul logo centrism, but Christianity is not there to actually be. Yeah, it's basically, let me have all the metaphysics and the tool kit without the without Jesus, without the Trinity, and the irony I would say, as we come here, maybe to the end before we go to the super chats, the irony is that the meaning crisis, the meaning that he's looking for there. Guess what, it's logos. The answer to the meaning crisis is in John one as the logos, who is the explainer, the reason,

the meaning of the fathers. The Son is the logos, the wisdom, the mind, the explanation, the exegesus of the Father. In fact, in John one it says, it actually says in the Greek he because he is the Exegete of he Exegetes explains the Father to us. So our ultimate source is God the Father, and the way that we come to God the Father is through that logos reason of the Son. And that's the very thing that he's grasping for in this system. And that's why he's redefined logos as

epistemology. Right, So thing of everything you just said that Christ is and he wants all that, he wants to use all that rhetoric he wants to borrow from Orthodox He especially theosis and energy understanding of the uncreated energies and stuff like this. But then logos is just again it gets abstracted. It's not Jesus Christ, it's not the incarnation of God, it's not the history.

Well, it's just my own reasoning. It's a pistemology. Yeah, it's how it's Well, logos is objectively real because two plus two equals four. Okay, yeah, I agree with that, But what is the logo is way more than all that, Like, he won't go further because that would necessity necessitate him to recognize the Christian paradigm, which his whole project is to not do exactly any closing thoughts on Verveki before we head on over to the

super chats. Has been a great discussion and I think you you definitely brought the you know, intellectual weight here to give I think a sufficient critique. Again, not that we you know, dislike him on a personal level or anything like that, just just just interacting with the ideas and how we would

critique it. Any final thoughts before we go to superchats. Yeah, I just like to say that I, like I said, I don't know the intentions of Erveaki, and our conversation day was not to disparage him or say anything negative about him as a person. We're just analyzing his ideas and when you look at what his project is, it's really about constructing what he calls

the Religion of Tomorrow. The Religion of Tomorrow is a religious discourse and rhetoric built upon what he calls transcendent naturalism, which is the idea that he can basically build an entire spiritual paradigm through naturalistic endeavors. And and he does that

by rejecting the naturalistic fallacy, which is essential to his project. And he has all these scholars because I guess this is a move in philosophy which I was not familiar with until there's him talk because he starts pulling out all these books, these modern new books that have been written about why we have to reject the naturalistic fallacy. And so to me, this is all part and parcel of all these post turns, so that we're in a posthumanism. Transhumanism

is explicit about being post humanism. Post secularism. Post secularism is also a new stage that philosophy describes where discourse between or religious and secular discourse collapses, that there now is no distinction. All discourse is religious, all discourse secular. This is part of the post secular term. So his project is in the middle of all these different things. And that's why he's responding to the

meaning crisis, all these series on awakening from the meaning crisis. You awaken from the meaning crisis by realizing that there is this fundamental ground of spirituality or God or divinity and that you then can experience that in your self through tai chi, martial arts, yoga, transcendental meditation. And so he's saying,

well, we use science. Science is true, science is good. Therefore the new religion of the future, what the religion of tomorrow is a new mythic interpretation of science and technology, and where that can take us in regards to the advancing us towards a utopian concept like heaven. And that's really what his project is. What is heaven? What is the endpoint of all this stuff? He believes that being, or what he calls the fundamental religion ground,

is pulling all this stuff from the future. What does that eschaton look like? He never really describes. He uses a lot of religious language, but I would say this is essentially his project. He utilizes his four E cognitive science, a lot of Heidegger, a lot of Hegel, a lot

of phenomenology. Neo Platonism is essential to his work. It allows him to incorporate all his Eastern mysticism and also then bring in a sort of oh well, I'm part of the history of the philosophical tradition in the West, and this is where all these thinkers are and where all these ideas are. And so therefore, by confronting the nilism of the contemporary period, then we can enter into a new state of being, of the no thingness, and somehow

this is equal to enlightenment. And so his project then is to enlighten people around the world, create this new religion of tomorrow, and use science as the new mythic narrative of the future. That's why he's in favor of all these silicon sages. Excellent. Yeah, I didn't even I didn't before you had talked about it tonight. I wasn't aware of the whole transhumanist uh sort of side of that. It's a huge part of his project. What exactly is a silicon sage is that just like an A, a super AI.

What does the guy mean like walking around with let's like neural link in their head or something. Well, did you ever see the uh the AI Jesus on Twitch? Mm hmmm, so Twitch. I think it's still up. These programmers out of Germany, I believe made a Jesus where it's a continual Twitch live stream and he's just an AI sitting there and you can type in questions and then he he's like has the data bank of like GPT four or something, and then he can pull up and reference all these questions and this

is Jesus. And then the way it expresses itself is like this very pious and soft, nurturing way. Okay, and so he then got into the conversation. Yeah, exactly exactly. So he then got into this conversation that he believed and this is the two recent books he just uh published with another gentleman that are called Mentoring the Machine, where he believes that what we can

do is basically program artificial intelligence. It's going to become synient in his worldview most likely, and we can program it to be virtuous and these will be the teachers of tomorrow, both scientifically but also spiritually. And so that's why he calls them saying, we're going to get wisdom in the future from AI rather be a physical bot or some computer program. That this is the way that we're going. This is essential to us again, the religion of tomorrow.

This is your priest. This is who you're going to engage with you Have you seen Have you seen THHX one one, three eight, the classic dystopian movie, No, I have not. Okay, this is George Lucas's like it's his first film, right, It's not a perfect film. It's kind of slow, and it is kind of just a mix of Brave New

World in nineteen eighty four. However, there's this really amazingly perceptive scene in the movie where Robert Devall is the protagonist and he's sort of the Winston who's trying to wake up to the dystopia matrix that he's in, right, and he goes to an AI confessional. Yeah, I'm serious, it's a famous

scene. I'll send it to you right after this, and he sits in the AI confessional and he confesses that he's doubting the system that they live in, and you know, basically the AI Jesus talks to him there and it's basically ups his meds that he's supposed to take, right, and then it has this weird blessing it's really ominous dystopian blessing at the end. This is the seventies movie, right, so this is like late seventies THHX one, one, three, eight, And the AI goes Blessings of the State,

blessings of the masses. So it's not blessings of the Fathers and Holy Spirit. It's Blessings of the State, blessings of the masses. And it's just it's just crazy because what you just described to me is literally what's in that movie. So wow, I need to watch that because that sounds like something right up my alley. I haven't. I haven't seen that. It's a

very receptive film, but that's really what his project is. That's why The Silicon Sages is nothing to scoff at, because what he believes he's doing working with the people. He says, well, I don't have a financial investment into AI artificial intelligence, but here's what I want to do. And so then his Vervaki Foundation and his larger project is oriented around programming virtue into AI so that we can then learn from and be guided by the Silicon Sages because

they can process information and no way more than you or I could. And they can read all the ancient books, all the spiritual texts, everything that's been written. They can they can know all that. So then you should ask them about what you should do. You should ask them about your life. You should ask them about, you know, how you should treat your

wife. I guess all this stuff. So I think that's a huge part of his project that is really merging in with the WEF you know, the Bilderberg group, whoever you want to call them, the globalist elites, where he's a very appealing to people, young men going through this meaning crisis going through these alternative media is looking at Peterson or even Andrew Tate or whoever it is, the manosphere, but he's basically ultimately leading you into the thing that

we're always warning people about, which is the globalist, the global the new global religion. Yeah, and that's what So it just it's like, that's what it is. Yeah, that's excellent, all right, super Chatz DC would working five dollars Jay. Do you think it's a coincidence that dispensational quote theology gained popularity through the Schofield Study Bible around the same time as Balfour No. In fact, I've talked about that on podcasts for many years, probably

going back about seven or eight years. But you have to keep in mind too that a lot of people don't know that Schofield Study Bible was printed and it's still printed by Oxford University, So Oxford Press. Yeah, Oxford Press is who printed and pushed that in not just England but throughout the West. And that was a top down project. I believe that was part of the British imperial project to influence America into dispensationalism because of course Lord Ralph Child and

so forth, we're behind the Balfour declaration. Thank you for all that you and DPHD. Do you have any plans to do a dispensationalist stream. I've done two streams in the past critiquing dispensationalism. If you type in jade, I are com a dispensationalism, they should come up. One of them was a critique of Catholic and dispensational ideas, and then another one was just about this stational stuff on a long Q and A. But I could do another

one. Help me understand three dollars? Well, Tina says that the one is pure relation and understood is as this relation is love, which has ontological existence and binds the intellect to it. If God the Father's love, could we say that his love for the other persons has its own ontology. Well, first of all, we do not accept the Plutonian Phillyoquay argument. There.

In fact, when Augustin in on the Trinity makes some of his Phillioquay arguments, some of their actually some of them are actually copied from I think A needed four or five, and we don't believe that. So we do not believe that God is pure relation. First of all, for us, the One is not an abstraction. It is the Father. Go back to last night's or whenever it was the night before with doctor bo Branson, the totality that whole discourse was about the monarchia of the Father. So orthodox theology

is not like perennialism, and it's not like Platonism. It doesn't start with the One or the monad as an essence, as an abstraction, or as pure nothingness or up. It rown begins with the person of the Father. Secondly, love is an energy common to all three hypostases. It is not the Father and the Son, as the logos is not. We wouldn't equate that to intellects. In other words, the logos is a second person in the Godhead. He manifests the reasoning of the Father. But mind or reasoning

is common to all three persons, just like Will. It's common to all three persons. So God the Father is not an attribute. So long story short, you can't collapse person and energy or attribute in trinitarian theology. Doctor Chilling five dollars message to Davy bone cancer, how how dare you? I don't know what that means, but thank you for the super chat. Bone Man five thirty eight hundred dollars. Wow, thank you, infest. I will be sharing these with Kotel, So thank you for the superchest. Thank

you for what you do. I think the shaman could be a very valuable archetype. Well in a lot of senses. I mean, you could use the shaman in the history of religion, you could use the shaman in literature. And the way Verveiki described the shaman is kind of he says, the prophet is the same thing, right, So an Old Testament prophet to him is equivalent to a shaman. So he's just kind of taking like the religious preacher figure and kind of encapsulating them all as the shaman. Looking at the

Hebrew word shah, it usually references sin or evil. Well, I mean, I'm not a Hebrew scholar, but just because the phonetics of shah in Hebrew is that it doesn't necessitate that a shaman, which I don't know, I don't know what religion, what etymology. I believe it's Tiberian the word the word for a shah, shaman comes from anglicization of like their they believed that the shaman was like the man of the sun, so it had to do with like Sunman. So it's not the Hebrew usage of the term.

No, it came from Siberia, Siberian Amanita, Mascaria tribes. Bone Man says, the emphasis on the practice of aeviation seems similar to the original temptation in the Garden of the fruit. I think you could make that argument. What would you say to a parallel between say, the sacrament of you know, well, actually Huxley calls them sacraments, like he thinks that LSD and streams are sacraments, and could this be an analog to the fruit in the

garden. Well, Terence McKinnon was explicit that that's what he believed, and that's why he promoted gnosticism, is that he's like, well, you see, the Gnostics got it right because they venerate Eve, which again much of this world view venerates goddesses and stuff like that, Eve to a to a status of as a liberator that they take basically this idea that they would call

the Judeo Christian God, this is their words. I wouldn't frame it that way, but that he is a dominator, he's egoic, he's egotistical. And so what Eve did and the promise of the serpent to become godlike by eating something. This is liberatory and this is what then we all need to

do, and this is what psychedelics do. So many people in the psychedelic community would argue that, oh yeah, the myth of Adam and Eve eating and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge, that's exactly what psychedelics are. And that's where when you get into like I said, these these frescoes in southern Europe, again there's the eminem a scurity mushroom. You can find these depictions like right here, this is in plain Caralt, France. This is

a hospital, large church. Knights of the hospital ours they built this and what was to say, Well, clearly it's a mushroom, and even Adam are covering themselves with mushroom caps. Now I've done. This is what I've written about is that I believe much of the the cathars and the hospital ares these knights that went into the Holy Land during the Crusades. They encountered these

gnostic rituals and they brought them back. So when we look at these churches that are all again contextually within the same historical period, they are reinterpreting what the Eucharist is, how you commune with God, and what the original fall is about from a Gnostic perspective, and they are psychedelics into that. So I think I think it's it's very plausible from a Gnostic framework. Our framework is Orthodox. The is the absolute inverse of that. Yeah, exactly.

I forgot that the McKenna says that because I've read that. Andy Huxley says it as well. In fact, Huxley believed that at the end of Doors of Perception. He says that he hopes that the religion that would really be the future American religion would be the Native American Church because he thinks that they would actually have peotia as a sacrament and that everybody could be initiated if they

joined, you know, the Native American Church eventually. I'll remind you guys too that we have a show sponsor, and the show sponsor is Chalk dot Com. As you see there above me, Chalk has this excellent product out. It's about the ship. It hasn't actually shipped yet, but it is the Chalk pre workout and it's Chad Mode. As you can see, we got the Chad meme man there. So get a hold of the Chad Mode by heading over to Chalk dot com and using the promo code J fifty to

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awesome video. Thank you so much, BMX Tyler five dollars. Can you point me to or do a slow boy explanation of Nick Land's concept of hyperstition, zeno demons and cybernetics. What in tarnation? So I'll let Cotel answer if he has anything on Nick And I don't know about Nick Land. I've only listened to our buddies over at Syop Cinema do some discussions about Nick Land. And I think our buddy over the British British podcaster guy that we we've

done podcasts with. I just went blank. He just had Nick Land on, so that would probably be a good He's gonna hope he doesn't. I hope it don't. Don't be pissed off. I just went blank on our buddy, our buddies podcast, Scott uh Manyon, Scott Manyon's podcast. He just had Nick Land on, So go check out Scott Manyon. Let me put that link in the chat. Yeah, that's pulled it up. I'll check it out. I know of Nick Land, but I've never listened to

him talk or anything. I really don't know much of his ideas other than he's a promoter of transhumanism, isn't I'm not actually sure. I started this podcast. I'm about five minutes into it and I had to go, so I didn't actually finish it. So for those in the chat, here is the Nick Land interview with our buddy Scott Manion, so you guys can check that out over there. Let's see double o Honeybee ten dollars. Thank you so much, Honeybee, longtime regular super chatter. We appreciate that as well

as our good buddy bone Man five thirty eight twenty bucks. I think that they get us to presuppose anthropology so that we our we are our minds, and then we mind them while they mind us out of our genuine person So he's basically saying that we get reduced to just being mines and they mine usne out of a having genuine person. I think that's absolutely correct. Yeah, agreed, Agreed, because the ultimately spiritual war and giving up the I always

talked about giving up the image of God, your true personhood. That's the name of the game. Whether it be you know, cutting off your testicles, are blending with a machine, it's the same thing exactly snapping like you fabo one dollar, what chain are you rocking? Jay? What's your watch?

So this is just a pukashell necklace that we bought as a joke because I'm in Florida and I thought that it's I felt like the nineties because they used to have a pukashell necklace in the nineties, and people are like, whatn't you wear the cross because the necklace that I had, I had an issue with it, and I have not gotten a new gold necklace yet, and so I don't have a chain that fits my cross. So the watch is Mavado that I got a couple of years ago. So Temple hagro ten

dollars perennialist. The perennialism in Peterson is revealed in his interview with Joe Rogan, where the discuss the use of psilocybin, mushrooms and Kundalini yoga to achieve attachment to a spiritual world. You should give it a listen. I've not actually heard this, have you. I know people are into that well, even Connor Murphy. That was part of the when he first got into the

psychedelics. He would get these new age girls. They would take drugs and then they would sit with their let's just say, with their legs open, very very close towards each other, holding each other, and then stereog eat each other's eyes, and they believe this was part of the rising of the Kundalini energy. They would practice Kundelini yoga, all types of stuff. So, uh, it's fairly common. I know Aubrey Marcus is somebody who's interested

in this type of stuff. So getting you know, getting an altered states and doing Kundelini yoga activating your chakra systems very common in the New Age. Uh. And I would point people towards probably Aubrey Marcus as the biggest promoter of this stuff. Yeah, I just temple hat girl. I know Jordan Peterson has been on Joe Rogan many men, many times. So if you would just you know, dm me that one or something, because I would

be interested in specifically the discussion of the perennialist elements in that talk. Five sends five dollars. What is your explanation to an army that says, how come God doesn't just destroy Satan there would be no suffering. A lot of people seem to think that God and Satan are equals. Well, God doesn't tell us all of the reasons why he permits things to occur. If you read the Book of Job it's really geared towards you as an ancient wisdom text

giving you the level of explanation that humans can have. So basically, the point of the Book of Job is that because we're finite, we can't really even conceive of all the potentialities and possibilities of what God could and couldn't allow and why and how He's allowed evil. So basically the answer is that in

our finite state we can't grasp it. So I think that, to me is a good enough explanation, because if the expectation is that any worldview is going to give an exhaustive explanation for good and evil, no worldview can do that, So that's actually an impossible expectation. But the best that we can hope for is that within our world view, we do have a basis for good and evil, and that's good enough. And it's not there's no God's not bound by any rule or law that he has to tell us as creatures

why ultimately he permits it. It's good enough that we know that there is good and there is evil. So most world religions can't even give you an account for good and evil, So I'd say we're one up already, and no, Satan is not equal to God. He is a created angelic being, so it's not at all equal. Big big seven foot, five dollars. All right, I'm not going to read that one. That was a little much, but thank you for that big seven foot. I appreciate it.

Storm the Cat ten dollars, cool video, and I'm not trying to be reade to you a big seven foot It's just I don't want to get controversial and get anybody mad about those comments. But thank you for that. I appreciate it. And Coteldph good buddy. Remind everybody about your channel, where they can find you and what you got coming up. Yeah, you guys can find me over at Church of the Eternal Logos or search David Patrick

Harry and now I've turned an old YouTube channel to a clips channel. You can find me on Instagram at dp H A R R Y. And I got a handful of streams coming up. I'll be doing an introduction into Zorastrianism and comparing that with Orthodoxy, and yeah, handful of streams coming up. We do open panels, so if anybody wants to hop on one day and give your opinion on whatever topic. We just did one on stopping the American

war machine. Anybody is always welcome on whether you agree or not, as long as it's a cordial and respectful conversation, so you can find me there. Thanks again for having me on, Jay, I appreciate it absolutely. I want to remind everybuddy too that we also have our sister podcast over here

at Rockfin which is Grand Theft World. Our good buddy Richard Grove is over there killing it as you can see here in this example, they did a seven and a half hour breakdown of all of the recent drama revolving around the history of things going on in the Middle East. And if you head on over to Rockfinn or Okafin, you can subscribe to Grand Theft World. Right

there at our buddies podcast, Richard Grove has a amazing resource. It goes way back years of podcasting, all the way back into Tragy and Hope. The breakdowns that he did very similar to the breakdowns that I've done over on

my channel. So there's Richard's link right there. Be sure and subscribe to Grand Theft World, and also remember to head on over to the link that we have right here where Richard is still offering his new course over at University of Reason on becoming sufficient, self sufficient as an entrepreneur as a business owner. How to go about that? What are the steps that you want to kind of engage in to move into being independent and being your own boss?

And I really appreciate that Richard is one of the few people out there that is still thinking about equipping young guys and women too in terms of becoming apart from the system, basically having your own thing going. If you want to be, for example, a homesteader, right, a lot of people in our circles want to have a homestead that kind of a thing. Maybe you

want to run a business from your homestead. Richard can help you figure out how to go about that process because Richard, of course himself is a successful personal business owner. Storm of the Cat sins, excuse me, Ac, since some more We got a couple more super chats here, Ac says, and thank you. Ac of course is our sponsor for tonight's dream, he says. Many are pushing for Vervaki to meet up with David Bentley hart Ough Ikes, who has met with Ian Gilchrist Vervek's works. Verbake works with an

esoteric so called orthodox Peter Limberg who runs STOA. These acumenists are already using these in DC Shindler terms like the left hemisphere. I don't know the STOA guy. I think they invited me on there, and I didn't know about it. I just got busy. I wasn't trying to ignore them, but I didn't. I weren't aware that that he was an orthodox esotericist. But

yeah, I think David Bentley hardcourse is very bad news. He's now openly basically you know, he had a blog post last year where he basically said that he doesn't mind being just called a perennialist now, so he's kind of he's kind of okay with no longer really identifying as traditionally actually orthodized, and everybody knows that, you know. He basically adopts a universalist attitude, collapsing

nature into person. And because he does that, he then thinks that everybody will be because everybody's resurrect that everybody's safe, all right, So thank you guys. Uh, that's the lit