Beautiful comment and compliment, and I fully agree! :-)

Likewise I struggled with the very technical RR episodes but these ones have been incredibly relevant

Vervaeke is one element is a series of thinkers. He does not know all of the work of the great thinkers. You have to collect many ideas from many great men. Collect, integrate, and synthesize. Forrest Landry would be another example.

The exemplification is as profound. And the substance is quite profound whew

I’m not sure this is a sufficient explanation though, as there is plenty of intercategorical things that we have different reactions to that disgust, if we have reactions at all

Vervaeke wave?

@@911garebear Yes, please!

RelevanceRealizationReligioWave! 🌊

Thank you for sharing that. Very moving.

@@johnvervaeke Thank you for the kind reply, John.

Deeply touching, thank you It reminds me this moment from Midnight Gospel - ukposts.info/have/v-deo/qnynibCrp2160Js.html It is based on this recording of Duncan and his mom talking about her coming death - ukposts.info/have/v-deo/hHeWfYmPrnmQ0YU.html

My thoughts exactly.

Recommendations for a first Lovecraft book to get into with this lecture in mind? I've never got into Lovecraft... But have been wanting to lately.

And an antonym that I think fits with this would be the Japanese aesthetic of Yugen.

Interesting! Will check that out

I’m also very familiar with McGilchrist’s work. On music, there was some discussion in the comments section (of a Vervaeke questions and answers, ?I think) and the lack of narrative structure in modern pop music. I’d be really interested to know what you make of what Dave Kilminster (guitarist for Roger Waters) has to say about the music of Pink Floyd, in the first couple of minutes of this interview ukposts.info/have/v-deo/f3thbaNreJ5l1Y0.html The interesting thing for me is that he apparently deduces the emotional content of the music from the audience reaction “like a religious experience” (a left hemisphere response?), however, I do think he does a pretty good job of emulating the nuance of Gilmour’s guitar parts.

Excellent book by McGilchrist, I'm currently reading the chapter on music and language

Jase the-ace Excellent? Try telling mau deeb that... the brain is the most complex thing in the universe ergo we can’t really infer anything of particular, or even general, significance. Or so I think the left hemisphere logic goes. 🤨mau... who? Never mind 😎 But yes, M>e is an intriguing and profound read methinks.

@@jasetheacity hi, how are you getting on with Master and emissary? There’s a fairly recent interview with McGilchrist here ukposts.info/have/v-deo/hopna4hwZ2mDkas.html

El Rilla - I love this comment, it is so rich. This reply is also available on Medium: link.medium.com/01yStH7bZZ (just because it it so long) This feels like a good comment to extend on the idea of what this series is more deeply trying to accomplish, from my perspective. As you note, when we simply rely on the cerebral notion of an idea, and fail to really delve into the depths of our participatory knowing, we risk a shallow interpretation of the world. So shallow that the word interpretation is too generous. John Searle’s “Chinese room” thought experiment comes to mind. Without a true embodied sense of the impact of the notion of, say, Justice, there is a real chance that the degree of comprehension is thin and fragile and subject to profound misrepresentation. I must admit that this exploration is so subtle that I have been deceived into thinking it was a simple question, and not fully appreciating the depths of the insight. But it goes even deeper than whether computers will ever be able to truly understand anything and participate meaningfully in consciousness. It points to the fact that the more we rely on the notions of our conceptions without a truly embodied participatory knowing the more we are stuck in a kind of chinese room and not participating in consciousness. The gift of contemplating this question in light of computer sentience and AI capability is to notice just how much we take our participatory knowing for granted. When we believe that Alpha Zero can know something real, we would be wise to recognize the limitations of what that knowing can entail. I am not claiming anything about whether AI will be able to comprehend, only to recognize how profoundly I have underestimated what it means to comprehend, and wonder in which ways will computers be able to access participatory knowing, and whether we will be able to discern how much trust of that comprehension is warranted. You’ve no doubt read of the computer vision algorithms that can be fooled by changing a trivial number of pixels, such that something that was previously correctly identified as a cat is now proclaimed to be a bowl of guacamole with 99.9% certainty, with “cat” no longer being in the top 3 guesses. This kind of misperception startles us, and becomes salient in the news reporting because of the profound capacity and weakness of AI to engage in sense making and perceptual knowing. And yet, are human beings really that much better off? Stock market bubbles and tulip madness are examples of human algorithms of abstract value going off the rails of reasonableness, as are recent electoral results (whether you go back to 2016 or 2012 in the US, or EU vs Brexit in the UK) and news cycles. The trolley car examples demonstrate biases in our purity codes deep in the structure of our participatory knowing that have strange hallucinations at the propositional level, where our gut level intuition about rightness and wrongness clearly have some odd groundings. This demonstrates more clearly why we are in a meaning crisis. I believe the way we move forward from the meaning crisis in really engaging manner is to embrace the material of this course and cognitive psychology and cognitive science to understand the gyrations and machinations of our relevance realization machinery. I believe we will continue explore the deeply forgotten foundations of our participatory knowing, and really grappling with all levels, from participatory, through perceptual, to perspectival, to propositional knowing, noting the ways in which our advances in machine knowing demonstrate the “bugs” or lack of structural integrity in our own evolutionary and collective relevance realization stack. If Lee Sodol can become a better Go player by losing to Alpha Go and re-examining his deep assumptions, perhaps there is hope for us all. But this won’t happen if we think are are approaching an error in which we get to hand the reins of control over to the algorithms. This participatory dance will require that we become more human than we’ve even been before.

Yes excellent reminder. Or eldritch. Endlessly fascinating horror.

Very much looking forward to hearing your perspective on Jung, I recall he employed Otto's concept of the numinous throughout his writings as well.

I see it nearly opposite....metaphor isn't compression, but expansion; not conservation of energy, but using it more creatively and directed. It's a type of translation between dimensions. I'd say metaphor is instead, a Compassion Algorithm, due to noticing how very literal those of low compassion, low humility, and low sense of humor tend to be. Metaphor is a beam of light shed on the darkness, a painting full of caves and a cave full of paintings. And quite often, a very important function of metaphor is to obfuscate meaning from those without eyes to see and ears to hear. Metaphor is not always meant to clarify or simplify, but to increase complexity and hidden meaning. Whatever metaphor is, it's fantastic : )

This will be my first UKposts comment, but I had to say (as somebody struggling to follow the last few lectures and draw meaningful implications from the deluge of information) thank you for this summary of the episode. It helped me understand the significance of what VV is getting at and restored my faith to not bail so late in the journey.

Yes I believe so. Great question.

Another interesting section from same article. In the context of JVs discussion on the importance of sacredness, notice use of the term "desacralise" toward the end "The importance of learning through the senses may be recognised as appropriate at very early stages of the mainstream Western curriculum, in accordance with Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development, which demotes the intuitive, practical intelligence to the infantile level of “sensorimotor intelligence”. This mode is dominant during the first two years of life, but is superseded by more powerful, abstract, intellectual ways of knowing. Thirty years ago, the sociologist Harry Gracey had lamented the fact that “children's perceptions of the world and opportunities for genuine spontaneity and creativity are being systematically eliminated from the kindergarten.” (Gracey, op. cit.) The restitution of learning through the senses was part of the reform of educational practice in the 17th century in England, based as it was on the realization that medieval scholasticism had given rise to an arid educational process based on abstract reasoning and verbatim memorisation. This was the time of the scientific revolution - the realization that truth could be found out through actual observation and experience rather than recourse to authority. What went wrong was that the notion of “experience” as the ground of truth was narrowly applied only as “experimentation”, which gave rise to the fallacy that the only reality was the observable world accessible to the senses, and the only truth was that which could be verified by measurement. Hence, the suspicion of introspection even today. By limiting science to experimentation, the balance between inward experience (the source of spiritual insight) and external observation (the basis of scientific method) was destroyed. Such balance between religious and scientific outlooks was germane to the philosophy of Roger Bacon, one of the founding fathers of empiricism, himself strongly influenced by Islamic thinkers, especially Ibn Sina. As a result of the narrowing of the notion of ‘experience’, the mind of Western man became externalised, focused only on observable and quantifiable realities. Inward experience, the source of a deeper science or wisdom, was no longer to be trusted; the capacity for contemplation, the source of spiritual insight, was neglected, and the very idea of a hidden Reality, beyond the reach of human perception, was denied (See note 52 for a discussion of the etymology of the English word understand which shows how this word originally meant ‘stand in the midst of’). The Qur’an tells us that it is a “book for those who believe in the existence of that which is beyond the reach of human perception” (2:3). Asad comments that the Arabic word al-ghayb, commonly and erroneously, translated as “the Unseen”, is used in the Qur’an to denote all those sectors or phases of reality which lie beyond the reach of human perception and cannot, therefore, be proved or disproved by scientific observation or even adequately comprised within the accepted categories of speculative thought: as, for instance, the existence of God and of a definite purpose underlying the universe, life after death, the real nature of time, the existence of spiritual forces and their inter-action, and so forth. Only a person who is convinced that the ultimate reality comprises far more than our observable environment can attain to belief in God and, thus, to a belief that life has meaning and purpose.” The rejection of inward experience as a ground of knowledge also ensured that the Book of Nature, too, was desacralised and divested of its significance, in the sense that its beautiful and majestic signs (ayat), symbols (rumuz), and similitudes (amthal) - whether in the “far horizons” or within ourselves - were no longer seen as pointing beyond themselves to the existence of a Creator who had invested everything with “due measure and proportion,” but only as phenomena referring to nothing outside their own self-sufficient laws and mechanisms. "

Thanks for the recommendation!

Viktor Frankl will help!

That movie was REALLY messed up.

Existential or psychological horror, definitely the best I agree with you man

ukposts.info/have/v-deo/iYiAf6mBjZ951Y0.html

Although I haven't yet reached John's current ongoing project "After Socrates," from what I've briefly viewed, Mr. Vervaeke is sharing the ecology of practices he engages with there which you may find relevant. I hope you are able to find what you are looking for... also, thanks for compelling me to look up the meaning of the term "eudaimonic;" I'm quite curious now if Socrates ever referred to his daimon as the "good spirit"? Nonetheless, now I have a new semantic frame for speaking of happiness and exploring the history of the term in Greece.

@@kylelaferriere4408 I'm glad I could be of help! And thanks for your reply. I hope you and yours are well.

Archetypes are not *symbols* - they are deep psychological *functions*. We represent the functions symbolically, but the symbol is never the THING in itself. It can only be a finger pointing to the moon. Never mistake the finger pointing for the thing it's pointing at.

@@yeaown8139 wouldn't that be a "sign"? (e.g. the heart John uses as an example in the video). Symbol, as I understand John, seems to be deeper and actually activating the exapted machinery of the brain.

@@yeaown8139 i deleted a response, thanks 4 ur view. When i point to the moon, my finger dissappears, always thought that was wierd

Yes I think you make a fair point. I appreciate every good faith effort to do what you propose doing. Thank you!

@@johnvervaeke Thank you too John

It's a little inflammatory to put it that way, to say the least, but you are probably right.

Thanks Lee.