August 26, 2025 • 62 mins
It seems we see the world through a somewhat warped perspective. Where everything is interconnected, we see individual elements. As a result, human beings can uniquely manipulate the physical world, which helps us evolutionarily. But, just like quantum physics applies different rules than Newtonian mechanics, we need a different way of seeing reality if we want to apprehend its wholeness, rather than its parts. These Fools touch on Iain McGilchrist’s work, “Master and Emissary,” along with Henri Bergson’s analysis of evolution and the hierarchy of matter and consciousness, and explore the possible means and implications of experiencing wholeness. Enjoy!
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Episode Transcript
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(00:14):
Howdy, Brian. How are you doing, Sir?
I'm doing well, thanks. It seems like the tides are
turning on some important frontshere.
So it's yeah, we were in a good mood most of the weekend.
Yeah, very good. Happy Independence Day.
I tell you I've been independenta while now and I appreciate it.
Yeah, and and I guess Interdependence Day is to to to
(00:39):
be defined. Or all the others.
All the others maybe? Or maybe that's what something
we aspire to. Yeah, I was thinking more that
that maybe Codependence Day is all the others.
As far as we'll get, yeah. Can't rule it out.
Yeah, yeah, I was up early this morning.
I've been to Madrid already. The the current water operator
(01:02):
that replaced me is on vacation,so I've been having those deja
vu going in and doing some testing.
All easy stuff. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no wrenches involved. Knock on wood.
Cool. But yeah, so that's kind of
cool. It's sort of nice.
It helps. It sort of vivifies the
(01:24):
experience of retirement to experience the things that I
don't have to do regularly like I did for so many years.
So that's kind of fun rather than just forgetting it
completely. Yeah, congratulate.
Yeah. But they're doing a big project
there, which was starting on when I was still there, which is
to replace the fire tank. And you know, there's all this
(01:47):
flooding in Texas now. What we had some years ago, we
had a quite a remarkable storm that came and took 10 feet of
the Arroyo out of the side whereour fire tank was.
And now they realized we got another one of those.
We don't have a fire tank so. That was outrageous.
I I want to say that was about 12 years ago.
(02:07):
Sounds right. And Isaac and I were at the at
the mine shaft. And after the worst of the rain,
we decided to brave it and try to head up the up the hill.
And there was ball lightning. There was white water in the
arroyos, like they were full, full with white water, white,
(02:30):
white caps. And and yeah, that was that was
an outrageous rain. That was the year that the the
roads were all getting washed out in Colorado.
Yeah, I got stuck at 1 Arroyo once.
I watched 4 tires look pretty good go down and at least a cord
of firewood go right down the royal somewhere in Mexico now.
(02:53):
Yeah, yeah. Yes.
It's intense, The flash floods, yeah.
It sure can be. And yeah, you know what?
I, I came from back east, of course, where that wasn't a
thing. And it's, you have to have a
whole sort of a sensibility around that because you may not
be where the rain is and it can come fast.
(03:14):
And, you know, people think of it as all this water coming and
it's like, well, oh, it's just water, but it's not, it's moving
all of this lumber and anything that it can.
So you're actually got a lot of force coming behind a bunch of
solid objects. And so it's not just like a like
(03:35):
a white water river where it's mostly water.
This has got a lot of stuff in it.
And so so yeah, no, there's a whole, you know, you might not
want to pitch your tent on the nice flat spot.
That's kind of what comes out ofthat.
And yeah, those they're saying this flood in Texas and they're
(03:58):
saying this is like a once in 500 years flood.
We talk about the hundred year floodplains.
Yeah, I mean, they they had river rise like 26 feet and 45
minutes kind of stuff. See, that's, that's supernatural
stuff. Yeah, yeah.
So, so yeah, that's, that's I'm surprised actually that the
numbers are, are as as low as they are.
(04:22):
They're not. Well, yeah, I mean, really scary
what happened at that kids camp.And they're, I think they're
still missing a few, a few people.
Right. Well, you know what I'm
remembering some of these famousfloods through history and where
the numbers were, you know, I think 1 was particularly a mine
and they had up, they had a dam and they were holding back all
(04:45):
of this water. And when the dam failed, it came
roaring through in the middle ofthe night.
Just, you know, at, you know, more than 26 feet and more, you
know, faster than 45 minutes andnobody got out alive.
And there's still some some graphic photos about that where,
where it actually created like alittle Eddie pool up river from
(05:07):
one of the more stable bridges. And that's where you can really
see how it's all the stuff. It's not the water that's
necessarily the problem. The water is the force.
A a problem in and of itself andthen you have a debris on top of
it. And then it's carrying ten
buildings worth of building supplies at you with everything
(05:28):
else mixed in betweens. It's quite a phenomenon.
So but you know, we've had it. This is one of the things you
learn about in the water industry is the power of water
hammer. And I believe water hammer,
which is, which happens in a system when you, when you close
something really fast and you'vehad like a, if you have a bunch
(05:50):
of volume of water, which weighs, you know, 8.6 lbs per
gallon and it's moving with a certain velocity, it's just in,
in energy. That's incredible amount of
energy. And people don't know if they're
not trained that there is like ascience to how you, and it's
like breaking, like when you're bringing a locomotive into the
(06:13):
station, you don't just slam thebrakes on, you know, if there
are even breaks that could slam a locomotive, you know, because
what happens, all that force keeps moving.
And water hammer, I think they say, travels at like 750 miles
an hour. So that's a fast train.
And I've had other operators tell me about plants where
(06:36):
somebody upstream shut down a a main and the water hammer
somehow rebounded and knocked a massive pump straight off of
this big cement pedestal that itwas mounted on.
And we're not talking about. We're talking about pumps that
you and I could be pushing that we can't even get it to to
wiggle right. But this is just literally like
(06:57):
a locomotive train. But it's in this liquid form,
which is interesting. And it's a curious segue into
today's topic. OK.
Which today's topic I guess we had discussed before talking
about. And if you've listened to the
past couple episodes, people might have picked up that I've
been sort of borderline excited about reading Henry Henri
(07:21):
Bergson or Henry Bergson if you're American.
And he wrote a book sort of in response to Darwin's evolution,
books on evolution in his theoryof evolution, sort of updating
it. And Bergsen was like a celebrity
(07:42):
in his own day. But he's also French, hence the
name Henri. And so a lot of the Bergsen
splash didn't seem to really come across into American
philosophical circles, at least I I haven't come across it.
If it came in those days, it seemed to have passed away.
(08:05):
And I would surmise that the reason it passed away or became
sidelined, let's say, is becauseit was just too far ahead of its
time. You know, like some folks might
remember, we talked about Marshall Mcluhan when he went to
the publisher and the publisher of Understanding Media said
there's like 90% new ideas in here and the the public can't
tolerate that. So you got to dial it down to
(08:27):
like 10% new ideas. They can handle that.
And of course he didn't, thank God, but neither did Bergson.
And it's really interesting because he does it in a very
reasonable way, a very scientific way, referring
frequently to science that had been done largely botanical and
(08:51):
zoological science, trying to understand the relationships
between various plants and thereis their development and various
animals and some of those questions.
And but what he does is he he heends up using this very
reasonable argument to make an argument that we need to
(09:12):
reorganize entirely how we think.
And some folks may remember whenI've made reference to Ian
Mcgilchrist, I believe it's Dr. Ian Mcgilchrist.
He or Sir Ian Mcgilchrist, maybe, I don't know if you have
a Sir, if that bumps the doctor.But anyway, he talks about the
differences of affect in the brain and the different ways the
(09:35):
brain understands things. And one of his books about that
is called the Master and its Emissary.
And the idea is that our left brain is really, it should be
the emissary and not the master.That is the right, the the
logical and and not just, it's not that the right brain isn't
(10:00):
logical, but it's a logic from coherence rather than a, the
logic of separation and dissection.
And basically what, what Bergsendoes is, and I, and I still have
about 100 pages to go, but I'm, I'm, I think this is so
important and so much a represents A foundational step
(10:22):
for a new way of thinking that Ithink we should do a reading of
it and make that one of our things.
So that's something that folks can look forward to in the
future is, you know, and I've almost made my first reading and
one of the reasons is I'm anxious to read it again.
And so sometimes reading it out loud actually helps, you know,
(10:43):
to get that second level of things.
And but so, so basically he looks at the way that
consciousness arises and he makes the argument that the
consciousness that we the, the, the, the operating procedure of
our consciousness is based on a functionality that is focused on
(11:10):
manipulating things in 3D space.So it's bent towards what he
calls well, or what gets translated out of the French as
spatiality, which is a sensibility about dimensions in
space. And some folks might remember
(11:32):
the the the analogy that we madein the last episode.
I think it was where we really went into the record player and
we looked at some of the tricks that spatiality can play on our
perceptions in that. And also what he says is that we
(11:52):
have this intelligence that's focused on spatiality because
it's meant for to help us to manipulate things.
And, you know, he made the argument that we shouldn't be
called homo sapiens, we should be called homo FA bear because
of the route to fabricate. Because what we're really about
is making stuff or taking disorganized material and
(12:15):
organizing it to a state of higher organization to, to, to
make it serve another level of consciousness.
But so he goes through all of this and he he sort of looks at
how in our experience, we break things down or for example, we
(12:36):
take instantaneous snapshots of states rather than understanding
them as a fluidity. And that that's we're unaware
because that snapshot protocol really serves us in manipulating
stuff. He interestingly calls geometry
(13:01):
and an extreme case example, of course, of pure spatiality that
has that every every fact about it can be captured in a logical
spatiality. But that is the extreme case.
So, so he also talks about this idea of mind arising,
(13:25):
consciousness Co arising with the bodies that house them.
And you know, he, he's sort of the, the suppressed premise of
Darwinism is that creation movesfrom the bottom up.
And that's why it seemed like a logical step for Jeff, for Jeff
(13:49):
Moore and folks that didn't check that out.
We did a great conversation with, with Jeff Moore on, on
this chain of being idea and hisbook called the Infinite
Staircase, which is about that idea of the steps of the stair.
So, so this idea of Darwinism where things are purely
accidental, it, it is kind of a way to, to pitch the idea of
(14:13):
matter just increasing and increasing its complexity and
somehow generating consciousnessout of that, that higher forms
are built out of the accumulation of lower forms.
And we've spoken about those leaps that have to be made to
actually do that. But that's the suppressed
premise that all comes from. Look at how animals get in, you
(14:37):
know, influenced by their environment.
Well, he looks at a lot of thoseideas and comes away not with
not just with new conclusions about the external story, but
with new conclusions about the, the problems in having a
(15:00):
narrative that explains the external story lying in the way
we're thinking. And so the latter part of his
book, I, I made reference very early to, to the compulsion that
human consciousness has to thingify stuff.
And that's exactly the impulse that he talks about and he
(15:23):
explains it in great detail. And I think it's worth.
Going, I think, I think we touched on that in our last
episode, too. That's the same as what David
Bohm would call fragmentation. Yes, yes.
Or the same as what Levinus would call totalizing.
Right. And that it in that it's, it's
based on the the perfect perceptual warping that happens
(15:47):
with fragmentation. And that's why the interesting
thing David Bohm's, you know, Seminole work, the first word of
the title is wholeness, right? Wholeness and the implicant
order. And it's to me, without having
(16:08):
read the book, but understandinga little bit about his idea of
the implicant order largely fromsecond hand.
I find it curious and not insignificant that the first
word of the book, the first title word is wholeness.
Because we've talked about that dichotomy of being a part and
(16:28):
being and being a whole unto itself as a whole on from from
Wilbur. And that there is this dichotomy
and he unfolds that that is he being.
Bergsen unfolds that dichotomy at for its apparent dichotomy.
And he tries to give us that lifting up into the higher
(16:51):
dimension to look at the story of life and matter.
Life heads down the ladder. Matter heads up the ladder and
it's through this, but he does say some wonderful things like
the nature of everything is psychological first and then
(17:11):
that is in the biggest sense, not human psychological, but a
manifestation of consciousness and then it works through
matter. And he kind of, and so he's a
brilliant, brilliant arguments, but significant in that, you
know, he says that we are using the consciousness that was
designed by nature to be pragmatic and practical and
(17:38):
we're trying to apply that to speculative ends.
And that's the problem. These are not the appropriate
protocols for the types of ends that are beyond this pragmatic
manipulation of stuff. Speculative ends just.
(18:00):
I think it it might be worth describing what that means a
little more so. So using kind of the rational
mind to try to query and and answer questions that aren't
entirely rational. That's what you mean by
speculative. Well, they're not entirely
(18:22):
pragmatic. In other words, they're not
about manipulating the thing, they're about this like this new
mental idea. We're trying to understand the
thing in itself. We're trying to understand
beyond just the effects of the phenomena to some higher
questions of being or like that.And so when we start doing
(18:45):
metaphysics and I, I interestingly made a similar
argument when I was an undergraduate, and that was
that, that the, the, the reasoning system that makes
sense within, within the dimensions, what physicists call
the middle, the zone of middle dimensions, which is where
(19:08):
Newtonian mechanics works and makes sense.
But if we want us to understand the ultimate nature of the
cosmos or of, you know, the physical universe or a being
itself, we have to go outside ofthat zone of middle dimensions.
And the, the, the, the reasoningthat works in the zone of middle
(19:30):
dimensions is that pragmatic, what he calls intellect.
OK, So for, so for Bergsen, we have consciousness and life,
which he describes as a wave or as an explosion, right.
And like an explosion of the organization of matter into
(19:51):
these higher and higher forms like we've spoken about in the
the chain of being. And but that matter is always
pulling against it, always pulling against it.
And that intellect is our personal consciousness moving
towards matter. But what he calls intuition,
(20:14):
which will become significant ina few weeks.
When we talk more about Spinoza or Rook Spinoza, he talks about
intuition as intelligence moving.
Or consciousness moving home, moving where consciousness came
from and that intuition and intellect are actually opposite
(20:36):
directions. You know, Espinoza doesn't tell
us a lot about what he thinks intuition is, but but Bergson
makes a, you know, at least a quasi scientific argument that's
very consistent within his philosophy of how exactly that
the relation, that relationship works.
(20:56):
And so, you know, he he sees thefunction of our consciousness
through that fabrication impulseas life organizing matter to a
higher state of organization. And that's kind of what we do.
(21:17):
And you know, here I make stuff all the time, but I'd never
actually seen it in that, with that metaphysics before, that my
impulse to want to make something is actually the
impulse of life organizing matter out of a lower organized
(21:38):
state into a higher organized state.
And that that impulse is the same impulse that is organizing
matter in through evolution all around us.
And that and that, that makes sense.
Like that's what nature is showing us everywhere else.
(22:01):
But we have to start to be able to see flows.
We can't, we can't keep needing to freeze everything to try to
get at what it is because some things what they are is just so
not frozen that taking a frozen snapshot of it, what he calls an
instantaneous picture, very useful for manipulating things,
(22:24):
but not very useful to understand the the the
wholeness, right, which has to do with that flow.
It's not a, you know, a snapshotis like a cross section of a
living creature. You don't get the function of
the OR the, the creatureness outof a cross section of an animal,
(22:44):
right? Like a slice of olive loaf or
something, right? And so, but we have that
impulse. And So what he says is that we
don't let our intellect be guided by our intuition.
We let our intuition. That's exactly what now how many
years later, what Dr. Ian Mcgilchrist says, not from
(23:09):
philosophy, He says it from the science of studying the brain
and says, yeah, we seem to be wanting to use the brain this
way. And it seems like maybe it would
work much better if we used it this other way.
And here's Bergsen, many years before that, saying, you know, I
(23:30):
think we're not thinking this right.
And that if we keep thinking with that kind of brain and we
keep making instantaneous things, yeah, we'll keep getting
pieces and we'll keep getting tinier pieces, but we'll miss
wholeness. And that's part of what Boehm
represents is that, wait a minute, we bark down this alley,
(23:52):
we need to head back and start thinking differently.
And that's where the rubber meets the road.
And that's why the elegance of how this all just dovetails
nicely into one tidy bundle. Like, who could, who could have,
you know, we just happened on this, right?
This is the implicant order manifest explicating itself make
(24:16):
itself manifest. I wonder if we could rewind a
little bit and, you know, there there's probably, I'm guessing
for our listeners and, and for myself, it's relatively
straightforward to intuit what the difference might be between
(24:36):
the slicing that you're talking about.
You know, the cross section of the animal is a good
illustration of that. You you not only can you not
grok the animal from a cross section, but you can't grok its
life or its mind from a cross section.
When you when you mentioned flowas you know, being able to see
(24:59):
things outside of a cross section, that that is a little
more of a stretch to intuit and harder to come up with examples.
Do you think you could describe that a little more?
Like how? Like how might our thinking
change to accommodate that insight?
(25:21):
Well, one of the places that it really shows up is in our
understanding of the human body.For example, one of the Ahas
that I had when I read that excellent book by Booner on the
secret teachings of plants. It'll be in the show notes was
that in this came from recent physiological stuff, relatively
(25:43):
recent, you know, my second-halfof my life that the blood
doesn't just pump through the through the blood vessels like
water through the plumbing lines.
But then it actually spirals andthat it's spirals because there
are structures within the blood vessels that actually encourage
(26:05):
that spiraling. But on dissection, you those are
not there to be experienced the way that one of the ways that
that Chinese medicine works it by reading pulses.
You're you're tapping into a flow.
You're the image that we might have often in the West is of a
(26:28):
mechanical picture of the human body, but it it turns out that
we're the dimension that we're missing is exactly that
dimension that Bergson is talking about.
That is understanding that the body is actually made-up of a
bunch of flows. For example, what Booner talks
about in this book is that within the, I believe it's
(26:55):
within the either the heart or the aorta, there are three
distinct flows of blood. Not just blood spiraling, but
three distinct spiraling currents.
And that the body regulates the relative flows of those
(27:15):
currents. And that by regulating the flow
of 1 current against another, itcan actually generate friction
and heat and regulate body temperature by regulating the
the relative velocities of thoseflows.
And then of course we get into the fact that the blood has
(27:37):
iron, which are hematite, and soit actually is spinning charge.
And so it actually is a sort of an electronic field generator
generates electromagnetic field.And, but, but all of these
things have to do with the, the nature of the wholeness of the
(28:00):
Organism in its regulation of flows, not static.
You know, we want to, we want totake a blood sample and we want
to say, OK, this is in the bloodand this is in the blood and
this is in the blood. And that feels very static
somehow because this river has gone by and we've dipped a cup
(28:23):
in it and we're kind of looking at the stuff in the cup.
What we don't have in the cup isthe river.
And no matter how many discrete cups we might sample of the
river, we don't get the river. But the condition that we're
trying to understand is a condition of the river by taking
(28:44):
samples out. So how would how do we
understand that flow? We need to, we need a different
protocol somehow. And Bergson argues that this is
what intuition is. And I and I would connect it
with because we've had several philosophers ideas of intuition
go by in the in the podcast. And I would suggest that this is
(29:07):
this is that higher philosophical idea of intuition
as direct experiencing of the reality of a thing and not
needing a mediation. You know, if we go through a
reasonable chain and we have a therefore at the end, we weren't
experiencing the thing directly.We actually were experiencing
(29:27):
something that told us clues that we could put together
through a reasoning process and get the final conclusion.
And then that conclusion is reasonable if we were taking our
steps correctly all along the way.
Analytical philosophy, this is all what it's all about, but the
idea of intuition is just this direct seeing in and that that
(29:51):
the brain has a mechanism to do that, but we're not actually
operating it correctly. Which, you know, and then that
Bergson comes up with because what what's curious about this?
And the reason that I'm not the kind of a philosopher that says,
OK, it's all Aristotle and he got it all.
And I'm going to get into the drill, into the minutiae of
(30:11):
Aristotle or it's all about thisguy or that guy is is because
there is a a story to this all right.
And there is a process to our unfolding this that has its own
story. And so again, to take one
philosopher is to take one dip out of that stream of human
thought that Hegel called the the Phenomenology of Spirit,
(30:37):
right. That moves through, or this
ghost Geist that moves through, right?
And so one of the things that's interesting is when you start
hearing a bunch of people from abunch of different hermeneutical
bases saying very, very similar things.
You start to think that, OK, maybe these are some of the
(31:00):
bigger rules or the bigger Ahas to be had because it keeps
showing up in these relatively different locations and
relatively discreet models, cognitive models.
So. So I take a lot of truck in
that, as the old saying goes, when Aristotle and Confucius
(31:22):
agree on something, those are pretty different hermeneutical
bases from which to folks remember from our previous
episode. What I mean by a hermeneutical
base is your sense of the whole picture that you've accumulated
over your life is an ontologicalhermeneutical base, your
(31:43):
understanding of how things workso that when you get this piece,
you go, this piece fits in this way because I have all this
picture of things. Well, the the world view that
Confucius had, as in his ontological hermeneutical base
that he used to hold his pieces up against to measure and assess
them, was very different than Aristotle's.
(32:07):
And yet we find similar things coming out of it.
That's why in our conversation with Krishnan, I said, yeah,
it's very interesting the differences between East and
West. But what we really maybe ought
to not miss is the way that they're the same.
It's when your left eye and yourright eye agree on something
that you can trust it. And that's when you can find it
(32:29):
in space, right? And so we have that kind of a
function going on. And the differences are very
interesting also. But the sameness is it's like,
OK, you've heard this six different ways from Sunday, from
how many different sources and the things that line up, you
know, like, yeah, there is a, there is a point to being
virtuous and there is a developmental thing that's
(32:52):
happening. And, you know, there's a lot of
things that sort of distill out regardless of whose story we're
taking, you know? So those are things that are
worth looking at, you know. Yeah, I mean, this is similar a
similar question to the one I just asked about the difference
between slicing something up to examine it and trying to
(33:16):
experience its flow. Instead, when you talk about we
need to use our brain differently, you know, I'm
thinking of doing the cleaning up and waking up work that
complements the learning how to think work, right?
So there's like learning about cognitive biases and learning
about logic and things like thatthat work on, you know, one side
(33:40):
of the brain loosely and then getting shadow material surfaced
and integrated is working on theother side of the brain, say,
and having peak experiences thatthen inform you through the
possibility of peak experiences through the context that those
(34:00):
create meaning states of consciousness that so so that's
what I think of when when you say we need to use our brain
differently. But I'm wondering if Bergson
gives any clues about what he thinks, because I imagine a lot
of people read his stuff and then tried to think differently.
(34:21):
And in our very first ceremony together, you said something to
me that was it's not by thinking.
You paused in the middle of of singing, said it's not by
thinking, and then went right back to singing and well, how?
(34:41):
How can we intimate what it is about then?
I think there's two halves to it, analogous to the energetic
disciplines. 1 is taking off theemergency brake, getting the
thing out of the way. That's in the way, and the
second one then is powering up the motor, getting the thing
(35:05):
you're after to activate. Same.
More about both. Well, so this is a case where
the first job is telling is using the logical brain on
itself and basically having to tell.
It's like, it's like the famous Star Trek's where where Kirk
breaks the computer by catching it in a logical trap and it
(35:27):
can't, right? And you're telling the brain
that, OK, you have to understandlogically, that you can't
understand everything logically.And and Zen is all about
defeating that brain. Well, what's the sound of one
hand clapping wise ass, right, as if speaking to that left
(35:48):
sphere? And then there's the questions.
What do we do to really, you know, so that's kind of taking
off the emergency brakes. That's like trying to say, OK,
logical brain, you have to realize, you know, you think you
know everything, but you realizeyour prejudice, right?
Well, yeah, you realize that youjump to conclusions, right?
Well, yeah, You realize that you're extracting things out of
(36:11):
this whole melange and you're just picking out what you want,
right? Yeah.
Well, yeah, You know, so sometimes you got to just chill
the fuck out and, well, OK, but that does that alone.
Then what do you do? You just sit there.
That alone doesn't necessarily activate the intuitional
circuits. And that's this idea that I
(36:33):
think there's a lot of mystery around what that is.
But I think that the maybe the biggest clue in the end, what I
was probably pointing at with the it's not by thinking is that
what it is, is by experience andand thinking can interrupt
experience. That's what it does in the
(36:55):
martial arts setting, right? And I had said exactly that.
I said when I face an opponent, because I have all this time
body, I stand in front of them and I go, what that means that
there's an openness to experience there.
That means that I'm not filling in that space.
Well, who's going to want to fill in that space, that other
brain like it did when I was young and I was new and I was
(37:18):
inexperienced and it started just chattering away.
Well, what if he does that? What if he does this?
Is he right-handed? Is he left-handed?
I wonder if he's going to kick alot.
I wonder if he got, you know, I just want, how does he use
distance? How does he, you know, and after
a certain point, because I've done a thing not, not 100 times,
not 100 * 100 times, but 1000 * 1010 thousand times 10,000.
(37:42):
So now it can do itself through me, so I can trust in that.
So I can just stand there and go.
What? Just like a jazz musician who
knows his instrument intimately can just listen and just play.
If he starts thinking too much, that'll be a different circuit,
right? But what he wants to do is, and
(38:04):
they'll tell you about it. Well, I want to get in the
groove. Well, what is the groove?
It's a flow and I know that I know how to flow when I get that
flowing brain going. So I'm going to I'm going to
float into the into the flow by going what not filling it, not
(38:29):
positing it. So that's the emergency breaks
off. So now that you can actually see
what now you got to get the right wad in front of you to
see, That's the way I would put it.
Well, I can't say that this or that is necessarily this is
where your intuition and your yin will and your deeper feeling
(38:55):
for how life will reveal itself to you because there's a lot of
different ways that we have referred to before as
philosophical practices. But understanding your shadow
material, I would say it's part of taking the emergency brakes
off because what that shadow material is going to do is it's
just going to insert itself and it's just going to try to turn
(39:15):
everything its way. And, and you don't, you just
need to know that and identify it so you can get erase its
influence like noise cancelling headphones, right?
So, but that doesn't necessarilyput the right record on or the
right, what do we call it now? The right soundtrack on the
technological machine and we used to have these things they
(39:38):
were records. They would go around and you put
a needle on that's why I say records so, so so that it is a
different mode and there are things that make us shift mode.
And that's why in our conversation with with Krishna
and I was saying this type of knowledge may be dispositional
and not propositional. Propositional is thinking it's
(40:01):
running reason programs on propositions.
Dispositional is being so it it implies that there is a certain
experiencing that goes on and a certain interaction based on
that experience. And it's not saying the thinking
won't be you're that you're brain dead the whole time.
(40:23):
It's just that then thinking is the emissary.
It's not the master, right. So one of the things, well,
flower arranging, it's a great example of a doe.
Well, what the hell does flower?How is flower ranging going to
awaken that deep? Because there are certain
principles and certain things that if you follow them and you
(40:44):
open up to them, you'll go, Oh, well, that's that Aha
experience. That's direct seeing.
That's we want to call it intuition, but it's, we're
calling it intuition just because there's no reason you
didn't go and this and then that.
So then this means that. And so therefore, oh, that isn't
(41:05):
what happened. You saw in and you went, Oh,
that's what that's this new kindof perception that doesn't make
mediated by thinking, doesn't mean I was in a coma when it
happened. Doesn't mean that my thinking
brain was not running. It was just running in that
appropriate support emissary function for this other direct
(41:30):
experience of things. So now how do I really ride that
horse of direct experience everywhere it wants to go?
Well, that's when you start looking at different spiritual
disciplines with different eyes because you realize it's not
about a content payload, right? The content payload is just that
(41:52):
getting the getting the emergency brakes off, it's just
getting the garbage out of the way is polishing off the
windshield. You need to get to turn in the
key on the motor and actually steering down the road.
But that happens in that mode ofdirect experience, right?
That's what one of the reasons why the Zen Master hits you
'cause you're off going. Therefore they're like no, here
(42:18):
now, here now this 3 lbs of flaxin the very excrement experience
it. That's why he cut Gute's finger
off right, nothing more real. And here and now then boom, that
here experience here. And we just don't get because of
(42:40):
the perniciousness of that mind.That's what the the the
significance of his book, The master in the Emissary is to get
things that back in their right place because the emissary has
been, you know, the story of thethe sorcerer's apprentice,
right? When The Apprentice starts to
try to do the job of the sorcerer, necessarily things go
(43:00):
awry. So what Bergsen is telling us
is, look, all of this has gone awry, and that's why your
universe doesn't make any sense.And it appears paradoxical
because you've got the emissary trying to parade around like the
Master, and you have not empowered the Master to do that
which the Master does. And does does he have?
(43:25):
We got to see. I haven't finished the book yet.
So so you don't know if he has amethod or or at least some
advice. His advice is I, I, I skipped
ahead. I was joking.
I was joking about the book, andI looked at the last page and
the last word on the last page is Aristotle.
(43:49):
Is Aristotle. I was close.
Close, I guessed Finnegan. Yeah, I mean, it's with the
other end of the stick, but basically the same stick.
But what he was saying was that we'd, he was, he was giving a
final counsel admonition, I believe, because I only read
(44:11):
that last sentence. So this is what reading
Finnegan's Wake will do to you, right?
He was saying that he wanted that, that we needed at all
costs to avoid a new scholasticism, the same way that
the old world had set up an old,the old scholasticism around
Aristotle where we couldn't see past it because we were so
(44:34):
caught by this mentality, this way of thinking.
And how do we break 3? And that's what Bergsen's all
about. How do we break out of this?
And that the, IT is the explosion of life, you know, and
he, he literally talks about it as an explosion because the way
that life works both in plants and animals is it has this way
of storing up energy so that it can use it all at once.
(44:57):
And that using it all at once isthat explosion that he talks
about. And now there is summer and we
had all these great rains. There are grasses out there that
look exactly like those fireworks where it goes off in
all directions. And but it's a grass stem going
(45:18):
in all directions and it looks exactly like the explosion that
the firework is. And you can look at that and you
say, yeah, life is an explosion.Look, it's right there.
And and you know, of course lifeexplores every possible way to
explode, which becomes an important part of his argument
that it is. There isn't a finalism to it
(45:39):
because we aren't homing in on one good answer.
We're exploring all relevant possibilities and in that
interesting way that the the possibilistic universe of the
future interacts with the determined, deterministic,
(46:00):
determined universe of history before this moment and
everything stacking up to it right at that cutting edge in
between is how is that? Is this unfolding or bombs?
That's where the implicate becomes explicate.
That's where the hidden universebecomes manifest.
(46:23):
And, and, and the implications that are, is that that potential
is actually what humans are all about in this interface of meet,
wear and consciousness. And, and, and Bergson talks all
about this idea of consciousness.
I mean, it's quite, it's quite impressive.
(46:43):
And that's why I want to read itso that people have no excuse.
All they have to do is sit thereand push the thing and you'll
get this, this this great, great, reasonable geniuses
explanation of how to think about the explosion of life and
the relation of life to matter and the significance of
consciousness. Moving back to going back home,
(47:09):
right? OK, now there's got to be a 100
rock'n'roll references here, right, from Stevie Winwood.
And I can't find my way home to Uncle John's band, right?
He's going to lead us all home. And that is this idea.
And it's, it is a quasi religious one.
It's a quasi spiritual one. It's a, it's a social and, and
(47:33):
community based one because there is that idea that, that
Rhonda said that we're all just walking each other home, right?
And not that we don't get an elbow here and there on the way,
but there's still that idea thatthere is a journey and that that
journey transcends death, right?And because consciousness
(47:55):
transcends matter and so so yeah, a lot of just, it just
goes in. It's every which way there.
And it's all Finnegan's ladder. Some great lines in there.
One I want to come back to. Maybe we'll, we'll finish off on
this because the the explicationmight might have some momentum.
(48:20):
It's not the the kind of inspired place you ended up
about how we're going home and perhaps accompanying each other
home. And I think that's an experience
that everybody I know that's in some pursuit of consciousness is
having. I mean, it's certainly something
that that I've been looking for really actively since I was like
(48:42):
13. Like, I want to find my way
home, but going back to something you said, thinking
interrupts experience. And I don't know if I've ever
heard that put so succinctly that that kind of describes both
(49:04):
the limitations of thinking and also the the downside of relying
on it too heavily. And I wonder if there's there's
just more to be said about thinking interrupts experience
and and you know, kind of what are the sages have to say about
that? It's all about paying attention
(49:25):
and it's all about what you're paying attention to.
If you're paying attention to your thoughts, you're paying
attention to that inner world. You're not paying attention out
here. And for a martial artist, that's
a serious problem because probably you need all hands on
deck in the here and now on the,on the 3D, you know, and you
(49:48):
know, there I, when I, I've probably mentioned this before,
when I would be fighting sometimes one particular
occasion and Peter was watching and he said, oh, look, Mr.
Brian, he wants to talk about itbecause I would much rather work
it out that way than physically with this guy that I was
(50:08):
fighting. And but it, but it, that was
part of pointing at that, you know, you can't be paying
attention to the verbal world. You have to be a paying
attention to the, to the world where you're going to get
smacked in the nose. And that's what's so good about
that as a practice is because when you don't pay attention,
(50:28):
you may get smacked in the nose.It will happen eventually here
and there. You know your reptile brain is
going to learn this. Maybe ahead of the frontal lobe?
I mean, if nothing else outside of fighting the the universe
will find all kinds of ways to smack you in the nose when
you're not paying attention. The new universe is filled with
rolled up newspapers. There's no question about it.
(50:50):
And where one puts one's nose, you know, and how you know.
And this is all about that situational awareness and what
you're paying attention to. And you know, it seems like,
well, OK, we have all sorts of stuff to pay attention to.
And sometimes it, it isn't necessary to pay attention to
the outside world, but it's necessary for us.
(51:13):
This is part of the, the responsibility that comes with
consciousness, conscious of consciousness.
If you're not aware of where you're paying attention and the
quality of that attention, then you're not conscious of your
consciousness. And that means that you're
likely to be in danger of falling back into more animal
modes, more instinctual modes. Because in, in Bergson talks
(51:36):
about consciousness having to separate itself from instinct
originally. Cause instinct will do a lot of
a lot for us. And this is where I look at my
dogs. And because there's, they have
original thoughts. I will bite your nose now, all
right. But they also are very ruled by
instinct. So the movements that they can
(51:57):
perform and the ideas that they can have about things are locked
in instinct. And Bergson would say, well,
there one case where matter consciousness was trying to make
it out of matter, but matter 1 so consciousness didn't get much
light and instinct instead kind of holds it bound down to that
(52:18):
matter condition, but with humans.
And This is why humans are different than animals.
And this is where this whole idea of humans being built in
God's image being different thananimals is because in humans,
consciousness has succeeded to free itself.
And that's why I'm not impressedwhen people argue that they're
(52:38):
not that there's not free will. It's like, well, that's because
you're still you, you need to have more consciousness,
conscious of consciousness. And if you if you if you push
that more, you'd see that there is free will.
And that is the achievement, although you may not be using it
much. It's like maybe it's a feature
on the car, like you're heated seats and you never use them
(53:00):
because you're in a warm country.
I don't know could be, you know,what's that other rectified
seems to be a vaguely haunting mass appeal, but.
I don't know. No, that's from Incubus Drive.
Close. Right.
Yeah. But the idea that, you know,
what is he saying is I see that sometimes I let the fear take
(53:24):
the wheel and steer. Well, fear is more in that
instinctive direction. Sometimes I let matter win over
consciousness. And I see later on in the song
that when I don't do that, then my light is found right.
And there's of course, a long tradition of light being
associated with consciousness. And part of that happens is
(53:45):
because in experiences of higherconsciousness, your nervous
system that's used to running on110 is doing like 440 or 880.
And so your neural circuits and your optical circuits are just
charge, charge, charge. And so it shows up like white
light. That's what all the white light
nonsense is about. It isn't like someone standing
next to you is going to necessarily see white light or
(54:07):
something coming down from the end.
That's not what that's about, right?
Hyperstimulation of the nervous system.
And so, but so, so something unique has happened with humans
and there is something that the universe is trying to do, that
creation, that nature, that God be picked.
(54:27):
You know, if you want Spinoza's God or Moses's God, that's the
same story. It's trying to manifest.
And the counterweight to it is matter.
And that is that activation between heaven and earth, right?
Matter. And this is where, again, life
(54:48):
stores up energy to expend it quickly.
And the old name for live people, when someone wanted to
be poetic and they wanted to refer to both the living and the
dead, they would call them the quick and the dead, right?
So there's this idea that this that motion is, is associated
(55:10):
with the living, right. And so, so yeah, I mean this
just plugs in from a lot of different ways.
This idea of light, this idea ofmovement, sometimes the idea of
flight, all these things sort ofget associated with
consciousness trying to specialize something that is
(55:32):
fundamentally non spatial. I think I got from from some of
that. Also a clearer distinction
between instinct and intuition, which I think people conflate a
fair amount. I think when when people are
trying to connect to their intuition, they're looking for
that instinctual voice, which isnot useless by any stretch.
(55:56):
But but you're describing instinct as kind of like the the
very first rudiments of what Jeffrey Moore calls
consciousness, but that does nothave the capability yet to be
conscious of itself. Whereas intuition you you you
describe as a direct experience of knowledge without reasoning.
(56:19):
Those are pretty different ideas.
They are pretty different. Yeah.
Experiencing my own emotions directly is not intuition.
It's closer to instinct and something we used to call some
of those emotions. You know, there, there's been
all sorts of historical references to these things, but
(56:41):
you one of the old ways is to call them passions.
And the idea of a passion is that you can almost hear it in
there is that we are somehow passive and it has taken over so
that the the things that are typically associated pat as
passions are things that we havetrouble controlling ourselves,
(57:03):
whether it's whether it's for a lover or it's for rage.
Both of those are considered passions because our autonomy
seems to be somehow threatened by them.
Well, those are closer into thatinstinct direction.
And, you know, even though your dog loves you and knows that
(57:25):
you're the source of everything in its life and everything, you
know, if you pinch it, it's going to growl, right?
Or, you know, it'll have an instinctive reaction that's
wired in harder than the than the higher functions are.
And with humans, I think it goesevery, goes every way.
(57:45):
There are definitely, this is this idea that that I think
we've referred to again, this isone of the things that Aristotle
and, and Confucius agree on. And that is that that there's
work to be done to get to that, to become the, the, the
potential that you have to whether it's morally or
(58:08):
creatively or whatever. And you know who agrees with
this kind of his Spinoza? Because in the end of Spinoza's
ethics, he says something like everything that is rare and
excellent is also difficult. And he's talking about, you
know, he, he doesn't say a lot about what intuition is.
(58:29):
But for him, even who's very brass tacks kind of guy, right?
Spinoza's God is pretty much nature.
And it doesn't care whether yourteam wins the Pennant or the,
you know, the championship or not.
And you can play till your eyeball, pray till your eyeballs
bulge out. And Spinoza's God doesn't give a
(58:50):
toot because it's just it manifests itself in the laws of
nature. If the guy kicked the ball so
the other guy could catch it andthe other guy could run, then he
won. That's the that's as much as
God's going to have involved with it.
And that's why Einstein said he believed in the God of Spinoza
if he believed in any God. But Spinoza had this idea that
(59:11):
intuition was still the highest form of knowledge, that it was a
higher form of knowledge than reason, and but also that being
higher, it was rare, and that itwas one of these things.
Like anything that is rare and excellent, it is therefore
difficult and therefore some effort must be put in the way
(59:32):
that the Chinese classics put itis, they'll say, these things
are our inheritance, but we still must strive to attain
them. So there is a certain rightness
to our, an appropriateness to that development, but we still
have to exert something to move the boat along that course.
(59:55):
And and and you know what's related to that?
If you don't, then you end up with other results.
All right? If you don't follow that, then
actual results may vary significantly.
Yeah, cool. And that's my argument for
virtue once again. Yeah, still whipping the same
(01:00:18):
horse. Well, I'd be curious how the
last 100 pages of Bergsen go, and I'm excited that you're
you're offering to do a reading of it for our listeners.
That'll be fun. And yeah, I mean, these themes
keep coming back and informing each other, so I'm just curious
to see how it keeps unfolding. We have some fun guests coming
(01:00:39):
up too to help us with that. That really, really, again,
that's that serendipitousness, because we happen to have some
experts that have really drilleddown on really important parts.
I was thinking about the parts. Just think about these in
particular people. And the word crux came up and,
you know, this was another one of these delicious old Latin
(01:01:02):
words that nobody really uses anymore.
How many people are out there getting the crux of things?
For God's sakes? Good.
And what does crux mean? It means cross, and so it means
crossroad, right? So it's where where certain
important things intersect. Crosshairs, yeah.
Crosshairs too, I suppose. Yeah, on the target, right.
(01:01:24):
And so some of these people thatthey're that that that our
visitor are coming guests are are experts in were folks that
were geniuses sitting at the crux of their times in history
and real important pieces in thestory that we've told piece meal
over the past you know, 50 of nearly 60 episodes.
(01:01:48):
Yeah. That it's, it's telling itself
kind of through US, yeah. It really is.
It really is cool. Very well, Sir, and we will see
everybody next time around.
Howdy, Brian. How are you doing, Sir?
I'm doing well, thanks. It seems like the tides are
turning on some important frontshere.
So it's yeah, we were in a good mood most of the weekend.
Yeah, very good. Happy Independence Day.
I tell you I've been independenta while now and I appreciate it.
Yeah, and and I guess Interdependence Day is to to to
(00:39):
be defined. Or all the others.
All the others maybe? Or maybe that's what something
we aspire to. Yeah, I was thinking more that
that maybe Codependence Day is all the others.
As far as we'll get, yeah. Can't rule it out.
Yeah, yeah, I was up early this morning.
I've been to Madrid already. The the current water operator
(01:02):
that replaced me is on vacation,so I've been having those deja
vu going in and doing some testing.
All easy stuff. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no wrenches involved. Knock on wood.
Cool. But yeah, so that's kind of
cool. It's sort of nice.
It helps. It sort of vivifies the
(01:24):
experience of retirement to experience the things that I
don't have to do regularly like I did for so many years.
So that's kind of fun rather than just forgetting it
completely. Yeah, congratulate.
Yeah. But they're doing a big project
there, which was starting on when I was still there, which is
to replace the fire tank. And you know, there's all this
(01:47):
flooding in Texas now. What we had some years ago, we
had a quite a remarkable storm that came and took 10 feet of
the Arroyo out of the side whereour fire tank was.
And now they realized we got another one of those.
We don't have a fire tank so. That was outrageous.
I I want to say that was about 12 years ago.
(02:07):
Sounds right. And Isaac and I were at the at
the mine shaft. And after the worst of the rain,
we decided to brave it and try to head up the up the hill.
And there was ball lightning. There was white water in the
arroyos, like they were full, full with white water, white,
(02:30):
white caps. And and yeah, that was that was
an outrageous rain. That was the year that the the
roads were all getting washed out in Colorado.
Yeah, I got stuck at 1 Arroyo once.
I watched 4 tires look pretty good go down and at least a cord
of firewood go right down the royal somewhere in Mexico now.
(02:53):
Yeah, yeah. Yes.
It's intense, The flash floods, yeah.
It sure can be. And yeah, you know what?
I, I came from back east, of course, where that wasn't a
thing. And it's, you have to have a
whole sort of a sensibility around that because you may not
be where the rain is and it can come fast.
(03:14):
And, you know, people think of it as all this water coming and
it's like, well, oh, it's just water, but it's not, it's moving
all of this lumber and anything that it can.
So you're actually got a lot of force coming behind a bunch of
solid objects. And so it's not just like a like
(03:35):
a white water river where it's mostly water.
This has got a lot of stuff in it.
And so so yeah, no, there's a whole, you know, you might not
want to pitch your tent on the nice flat spot.
That's kind of what comes out ofthat.
And yeah, those they're saying this flood in Texas and they're
(03:58):
saying this is like a once in 500 years flood.
We talk about the hundred year floodplains.
Yeah, I mean, they they had river rise like 26 feet and 45
minutes kind of stuff. See, that's, that's supernatural
stuff. Yeah, yeah.
So, so yeah, that's, that's I'm surprised actually that the
numbers are, are as as low as they are.
(04:22):
They're not. Well, yeah, I mean, really scary
what happened at that kids camp.And they're, I think they're
still missing a few, a few people.
Right. Well, you know what I'm
remembering some of these famousfloods through history and where
the numbers were, you know, I think 1 was particularly a mine
and they had up, they had a dam and they were holding back all
(04:45):
of this water. And when the dam failed, it came
roaring through in the middle ofthe night.
Just, you know, at, you know, more than 26 feet and more, you
know, faster than 45 minutes andnobody got out alive.
And there's still some some graphic photos about that where,
where it actually created like alittle Eddie pool up river from
(05:07):
one of the more stable bridges. And that's where you can really
see how it's all the stuff. It's not the water that's
necessarily the problem. The water is the force.
A a problem in and of itself andthen you have a debris on top of
it. And then it's carrying ten
buildings worth of building supplies at you with everything
(05:28):
else mixed in betweens. It's quite a phenomenon.
So but you know, we've had it. This is one of the things you
learn about in the water industry is the power of water
hammer. And I believe water hammer,
which is, which happens in a system when you, when you close
something really fast and you'vehad like a, if you have a bunch
(05:50):
of volume of water, which weighs, you know, 8.6 lbs per
gallon and it's moving with a certain velocity, it's just in,
in energy. That's incredible amount of
energy. And people don't know if they're
not trained that there is like ascience to how you, and it's
like breaking, like when you're bringing a locomotive into the
(06:13):
station, you don't just slam thebrakes on, you know, if there
are even breaks that could slam a locomotive, you know, because
what happens, all that force keeps moving.
And water hammer, I think they say, travels at like 750 miles
an hour. So that's a fast train.
And I've had other operators tell me about plants where
(06:36):
somebody upstream shut down a a main and the water hammer
somehow rebounded and knocked a massive pump straight off of
this big cement pedestal that itwas mounted on.
And we're not talking about. We're talking about pumps that
you and I could be pushing that we can't even get it to to
wiggle right. But this is just literally like
(06:57):
a locomotive train. But it's in this liquid form,
which is interesting. And it's a curious segue into
today's topic. OK.
Which today's topic I guess we had discussed before talking
about. And if you've listened to the
past couple episodes, people might have picked up that I've
been sort of borderline excited about reading Henry Henri
(07:21):
Bergson or Henry Bergson if you're American.
And he wrote a book sort of in response to Darwin's evolution,
books on evolution in his theoryof evolution, sort of updating
it. And Bergsen was like a celebrity
(07:42):
in his own day. But he's also French, hence the
name Henri. And so a lot of the Bergsen
splash didn't seem to really come across into American
philosophical circles, at least I I haven't come across it.
If it came in those days, it seemed to have passed away.
(08:05):
And I would surmise that the reason it passed away or became
sidelined, let's say, is becauseit was just too far ahead of its
time. You know, like some folks might
remember, we talked about Marshall Mcluhan when he went to
the publisher and the publisher of Understanding Media said
there's like 90% new ideas in here and the the public can't
tolerate that. So you got to dial it down to
(08:27):
like 10% new ideas. They can handle that.
And of course he didn't, thank God, but neither did Bergson.
And it's really interesting because he does it in a very
reasonable way, a very scientific way, referring
frequently to science that had been done largely botanical and
(08:51):
zoological science, trying to understand the relationships
between various plants and thereis their development and various
animals and some of those questions.
And but what he does is he he heends up using this very
reasonable argument to make an argument that we need to
(09:12):
reorganize entirely how we think.
And some folks may remember whenI've made reference to Ian
Mcgilchrist, I believe it's Dr. Ian Mcgilchrist.
He or Sir Ian Mcgilchrist, maybe, I don't know if you have
a Sir, if that bumps the doctor.But anyway, he talks about the
differences of affect in the brain and the different ways the
(09:35):
brain understands things. And one of his books about that
is called the Master and its Emissary.
And the idea is that our left brain is really, it should be
the emissary and not the master.That is the right, the the
logical and and not just, it's not that the right brain isn't
(10:00):
logical, but it's a logic from coherence rather than a, the
logic of separation and dissection.
And basically what, what Bergsendoes is, and I, and I still have
about 100 pages to go, but I'm, I'm, I think this is so
important and so much a represents A foundational step
(10:22):
for a new way of thinking that Ithink we should do a reading of
it and make that one of our things.
So that's something that folks can look forward to in the
future is, you know, and I've almost made my first reading and
one of the reasons is I'm anxious to read it again.
And so sometimes reading it out loud actually helps, you know,
(10:43):
to get that second level of things.
And but so, so basically he looks at the way that
consciousness arises and he makes the argument that the
consciousness that we the, the, the, the operating procedure of
our consciousness is based on a functionality that is focused on
(11:10):
manipulating things in 3D space.So it's bent towards what he
calls well, or what gets translated out of the French as
spatiality, which is a sensibility about dimensions in
space. And some folks might remember
(11:32):
the the the analogy that we madein the last episode.
I think it was where we really went into the record player and
we looked at some of the tricks that spatiality can play on our
perceptions in that. And also what he says is that we
(11:52):
have this intelligence that's focused on spatiality because
it's meant for to help us to manipulate things.
And, you know, he made the argument that we shouldn't be
called homo sapiens, we should be called homo FA bear because
of the route to fabricate. Because what we're really about
is making stuff or taking disorganized material and
(12:15):
organizing it to a state of higher organization to, to, to
make it serve another level of consciousness.
But so he goes through all of this and he he sort of looks at
how in our experience, we break things down or for example, we
(12:36):
take instantaneous snapshots of states rather than understanding
them as a fluidity. And that that's we're unaware
because that snapshot protocol really serves us in manipulating
stuff. He interestingly calls geometry
(13:01):
and an extreme case example, of course, of pure spatiality that
has that every every fact about it can be captured in a logical
spatiality. But that is the extreme case.
So, so he also talks about this idea of mind arising,
(13:25):
consciousness Co arising with the bodies that house them.
And you know, he, he's sort of the, the suppressed premise of
Darwinism is that creation movesfrom the bottom up.
And that's why it seemed like a logical step for Jeff, for Jeff
(13:49):
Moore and folks that didn't check that out.
We did a great conversation with, with Jeff Moore on, on
this chain of being idea and hisbook called the Infinite
Staircase, which is about that idea of the steps of the stair.
So, so this idea of Darwinism where things are purely
accidental, it, it is kind of a way to, to pitch the idea of
(14:13):
matter just increasing and increasing its complexity and
somehow generating consciousnessout of that, that higher forms
are built out of the accumulation of lower forms.
And we've spoken about those leaps that have to be made to
actually do that. But that's the suppressed
premise that all comes from. Look at how animals get in, you
(14:37):
know, influenced by their environment.
Well, he looks at a lot of thoseideas and comes away not with
not just with new conclusions about the external story, but
with new conclusions about the, the problems in having a
(15:00):
narrative that explains the external story lying in the way
we're thinking. And so the latter part of his
book, I, I made reference very early to, to the compulsion that
human consciousness has to thingify stuff.
And that's exactly the impulse that he talks about and he
(15:23):
explains it in great detail. And I think it's worth.
Going, I think, I think we touched on that in our last
episode, too. That's the same as what David
Bohm would call fragmentation. Yes, yes.
Or the same as what Levinus would call totalizing.
Right. And that it in that it's, it's
based on the the perfect perceptual warping that happens
(15:47):
with fragmentation. And that's why the interesting
thing David Bohm's, you know, Seminole work, the first word of
the title is wholeness, right? Wholeness and the implicant
order. And it's to me, without having
(16:08):
read the book, but understandinga little bit about his idea of
the implicant order largely fromsecond hand.
I find it curious and not insignificant that the first
word of the book, the first title word is wholeness.
Because we've talked about that dichotomy of being a part and
(16:28):
being and being a whole unto itself as a whole on from from
Wilbur. And that there is this dichotomy
and he unfolds that that is he being.
Bergsen unfolds that dichotomy at for its apparent dichotomy.
And he tries to give us that lifting up into the higher
(16:51):
dimension to look at the story of life and matter.
Life heads down the ladder. Matter heads up the ladder and
it's through this, but he does say some wonderful things like
the nature of everything is psychological first and then
(17:11):
that is in the biggest sense, not human psychological, but a
manifestation of consciousness and then it works through
matter. And he kind of, and so he's a
brilliant, brilliant arguments, but significant in that, you
know, he says that we are using the consciousness that was
designed by nature to be pragmatic and practical and
(17:38):
we're trying to apply that to speculative ends.
And that's the problem. These are not the appropriate
protocols for the types of ends that are beyond this pragmatic
manipulation of stuff. Speculative ends just.
(18:00):
I think it it might be worth describing what that means a
little more so. So using kind of the rational
mind to try to query and and answer questions that aren't
entirely rational. That's what you mean by
speculative. Well, they're not entirely
(18:22):
pragmatic. In other words, they're not
about manipulating the thing, they're about this like this new
mental idea. We're trying to understand the
thing in itself. We're trying to understand
beyond just the effects of the phenomena to some higher
questions of being or like that.And so when we start doing
(18:45):
metaphysics and I, I interestingly made a similar
argument when I was an undergraduate, and that was
that, that the, the, the reasoning system that makes
sense within, within the dimensions, what physicists call
the middle, the zone of middle dimensions, which is where
(19:08):
Newtonian mechanics works and makes sense.
But if we want us to understand the ultimate nature of the
cosmos or of, you know, the physical universe or a being
itself, we have to go outside ofthat zone of middle dimensions.
And the, the, the, the reasoningthat works in the zone of middle
(19:30):
dimensions is that pragmatic, what he calls intellect.
OK, So for, so for Bergsen, we have consciousness and life,
which he describes as a wave or as an explosion, right.
And like an explosion of the organization of matter into
(19:51):
these higher and higher forms like we've spoken about in the
the chain of being. And but that matter is always
pulling against it, always pulling against it.
And that intellect is our personal consciousness moving
towards matter. But what he calls intuition,
(20:14):
which will become significant ina few weeks.
When we talk more about Spinoza or Rook Spinoza, he talks about
intuition as intelligence moving.
Or consciousness moving home, moving where consciousness came
from and that intuition and intellect are actually opposite
(20:36):
directions. You know, Espinoza doesn't tell
us a lot about what he thinks intuition is, but but Bergson
makes a, you know, at least a quasi scientific argument that's
very consistent within his philosophy of how exactly that
the relation, that relationship works.
(20:56):
And so, you know, he he sees thefunction of our consciousness
through that fabrication impulseas life organizing matter to a
higher state of organization. And that's kind of what we do.
(21:17):
And you know, here I make stuff all the time, but I'd never
actually seen it in that, with that metaphysics before, that my
impulse to want to make something is actually the
impulse of life organizing matter out of a lower organized
(21:38):
state into a higher organized state.
And that that impulse is the same impulse that is organizing
matter in through evolution all around us.
And that and that, that makes sense.
Like that's what nature is showing us everywhere else.
(22:01):
But we have to start to be able to see flows.
We can't, we can't keep needing to freeze everything to try to
get at what it is because some things what they are is just so
not frozen that taking a frozen snapshot of it, what he calls an
instantaneous picture, very useful for manipulating things,
(22:24):
but not very useful to understand the the the
wholeness, right, which has to do with that flow.
It's not a, you know, a snapshotis like a cross section of a
living creature. You don't get the function of
the OR the, the creatureness outof a cross section of an animal,
(22:44):
right? Like a slice of olive loaf or
something, right? And so, but we have that
impulse. And So what he says is that we
don't let our intellect be guided by our intuition.
We let our intuition. That's exactly what now how many
years later, what Dr. Ian Mcgilchrist says, not from
(23:09):
philosophy, He says it from the science of studying the brain
and says, yeah, we seem to be wanting to use the brain this
way. And it seems like maybe it would
work much better if we used it this other way.
And here's Bergsen, many years before that, saying, you know, I
(23:30):
think we're not thinking this right.
And that if we keep thinking with that kind of brain and we
keep making instantaneous things, yeah, we'll keep getting
pieces and we'll keep getting tinier pieces, but we'll miss
wholeness. And that's part of what Boehm
represents is that, wait a minute, we bark down this alley,
(23:52):
we need to head back and start thinking differently.
And that's where the rubber meets the road.
And that's why the elegance of how this all just dovetails
nicely into one tidy bundle. Like, who could, who could have,
you know, we just happened on this, right?
This is the implicant order manifest explicating itself make
(24:16):
itself manifest. I wonder if we could rewind a
little bit and, you know, there there's probably, I'm guessing
for our listeners and, and for myself, it's relatively
straightforward to intuit what the difference might be between
(24:36):
the slicing that you're talking about.
You know, the cross section of the animal is a good
illustration of that. You you not only can you not
grok the animal from a cross section, but you can't grok its
life or its mind from a cross section.
When you when you mentioned flowas you know, being able to see
(24:59):
things outside of a cross section, that that is a little
more of a stretch to intuit and harder to come up with examples.
Do you think you could describe that a little more?
Like how? Like how might our thinking
change to accommodate that insight?
(25:21):
Well, one of the places that it really shows up is in our
understanding of the human body.For example, one of the Ahas
that I had when I read that excellent book by Booner on the
secret teachings of plants. It'll be in the show notes was
that in this came from recent physiological stuff, relatively
(25:43):
recent, you know, my second-halfof my life that the blood
doesn't just pump through the through the blood vessels like
water through the plumbing lines.
But then it actually spirals andthat it's spirals because there
are structures within the blood vessels that actually encourage
(26:05):
that spiraling. But on dissection, you those are
not there to be experienced the way that one of the ways that
that Chinese medicine works it by reading pulses.
You're you're tapping into a flow.
You're the image that we might have often in the West is of a
(26:28):
mechanical picture of the human body, but it it turns out that
we're the dimension that we're missing is exactly that
dimension that Bergson is talking about.
That is understanding that the body is actually made-up of a
bunch of flows. For example, what Booner talks
about in this book is that within the, I believe it's
(26:55):
within the either the heart or the aorta, there are three
distinct flows of blood. Not just blood spiraling, but
three distinct spiraling currents.
And that the body regulates the relative flows of those
(27:15):
currents. And that by regulating the flow
of 1 current against another, itcan actually generate friction
and heat and regulate body temperature by regulating the
the relative velocities of thoseflows.
And then of course we get into the fact that the blood has
(27:37):
iron, which are hematite, and soit actually is spinning charge.
And so it actually is a sort of an electronic field generator
generates electromagnetic field.And, but, but all of these
things have to do with the, the nature of the wholeness of the
(28:00):
Organism in its regulation of flows, not static.
You know, we want to, we want totake a blood sample and we want
to say, OK, this is in the bloodand this is in the blood and
this is in the blood. And that feels very static
somehow because this river has gone by and we've dipped a cup
(28:23):
in it and we're kind of looking at the stuff in the cup.
What we don't have in the cup isthe river.
And no matter how many discrete cups we might sample of the
river, we don't get the river. But the condition that we're
trying to understand is a condition of the river by taking
(28:44):
samples out. So how would how do we
understand that flow? We need to, we need a different
protocol somehow. And Bergson argues that this is
what intuition is. And I and I would connect it
with because we've had several philosophers ideas of intuition
go by in the in the podcast. And I would suggest that this is
(29:07):
this is that higher philosophical idea of intuition
as direct experiencing of the reality of a thing and not
needing a mediation. You know, if we go through a
reasonable chain and we have a therefore at the end, we weren't
experiencing the thing directly.We actually were experiencing
(29:27):
something that told us clues that we could put together
through a reasoning process and get the final conclusion.
And then that conclusion is reasonable if we were taking our
steps correctly all along the way.
Analytical philosophy, this is all what it's all about, but the
idea of intuition is just this direct seeing in and that that
(29:51):
the brain has a mechanism to do that, but we're not actually
operating it correctly. Which, you know, and then that
Bergson comes up with because what what's curious about this?
And the reason that I'm not the kind of a philosopher that says,
OK, it's all Aristotle and he got it all.
And I'm going to get into the drill, into the minutiae of
(30:11):
Aristotle or it's all about thisguy or that guy is is because
there is a a story to this all right.
And there is a process to our unfolding this that has its own
story. And so again, to take one
philosopher is to take one dip out of that stream of human
thought that Hegel called the the Phenomenology of Spirit,
(30:37):
right. That moves through, or this
ghost Geist that moves through, right?
And so one of the things that's interesting is when you start
hearing a bunch of people from abunch of different hermeneutical
bases saying very, very similar things.
You start to think that, OK, maybe these are some of the
(31:00):
bigger rules or the bigger Ahas to be had because it keeps
showing up in these relatively different locations and
relatively discreet models, cognitive models.
So. So I take a lot of truck in
that, as the old saying goes, when Aristotle and Confucius
(31:22):
agree on something, those are pretty different hermeneutical
bases from which to folks remember from our previous
episode. What I mean by a hermeneutical
base is your sense of the whole picture that you've accumulated
over your life is an ontologicalhermeneutical base, your
(31:43):
understanding of how things workso that when you get this piece,
you go, this piece fits in this way because I have all this
picture of things. Well, the the world view that
Confucius had, as in his ontological hermeneutical base
that he used to hold his pieces up against to measure and assess
them, was very different than Aristotle's.
(32:07):
And yet we find similar things coming out of it.
That's why in our conversation with Krishnan, I said, yeah,
it's very interesting the differences between East and
West. But what we really maybe ought
to not miss is the way that they're the same.
It's when your left eye and yourright eye agree on something
that you can trust it. And that's when you can find it
(32:29):
in space, right? And so we have that kind of a
function going on. And the differences are very
interesting also. But the sameness is it's like,
OK, you've heard this six different ways from Sunday, from
how many different sources and the things that line up, you
know, like, yeah, there is a, there is a point to being
virtuous and there is a developmental thing that's
(32:52):
happening. And, you know, there's a lot of
things that sort of distill out regardless of whose story we're
taking, you know? So those are things that are
worth looking at, you know. Yeah, I mean, this is similar a
similar question to the one I just asked about the difference
between slicing something up to examine it and trying to
(33:16):
experience its flow. Instead, when you talk about we
need to use our brain differently, you know, I'm
thinking of doing the cleaning up and waking up work that
complements the learning how to think work, right?
So there's like learning about cognitive biases and learning
about logic and things like thatthat work on, you know, one side
(33:40):
of the brain loosely and then getting shadow material surfaced
and integrated is working on theother side of the brain, say,
and having peak experiences thatthen inform you through the
possibility of peak experiences through the context that those
(34:00):
create meaning states of consciousness that so so that's
what I think of when when you say we need to use our brain
differently. But I'm wondering if Bergson
gives any clues about what he thinks, because I imagine a lot
of people read his stuff and then tried to think differently.
(34:21):
And in our very first ceremony together, you said something to
me that was it's not by thinking.
You paused in the middle of of singing, said it's not by
thinking, and then went right back to singing and well, how?
(34:41):
How can we intimate what it is about then?
I think there's two halves to it, analogous to the energetic
disciplines. 1 is taking off theemergency brake, getting the
thing out of the way. That's in the way, and the
second one then is powering up the motor, getting the thing
(35:05):
you're after to activate. Same.
More about both. Well, so this is a case where
the first job is telling is using the logical brain on
itself and basically having to tell.
It's like, it's like the famous Star Trek's where where Kirk
breaks the computer by catching it in a logical trap and it
(35:27):
can't, right? And you're telling the brain
that, OK, you have to understandlogically, that you can't
understand everything logically.And and Zen is all about
defeating that brain. Well, what's the sound of one
hand clapping wise ass, right, as if speaking to that left
(35:48):
sphere? And then there's the questions.
What do we do to really, you know, so that's kind of taking
off the emergency brakes. That's like trying to say, OK,
logical brain, you have to realize, you know, you think you
know everything, but you realizeyour prejudice, right?
Well, yeah, you realize that youjump to conclusions, right?
Well, yeah, You realize that you're extracting things out of
(36:11):
this whole melange and you're just picking out what you want,
right? Yeah.
Well, yeah, You know, so sometimes you got to just chill
the fuck out and, well, OK, but that does that alone.
Then what do you do? You just sit there.
That alone doesn't necessarily activate the intuitional
circuits. And that's this idea that I
(36:33):
think there's a lot of mystery around what that is.
But I think that the maybe the biggest clue in the end, what I
was probably pointing at with the it's not by thinking is that
what it is, is by experience andand thinking can interrupt
experience. That's what it does in the
(36:55):
martial arts setting, right? And I had said exactly that.
I said when I face an opponent, because I have all this time
body, I stand in front of them and I go, what that means that
there's an openness to experience there.
That means that I'm not filling in that space.
Well, who's going to want to fill in that space, that other
brain like it did when I was young and I was new and I was
(37:18):
inexperienced and it started just chattering away.
Well, what if he does that? What if he does this?
Is he right-handed? Is he left-handed?
I wonder if he's going to kick alot.
I wonder if he got, you know, I just want, how does he use
distance? How does he, you know, and after
a certain point, because I've done a thing not, not 100 times,
not 100 * 100 times, but 1000 * 1010 thousand times 10,000.
(37:42):
So now it can do itself through me, so I can trust in that.
So I can just stand there and go.
What? Just like a jazz musician who
knows his instrument intimately can just listen and just play.
If he starts thinking too much, that'll be a different circuit,
right? But what he wants to do is, and
(38:04):
they'll tell you about it. Well, I want to get in the
groove. Well, what is the groove?
It's a flow and I know that I know how to flow when I get that
flowing brain going. So I'm going to I'm going to
float into the into the flow by going what not filling it, not
(38:29):
positing it. So that's the emergency breaks
off. So now that you can actually see
what now you got to get the right wad in front of you to
see, That's the way I would put it.
Well, I can't say that this or that is necessarily this is
where your intuition and your yin will and your deeper feeling
(38:55):
for how life will reveal itself to you because there's a lot of
different ways that we have referred to before as
philosophical practices. But understanding your shadow
material, I would say it's part of taking the emergency brakes
off because what that shadow material is going to do is it's
just going to insert itself and it's just going to try to turn
(39:15):
everything its way. And, and you don't, you just
need to know that and identify it so you can get erase its
influence like noise cancelling headphones, right?
So, but that doesn't necessarilyput the right record on or the
right, what do we call it now? The right soundtrack on the
technological machine and we used to have these things they
(39:38):
were records. They would go around and you put
a needle on that's why I say records so, so so that it is a
different mode and there are things that make us shift mode.
And that's why in our conversation with with Krishna
and I was saying this type of knowledge may be dispositional
and not propositional. Propositional is thinking it's
(40:01):
running reason programs on propositions.
Dispositional is being so it it implies that there is a certain
experiencing that goes on and a certain interaction based on
that experience. And it's not saying the thinking
won't be you're that you're brain dead the whole time.
(40:23):
It's just that then thinking is the emissary.
It's not the master, right. So one of the things, well,
flower arranging, it's a great example of a doe.
Well, what the hell does flower?How is flower ranging going to
awaken that deep? Because there are certain
principles and certain things that if you follow them and you
(40:44):
open up to them, you'll go, Oh, well, that's that Aha
experience. That's direct seeing.
That's we want to call it intuition, but it's, we're
calling it intuition just because there's no reason you
didn't go and this and then that.
So then this means that. And so therefore, oh, that isn't
(41:05):
what happened. You saw in and you went, Oh,
that's what that's this new kindof perception that doesn't make
mediated by thinking, doesn't mean I was in a coma when it
happened. Doesn't mean that my thinking
brain was not running. It was just running in that
appropriate support emissary function for this other direct
(41:30):
experience of things. So now how do I really ride that
horse of direct experience everywhere it wants to go?
Well, that's when you start looking at different spiritual
disciplines with different eyes because you realize it's not
about a content payload, right? The content payload is just that
(41:52):
getting the getting the emergency brakes off, it's just
getting the garbage out of the way is polishing off the
windshield. You need to get to turn in the
key on the motor and actually steering down the road.
But that happens in that mode ofdirect experience, right?
That's what one of the reasons why the Zen Master hits you
'cause you're off going. Therefore they're like no, here
(42:18):
now, here now this 3 lbs of flaxin the very excrement experience
it. That's why he cut Gute's finger
off right, nothing more real. And here and now then boom, that
here experience here. And we just don't get because of
(42:40):
the perniciousness of that mind.That's what the the the
significance of his book, The master in the Emissary is to get
things that back in their right place because the emissary has
been, you know, the story of thethe sorcerer's apprentice,
right? When The Apprentice starts to
try to do the job of the sorcerer, necessarily things go
(43:00):
awry. So what Bergsen is telling us
is, look, all of this has gone awry, and that's why your
universe doesn't make any sense.And it appears paradoxical
because you've got the emissary trying to parade around like the
Master, and you have not empowered the Master to do that
which the Master does. And does does he have?
(43:25):
We got to see. I haven't finished the book yet.
So so you don't know if he has amethod or or at least some
advice. His advice is I, I, I skipped
ahead. I was joking.
I was joking about the book, andI looked at the last page and
the last word on the last page is Aristotle.
(43:49):
Is Aristotle. I was close.
Close, I guessed Finnegan. Yeah, I mean, it's with the
other end of the stick, but basically the same stick.
But what he was saying was that we'd, he was, he was giving a
final counsel admonition, I believe, because I only read
(44:11):
that last sentence. So this is what reading
Finnegan's Wake will do to you, right?
He was saying that he wanted that, that we needed at all
costs to avoid a new scholasticism, the same way that
the old world had set up an old,the old scholasticism around
Aristotle where we couldn't see past it because we were so
(44:34):
caught by this mentality, this way of thinking.
And how do we break 3? And that's what Bergsen's all
about. How do we break out of this?
And that the, IT is the explosion of life, you know, and
he, he literally talks about it as an explosion because the way
that life works both in plants and animals is it has this way
of storing up energy so that it can use it all at once.
(44:57):
And that using it all at once isthat explosion that he talks
about. And now there is summer and we
had all these great rains. There are grasses out there that
look exactly like those fireworks where it goes off in
all directions. And but it's a grass stem going
(45:18):
in all directions and it looks exactly like the explosion that
the firework is. And you can look at that and you
say, yeah, life is an explosion.Look, it's right there.
And and you know, of course lifeexplores every possible way to
explode, which becomes an important part of his argument
that it is. There isn't a finalism to it
(45:39):
because we aren't homing in on one good answer.
We're exploring all relevant possibilities and in that
interesting way that the the possibilistic universe of the
future interacts with the determined, deterministic,
(46:00):
determined universe of history before this moment and
everything stacking up to it right at that cutting edge in
between is how is that? Is this unfolding or bombs?
That's where the implicate becomes explicate.
That's where the hidden universebecomes manifest.
(46:23):
And, and, and the implications that are, is that that potential
is actually what humans are all about in this interface of meet,
wear and consciousness. And, and, and Bergson talks all
about this idea of consciousness.
I mean, it's quite, it's quite impressive.
(46:43):
And that's why I want to read itso that people have no excuse.
All they have to do is sit thereand push the thing and you'll
get this, this this great, great, reasonable geniuses
explanation of how to think about the explosion of life and
the relation of life to matter and the significance of
consciousness. Moving back to going back home,
(47:09):
right? OK, now there's got to be a 100
rock'n'roll references here, right, from Stevie Winwood.
And I can't find my way home to Uncle John's band, right?
He's going to lead us all home. And that is this idea.
And it's, it is a quasi religious one.
It's a quasi spiritual one. It's a, it's a social and, and
(47:33):
community based one because there is that idea that, that
Rhonda said that we're all just walking each other home, right?
And not that we don't get an elbow here and there on the way,
but there's still that idea thatthere is a journey and that that
journey transcends death, right?And because consciousness
(47:55):
transcends matter and so so yeah, a lot of just, it just
goes in. It's every which way there.
And it's all Finnegan's ladder. Some great lines in there.
One I want to come back to. Maybe we'll, we'll finish off on
this because the the explicationmight might have some momentum.
(48:20):
It's not the the kind of inspired place you ended up
about how we're going home and perhaps accompanying each other
home. And I think that's an experience
that everybody I know that's in some pursuit of consciousness is
having. I mean, it's certainly something
that that I've been looking for really actively since I was like
(48:42):
13. Like, I want to find my way
home, but going back to something you said, thinking
interrupts experience. And I don't know if I've ever
heard that put so succinctly that that kind of describes both
(49:04):
the limitations of thinking and also the the downside of relying
on it too heavily. And I wonder if there's there's
just more to be said about thinking interrupts experience
and and you know, kind of what are the sages have to say about
that? It's all about paying attention
(49:25):
and it's all about what you're paying attention to.
If you're paying attention to your thoughts, you're paying
attention to that inner world. You're not paying attention out
here. And for a martial artist, that's
a serious problem because probably you need all hands on
deck in the here and now on the,on the 3D, you know, and you
(49:48):
know, there I, when I, I've probably mentioned this before,
when I would be fighting sometimes one particular
occasion and Peter was watching and he said, oh, look, Mr.
Brian, he wants to talk about itbecause I would much rather work
it out that way than physically with this guy that I was
(50:08):
fighting. And but it, but it, that was
part of pointing at that, you know, you can't be paying
attention to the verbal world. You have to be a paying
attention to the, to the world where you're going to get
smacked in the nose. And that's what's so good about
that as a practice is because when you don't pay attention,
(50:28):
you may get smacked in the nose.It will happen eventually here
and there. You know your reptile brain is
going to learn this. Maybe ahead of the frontal lobe?
I mean, if nothing else outside of fighting the the universe
will find all kinds of ways to smack you in the nose when
you're not paying attention. The new universe is filled with
rolled up newspapers. There's no question about it.
(50:50):
And where one puts one's nose, you know, and how you know.
And this is all about that situational awareness and what
you're paying attention to. And you know, it seems like,
well, OK, we have all sorts of stuff to pay attention to.
And sometimes it, it isn't necessary to pay attention to
the outside world, but it's necessary for us.
(51:13):
This is part of the, the responsibility that comes with
consciousness, conscious of consciousness.
If you're not aware of where you're paying attention and the
quality of that attention, then you're not conscious of your
consciousness. And that means that you're
likely to be in danger of falling back into more animal
modes, more instinctual modes. Because in, in Bergson talks
(51:36):
about consciousness having to separate itself from instinct
originally. Cause instinct will do a lot of
a lot for us. And this is where I look at my
dogs. And because there's, they have
original thoughts. I will bite your nose now, all
right. But they also are very ruled by
instinct. So the movements that they can
(51:57):
perform and the ideas that they can have about things are locked
in instinct. And Bergson would say, well,
there one case where matter consciousness was trying to make
it out of matter, but matter 1 so consciousness didn't get much
light and instinct instead kind of holds it bound down to that
(52:18):
matter condition, but with humans.
And This is why humans are different than animals.
And this is where this whole idea of humans being built in
God's image being different thananimals is because in humans,
consciousness has succeeded to free itself.
And that's why I'm not impressedwhen people argue that they're
(52:38):
not that there's not free will. It's like, well, that's because
you're still you, you need to have more consciousness,
conscious of consciousness. And if you if you if you push
that more, you'd see that there is free will.
And that is the achievement, although you may not be using it
much. It's like maybe it's a feature
on the car, like you're heated seats and you never use them
(53:00):
because you're in a warm country.
I don't know could be, you know,what's that other rectified
seems to be a vaguely haunting mass appeal, but.
I don't know. No, that's from Incubus Drive.
Close. Right.
Yeah. But the idea that, you know,
what is he saying is I see that sometimes I let the fear take
(53:24):
the wheel and steer. Well, fear is more in that
instinctive direction. Sometimes I let matter win over
consciousness. And I see later on in the song
that when I don't do that, then my light is found right.
And there's of course, a long tradition of light being
associated with consciousness. And part of that happens is
(53:45):
because in experiences of higherconsciousness, your nervous
system that's used to running on110 is doing like 440 or 880.
And so your neural circuits and your optical circuits are just
charge, charge, charge. And so it shows up like white
light. That's what all the white light
nonsense is about. It isn't like someone standing
next to you is going to necessarily see white light or
(54:07):
something coming down from the end.
That's not what that's about, right?
Hyperstimulation of the nervous system.
And so, but so, so something unique has happened with humans
and there is something that the universe is trying to do, that
creation, that nature, that God be picked.
(54:27):
You know, if you want Spinoza's God or Moses's God, that's the
same story. It's trying to manifest.
And the counterweight to it is matter.
And that is that activation between heaven and earth, right?
Matter. And this is where, again, life
(54:48):
stores up energy to expend it quickly.
And the old name for live people, when someone wanted to
be poetic and they wanted to refer to both the living and the
dead, they would call them the quick and the dead, right?
So there's this idea that this that motion is, is associated
(55:10):
with the living, right. And so, so yeah, I mean this
just plugs in from a lot of different ways.
This idea of light, this idea ofmovement, sometimes the idea of
flight, all these things sort ofget associated with
consciousness trying to specialize something that is
(55:32):
fundamentally non spatial. I think I got from from some of
that. Also a clearer distinction
between instinct and intuition, which I think people conflate a
fair amount. I think when when people are
trying to connect to their intuition, they're looking for
that instinctual voice, which isnot useless by any stretch.
(55:56):
But but you're describing instinct as kind of like the the
very first rudiments of what Jeffrey Moore calls
consciousness, but that does nothave the capability yet to be
conscious of itself. Whereas intuition you you you
describe as a direct experience of knowledge without reasoning.
(56:19):
Those are pretty different ideas.
They are pretty different. Yeah.
Experiencing my own emotions directly is not intuition.
It's closer to instinct and something we used to call some
of those emotions. You know, there, there's been
all sorts of historical references to these things, but
(56:41):
you one of the old ways is to call them passions.
And the idea of a passion is that you can almost hear it in
there is that we are somehow passive and it has taken over so
that the the things that are typically associated pat as
passions are things that we havetrouble controlling ourselves,
(57:03):
whether it's whether it's for a lover or it's for rage.
Both of those are considered passions because our autonomy
seems to be somehow threatened by them.
Well, those are closer into thatinstinct direction.
And, you know, even though your dog loves you and knows that
(57:25):
you're the source of everything in its life and everything, you
know, if you pinch it, it's going to growl, right?
Or, you know, it'll have an instinctive reaction that's
wired in harder than the than the higher functions are.
And with humans, I think it goesevery, goes every way.
(57:45):
There are definitely, this is this idea that that I think
we've referred to again, this isone of the things that Aristotle
and, and Confucius agree on. And that is that that there's
work to be done to get to that, to become the, the, the
potential that you have to whether it's morally or
(58:08):
creatively or whatever. And you know who agrees with
this kind of his Spinoza? Because in the end of Spinoza's
ethics, he says something like everything that is rare and
excellent is also difficult. And he's talking about, you
know, he, he doesn't say a lot about what intuition is.
(58:29):
But for him, even who's very brass tacks kind of guy, right?
Spinoza's God is pretty much nature.
And it doesn't care whether yourteam wins the Pennant or the,
you know, the championship or not.
And you can play till your eyeball, pray till your eyeballs
bulge out. And Spinoza's God doesn't give a
(58:50):
toot because it's just it manifests itself in the laws of
nature. If the guy kicked the ball so
the other guy could catch it andthe other guy could run, then he
won. That's the that's as much as
God's going to have involved with it.
And that's why Einstein said he believed in the God of Spinoza
if he believed in any God. But Spinoza had this idea that
(59:11):
intuition was still the highest form of knowledge, that it was a
higher form of knowledge than reason, and but also that being
higher, it was rare, and that itwas one of these things.
Like anything that is rare and excellent, it is therefore
difficult and therefore some effort must be put in the way
(59:32):
that the Chinese classics put itis, they'll say, these things
are our inheritance, but we still must strive to attain
them. So there is a certain rightness
to our, an appropriateness to that development, but we still
have to exert something to move the boat along that course.
(59:55):
And and and you know what's related to that?
If you don't, then you end up with other results.
All right? If you don't follow that, then
actual results may vary significantly.
Yeah, cool. And that's my argument for
virtue once again. Yeah, still whipping the same
(01:00:18):
horse. Well, I'd be curious how the
last 100 pages of Bergsen go, and I'm excited that you're
you're offering to do a reading of it for our listeners.
That'll be fun. And yeah, I mean, these themes
keep coming back and informing each other, so I'm just curious
to see how it keeps unfolding. We have some fun guests coming
(01:00:39):
up too to help us with that. That really, really, again,
that's that serendipitousness, because we happen to have some
experts that have really drilleddown on really important parts.
I was thinking about the parts. Just think about these in
particular people. And the word crux came up and,
you know, this was another one of these delicious old Latin
(01:01:02):
words that nobody really uses anymore.
How many people are out there getting the crux of things?
For God's sakes? Good.
And what does crux mean? It means cross, and so it means
crossroad, right? So it's where where certain
important things intersect. Crosshairs, yeah.
Crosshairs too, I suppose. Yeah, on the target, right.
(01:01:24):
And so some of these people thatthey're that that that our
visitor are coming guests are are experts in were folks that
were geniuses sitting at the crux of their times in history
and real important pieces in thestory that we've told piece meal
over the past you know, 50 of nearly 60 episodes.
(01:01:48):
Yeah. That it's, it's telling itself
kind of through US, yeah. It really is.
It really is cool. Very well, Sir, and we will see
everybody next time around.
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