I totally agree. I love, love, love, that these two highly intelligent academic men are valuing the incredible truth that the grace of God allows poor, needy, hungry and thirsty souls to be changed, instantly into the person they were meant to be. I have been a fool for Christ for the last 50 years.

I loved this dialogue. Thank you both.

Someone said that as we develop into higher levels, "We must include and transcend" This involves inclusion of past wisdom, as we step into the novel and nascent. What we learn in our pre-tragic consciousness must be included as we transcend and transform into the post tragic consciousness.

Are you a THEIST? 🤔 If so, what are the reasons for your BELIEF in God? 🤓

For more on soul, spirit, future self, divine double have you watched the "Elusive I" series with Gregg Henriques, John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro? The whole series is valuable and builds the arguments, but episode 11 and 12 may interest you. kzfaq.info/sun/PLND1JCRq8Vui6TIS24xcDk5dsxSaIeN7T

@@orsonwajih thank you! I’ve watched the earliest episodes but not beyond. Grateful for your help! I’ll begin tonight.

A month late but Gurren Lagann? Never seen it myself but those quotes are famous. Enjoyed this comment.

@@crakhaed yes

Thanks Lee

But thar be Zeus Meat in them freezers.

1) When reintroducing perspectival and participatory types of knowledge into our conception of reason, how do we protect against a new form of reason that could potentially reinvigorate claims made by various dogmas that see things like Womens and LGBT rights as an absurdity/aberation of nature etc? Knowing your work, and based on my own intuitions/readings, the answer might lie in laying foundational principles of perspectival knowing and existential modes (akin to testing via Kantian universalising the imperative combined a Rawlsian-esque veil of ignorance) wherein we begin with foundational virtues of agapic love, compassion etc and that these must serve as some sort of litmus test against which other claims can be tested. Thus, there might be a newly rational insight gained via mystical experience but if it leads to a conclusion of propositional knowledge that runs counter to our virtues established in the foundational forms of knowledge (such as compassion) then it fails that test. In any new system of ethics/philosophy I feel it is incumbent on those of us that are its proponents to consider its potential for abuse by those for whom relatively recently-gained freedoms present some sort of threat. Particularly so when we see some of the ways in which your colleague Jordan Peterson’s work is being co-opted by the far right on social media.

2) How can we best make these claims about transcendence seem reasonable on a propositional level when encouraging others? Why I ask - whilst discussing Agnes Callard and the idea that rationality development requires self-transcendence it struck me that the process of entering into rationality development is easiest if our justification for doing so works both bottom up (it phenomenologically feels right in some sense) and also top down (insofar as it can be justified at least up to a minimum satisfactory standard by our existing propositional knowledge and beliefs). This is in part because we know naturally that engaging in transformative practises would require us to change and thus lose our current ‘self’, which is scary and requires vulnerability and therefore trust. Nobody, after all, wants to succumb to madness or fall into a cult! Take meditation for example: I, like many people, have been skeptical of meditation as just a bit of a quack’s pursuit that is boils down to just staying calm, but by reading books about the science of how meditation works and the demonstrable impact it has I was encouraged to give it sustained effort for a few weeks, noticed huge differences, learned more, then practiced more and so on until I created a sort of mutually reinforcing loop of the sort you mention in other videos. In AftMC you discuss relevance realisation being part of our embodied and enacted consciousness, and I wonder whether we have a deep-set will to flourish that inspires the realisation that we require a sort of processing (herein called rationality) that ties together our will to have better mastery of experienced existence, which we intrinsically know requires skills, which in turn are based on affordances and ultimately together provide data that can be stored as propositions. To clarify what I mean: Actor X is fleeing Actor Y, and comes to a crossroads. On one side is a bike next to a winding slope and the other is a direct set of stairs. Actor X takes the stairs and we see that as irrational because it looks clearer that taking the bike down the slope would be quicker. But X hasn’t seen a bike before so for them it isn’t rational because the slope is long and winding. However, then lets say they ask a friend (in prison) about that funny two-wheeled metal frame and one day in the yard they ask to be taught how to ride a bike, in the *then rational* knowledge that having this skill will help them to make a rational decision in a similar future situation. Importantly, taking the bike was always the rational decision to an outside observer but not for the individual who wasn’t aware how bikes worked. It also wouldn’t be if they knew about bikes but not how to ride one. However, if they had been told about bikes before they decided to rob a bank in a city with strange crossroads and an affinity for bicycles then they might have been tempted to try to learn. The underlying rationality is the will to provide your relevance realising machinery with as many useful affordances as possible, which is trained at a deep level in our participatory and perspectival knowledge, however propositional knowledge can make otherwise invisible or unthinkable options more accessible and break down the initial barrier to starting the transformative process. We know that there is a computationally explosive set of affordances available but also that we do not have access to many simply because we do not yet have the skills to identify them - hence it is rational to pursue the maximum optimal set of skills and propositions that allow for the realisation of our perspectival needs to afford the ultimate participatory experience.

3) Finally, I also wonder what the role is of directly observing the impact on how others manifest virtues through their individual conceptions of their divine double? For example, I see in my mother the most incredible reserves of patience, non-judgement and agapic love and can’t help but see that as a manifestation of her Christianity. Even more pertinently to my own practises, I observed for many years my paternal grandmother as having depths of calm , equanimity and non-propositional wisdom that simply astounded me and was a catalyst for my wanting to follow her footsteps in Buddhism. Both have ‘internalised the sage’ to use John’s language, and have over the past years inspired in me, the nontheistic grandchild, a reason and rationale to reconnect with spiritual practises and rituals that allow me to be guided by the clear successes in self transcendence they have achieved (although I suspect they’d both doubt this of themselves, as we each continue to climb our own unending mountain)

They are available online. Just search Dan Chiappe and John Vervaeke.

Very interesting. Need to think about that.

Yup. Well stated. In that way, it's an extraordinary existence.

Interesting. Somehow I assumed this link between the imaginary and the imaginal.