Guru Viking Podcast
Ep259: Questioning Enlightenment - Dr Justin Sledge 2
In this episode I am once again joined by Dr James Justin Sledge, a professor of philosophy and religion specialising in the Western Esoteric tradition and founder of the popular Esoterica Youtube channel.
Dr Sledge begins by explaining his position on enlightenment, why he’s not interested in becoming enlightened but still finds the concept interesting, and whether or not enlightenment claims are linked to traits of narcissistic personality disorder.
Dr Sledge also reveals his own ethical orientation, considers various theories of morality, the role of tradition vs subjective experience, and what he calls the ”meaning famine”.
Dr Sledge also takes aim at postmodernism and deconstructionism, retrieves the overlooked philosophers of antiquity and the Renaissance, and offers recommended reading lists for the autodidact interested in the esoteric.
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Video version: https://www.guruviking.com/podcast/ep259-questioning-enlightenment-dr-justin-sledge-2
Also available on Youtube, iTunes, & Spotify – search ‘Guru Viking Podcast’.
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Topics include:
00:00 - Intro
01:01 - Don’t want to be enlightened
02:20 - Belief, practice, and tradition
04:17 - Magick and the quest for power
06:42 - Judaism without belief in God
09:34 - Origins of moral authority
12:43 - Is belief in God necessary?
14:44 - Natural law and utilitarianism
16:07 - Dr Sledge’s personal ethics
16:40 - Virtue ethics
19:05 - The danger of existential questions
21:59 - Intellectual and spiritual hazing
22:31 - The meaning famine
25:35 - Dr Sledge on deconstruction and post-modernism
31:43 - Cancelling the canon
33:51 - Classics reading list for the autodidact
38:43 - Why get enlightened?
40:34 - Too lazy?
41:27 - Is enlightenment worth it?
44:48 - Enlightened narcissists
45:56 - Criticism of Dr Sledge
46:56 - Danger of unthinking fealty
50:05 - Questioning tradition and existential crisis
53:09 - Pros and cons of mystical experiences
57:27 - The mystic’s mistake
58:24 - Hyperfixation on baseline consciousness
59:42 - Hallucinations of the recently deceased
01:02:13 - Upsetting both sides
01:04:19 - Truth and other epistemologies
01:10:02 - Overlooked philosophers
01:12:05 - Telling the whole story of philosophy
01:13:25 - Dishonesty of academic philosophy
01:14:06 - Spiritual Renaissance philosophy and depriving
01:15:49 - The loss of awe and beauty
01:18:59 - Chasing awe with psychedelics, astronomy, and community
01:23:39 - Tactical religion and joining communities of value
01:27:19 - Huge influx of new converts to Judaism
01:28:43 - Recommended reading for Western Esotericism and overlooked philosophy
01:34:59 - Dr Sledge’s go-to book
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Previous episode with Dr Justin Sledge:
- https://www.guruviking.com/podcast/ep248-esoterica-academia-dr-justin-sledge
To find out more about Dr Justin Sledge, visit:
- https://www.justinsledge.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/@TheEsotericaChannel
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For more interviews, videos, and more visit:
- www.guruviking.com
Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James
- Duration:
- 1h 36m
- Broadcast on:
- 21 Jun 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
In this episode, I once again joined by Dr. Justin Sledge, a professor of philosophy and religion, specializing in the Western esoteric tradition, and founder of the popular Esoterica YouTube channel. Dr. Sledge begins by explaining his position on enlightenment, why he's not interested in becoming enlightened, but still finds the concept interesting, and whether or not enlightenment claims are linked to traits of narcissistic personality disorder. Dr. Sledge also reveals his own ethical orientation, considers various theories of morality, the role of tradition versus subjective experience, and what he calls the meaning famine. Dr. Sledge also takes aim at postmodernism and deconstructionism, retrieves the overlooked philosophers of antiquity and the Renaissance, and offers recommended reading lists, where the autodidact interested in the esoteric. So without further ado, Dr. Justin Sledge, enlightenment, salvation, gnosis. We left the last episode, I'm very delighted, by the way, to be speaking with you again. Thank you for agreeing to a sequel. No, I'm very glad to enjoy the conversation so much last time. I'm really glad that you want to have me back on. Thank you. Great. Well, we finished up last time with a bit of a cliffhanger, and I read a quote from your website about your view of salvation, enlightenment, gnosis, etc. And I'll read it again here. It's part of your FAQ section. And the question is, are you a practitioner of esotericism, magic, cabal, etc? And if not, why not? And the answer is no. I have religious reasons, but also I don't find the promises of such practices, nor the world you implied, interesting or tempting, salvation, enlightenment, gnosis, etc. Just don't interest me, personally, as spiritual goals, not to say that they aren't interesting concept as such. So there's quite a bit in there I'm curious about. Perhaps you could comment on that in general, but I'm also curious, you say you have religious reasons, but in the last episode, you also stated you don't believe in God. So that's very interesting. So I mean, there's much to say about this. So perhaps you could just begin by commenting on it, and then we can tease it apart. I guess I can comment on the first part about the religious reasons, is that we have this Christian obsession about belief that somehow what one does is inherently derivative of what one believes. And I think that's a very fundamentally Christian concept of how to understand the relationship of belief and practice. So one, I think those two things are logically separate. They do sometimes imply each other, but not a logical necessity. The fact that I don't believe in God doesn't have anything to do with the fact that I'm religious or not religious. Many people believe in God and aren't religious. So they don't they don't imply one another. But I think that the the rule for me is that tradition, when it's not just peer pressure from dead people, there's a lot of wisdom in it. There's a lot of wisdom in tradition. Traditions are how entire communities, especially oppressed communities were able to survive. It gave them tools and techniques and technologies by which to, you know, to to deal with the world around them and the world around them can be quite frightening and quite hostile. And so I take the wisdom of tradition very seriously, and I take the wisdom of my tradition very seriously. In one of the aspects of the Jewish tradition, is it puts real caps on what human beings should be up to. In the real caps about what you kind of questions you should ask, when you should ask them, and what time of your life you should be asking them, what you should aim for, what you should try to do, what you shouldn't try to do. And one of the the caps that Judaism puts on things is a cap around human power. Judaism has a real distrust of human power has a real distrust of human beings. Back in Judaism, the angels even argued that we shouldn't have existed in the first place. And the rabbis agree with that in general that human beings are kind of a mistake. And worse than human beings are human beings of the lust for power. And any human being with a lust for power is inherently to my mind untrustworthy. And I look at a lot of the magical traditions as a quest for power, a quest for domination, quest for getting some kind of supernatural trip or hack to get stuff, whether it's to get people to fall in love with you or to get rich by finding treasure or to get godlike powers. I just don't trust that impulse. And I think my tradition has given me very strong tools to say, don't go that way. If you want to get wealthy, get a job, do pernussive, make a living honestly. Don't use magic tricks to find very treasure. Do you want to get a girl to love you? Well, be a minge, be a good person. Like, don't use, you know, magic throughout anyway. So my sense of it in my tradition tells me that, and even the skull cap, right, the skull, we wear the skull cap to remind us if there's something above you, you are not the end of the world. The world does not end at the top of your head. You're not the top of the game. There's literally something sitting on top of you to remind you that you are not the top of the celestial hierarchy you're looking at. And the same reason why I wear the skull cap, the kipa, is to remind me, I'm not the main character of any of this. And I think that the impulse for magic and power and those kinds, that is the desire to be the main character. And I don't trust that desire. And I think my tradition for very good reasons has caps on that. So that's why I would say, you know, when people ask me, well, why don't you try to summon angels? I mean, I don't want to have anything if there are angels, which I don't know that there are, I don't think there are, but everything I've read about them terrified me. Why in the world would I presume that I have any right whatsoever, any sense of entitlement to be in contact with entities like that? It strikes me as insane hubris. And so my tradition says, no, don't do that. Don't do that. It's not it's not for you. And I take that very seriously. I think that is I think that very extremely powerful wisdom in that. So when I say I'm religious, it means that I'm accepting without experience at some level, the wisdom of my tradition. And my my tradition says, low-key-shoe don't do magic. Don't do it. So I trust it. And I think it's wise. People might be surprised to hear you talk about Judaism without belief in God or to refer to the wisdom of the tradition without accepting what at least the Wikipedia entry level understanding would suggest is the claim source of that wisdom. I guess again, I think that people get too tied up in what they believe and I my lack of belief doesn't doesn't I don't know doesn't seem to make me think that I should doubt the tradition. Now, of course, I should take the I should take the tradition with a critical eye like anything else and the tradition should have a vote and not a veto should should should inform my decisions and not not be a totalitarian thing. But I don't know. The question about whether the God exists or not, and this is a long tradition of Judaism, you know, there's even a line in the Talmud that says curse God to give charity. Like who cares if you hate God? It's not the point. Yeah, curse God, spit on God, but you need to give charity. Like you need to be a man should be a good person, do the right thing. So, so I love the this idea that belief in God is, is ambiguous in terms of motivating the right and wrong, the right and wrong actions in Judaism. I think that's a very Christian way of thinking about it, right? Just sort of prayed out, I believe in one God, the father almighty, the maker of heaven and earth have seen, and then everything is derivative about belief. Judaism says no, start with practice and maybe belief will come. Maybe it will or maybe it won't, but what matters is what you do, what matters is, are you doing this and this time and this way in the right way for the right motivations? And then maybe downstream of that belief will emerge, but it doesn't emerge. Doesn't the action doesn't emerge from the belief, the belief emerges from action, which is a very different orientation, I think, than most people in the West, who are typically in the more Christian orbit, orient that question. And so, and again, also, I would say that, you know, people ask, are you an atheist? I'm like, I'm not, I would consider myself a post theist. I think this question about belief needs to be decentered. It needs to be, but it needs to be decentered. And I think that atheism still centers the question of God. It's still a disbelief that that the center of what you believe. And I think, no, I'm just a post theist, and this, this question to me is, is actually very, a very little interest. Or it's only a very cerebral abstract interest, but it's not an interest in terms of how I live my life or what motivates me to do what I do or anything like that. I hope you'll forgive another easy and obvious question, but I think it's interesting. One of the ideas about an ostensibly theistic religion, like Christianity or Judaism, is that the moral authority or the authority of the, of the caps of the tradition, as you've described them, comes from ultimately that divine source somehow or another. That's the, the backstop. That's the, that's the authority underlying them. The tradition, if not then in a divine source from where do you derive that sense of authority in the tradition? I think that the authority regulates itself. I think that that's things like authority tradition, they're what Kant will call a regulative ideal. They're what we must believe in order to get morality off the ground or they're operative ideals without, without them, we don't function in the world. And so I like that the move that Kant makes and the first critique that says, is there God or is there not a God? Well, it's an antinomy. We're never going to prove it. We're never going to know the answer to that question. Logic only gets us so far and that it's never going to be resolved through, through logic. I don't think it's going to be resolved through any means, frankly. And insofar as it is philosophically unresolvable, then what we have to treat it as, as treated as a regulative ideal, sit it with free will. I'm fairly confident free will is not real. I don't think it is. I think there's good metaphysical, there's good physical reasons to believe it's not real. But if we're going to do ethics and we're going to live in the world, we experience it in a sufficiently persistent delusion as indistinguishable from reality to some significant degree. And insofar as we need something like free will to facilitate moral reasoning, we have to treat it as a regulative ideal. And so it has a transcendental function, even if it isn't, even if it isn't a transcendent reality. And so insofar as it functions transcendentally, as a regulative ideal, as a condition for the possibility of, let's say, ethics, then we must treat it as real. And I think Kant makes very compelling arguments for that in the first and second critiques. And I basically follow Kant in that argument. So in a pre critical metaphysics, yes, God is the backstop is the underwriter for things like ethics. I think in a post critical way of looking at religion, when you think of something like religion when the bounds of reason alone, I think that they have to function as regulative ideals and I basically follow Kant in his reasoning in that way. For some people, for some reason, people find that very unsatisfying, but I've always found it imminently reasonable. I don't know. Maybe that's what, again, this is a place where I'm very different than the vast majority of people, but I feel like it has sufficient metaphysical force to get the job done. Acting as if God is real. Not acting as if God is real, but that whether we like it or not, the character is certainly real. And the tradition and the community and the material reality that is derivative of that belief in a community is certainly real. And insofar as we are in those communities and in that reality, we have to deal with that derivative reality. And there's no escape from that system of symbols, of moral responsibilities, that community. I guess you could leave, but I don't want to. I like my community. And so it's not so much acting as if God is real, but living in a world in which belief in this character has yielded dividends, you have to live in the world of dividends. So you're in your relationship with this entity, whether you believe in them or not. Which is again why I just sidelined belief. I just find that it's, I find two things. One, I don't find it's actually a great motivator. Lots of people believe in God and do awful things. So it's not like, you know, it's not, it's clearly not a great motivator. And two, I don't find that the answer, that if I were to, if I were to have a different answer to the question of whether God is real or not, I don't know that he would change my life. In the sense that, you know, this old classic, you know, chop wood, carry water, then you get enlightened, chop wood and carry water. Well, I'm just going to chop wood and carry water. It seems like, you know, the relationship is totally transitive. So why does that middle part enlightenment know that there's a God or whatever? Why put, why put any emphasis on that middle thing, if on, on either side of that equation, you're doing the exact same thing. It seems like a, what we would call the Mississippi to little sugar for a dime. It doesn't seem worth it to me. Something I, I thought you might say that you didn't say with some sort of reference to what some people would refer to as natural law, since that while the proof of the morality's veracity is in, in its consequence when it's lived out or in the bad consequences that occur when it's straight from. That's another angle on it. I'm wondering what you think of, of that angle. Curious why you go to that. I don't go to it for the same reason that Kant doesn't go to it. You can't derive an alt from an is. So I think that, that, that, that naked utilitarianism doesn't work. So, so I think natural law doesn't work because you can't derive an alt from an is. I think Kant nails that. I think other people know that as well. So I just don't, I don't buy the natural law argument. I think it has, there's some features to it that are, that are pleasant. So I don't buy it logically. And then too, also I just don't accept utilitarianism. I don't think utilitarianism, I don't like it for all the reasons that everyone doesn't like it. There's lots of, when it works, it works. And when it doesn't work, though, then we're, sending the trolley down to kill people or whatever. You know, the truth of the matter is that in my day-to-day life, I'm a virtue ethicist. But when I'm, when I'm secretly honest with myself, I'm a Kantian. I think Kant nails it when it comes to ethics. I think the categorical imperative is correct. And I think he, he, he nails it. I just think that most of us can't possibly live up to that expectation. But the fact that we fail to do it doesn't mean it's not right. So I think that functionally I'm a virtue ethicist, but I'm a closet Kantian when it comes to, when it comes to ethics. Could you, it doesn't biguate that term virtue ethicist for us midwits, us muggles? Virtue ethics says, it's just the idea that the way that, the way that ethics actually works is that it's a, it's a cluster of various virtues that are constitutive of being, of being a good person. And so I think that, you know, Aristotle has his list of them. I think that they change over time. And I think that functionally, that the way that it caches out is that we live our life of the day, basically trying to be virtuous in the sense of, there are, you know, sets of virtues that, that we think accrue to us some type of moral value. And living up to those is, is what we, what we ought to do. Now, that's a hypothetical imperative. If you want to be virtuous and you should accrue the virtues, I think most people, including myself, never get much past that, because in the ask most people, they want to be virtuous. I think the answer is maybe. Most of us are kind of always telling my students, like most of us are not good people. And they, we don't like that idea because what we like to think of ourselves as good people. But most of us aren't. And I always get the example of my students. I'm like, well, who here is pro-slavery? And of course, none of my students raise their hand because no one would cop to the idea that they're pro-slavery in a public classroom. But then I asked them to look at the tag on the back of their clothes and ask them where their clothes come from, and how much you think the people that make your clothes make when they make them in Guatemala and Vietnam. And I'm like, do you want to really see the difference between sweatshops and slavery? I'm like, well, no, because they're basically the same thing. And I would say, yeah, well, you're perfectly fine with slavery as long as you don't have to confront it as long as the prices are cheap on your oranges that you get or whatever. We're perfectly content with slavery because most of us aren't good people. I'm not a good person. And so what we're left with is, can we accrue enough virtue to be good enough? And I think for most people, that's enough. Like, are you good enough to function in society to be virtuous enough? I think if we do that, we're doing quite well for ourselves. But I think what underwrites that is a commitment to things like logical consistency and the kind of stuff that goes ultimately into the categorical narrative and second critique of Kant. But yeah, are you courageous? Are you generous? Are you kind? etc. I wonder if you might say something more about some of the other caps of the tradition that you mentioned. For example, you said that it has suggestions or imperatives for the kind of questions to ask at certain times in life, or for the sorts of things one should aim for at certain times in life. I wonder if you might say something about those and any other caps that you find particularly meaningful. I think that there are good caps that the Judaism puts on existential questions. Like, why do I exist? What came before? There's a great line in the time that says, it's better not to be born than to think too much about what came before and what comes after. I always like that idea that Judaism just doesn't care about the afterlife, that concerning yourself with the afterlife is a bad idea in general. And so I've always found that to be a source of comfort, that I don't have to be motivated by the afterlife, and I don't have to worry too much about what came before me, and I don't need to worry too much about what's going to come after me. The world's going to keep turning, and I'm not the main character. Thank God. We being not on this planet is not going to make the earth not turn. So I think that people get themselves into quandaries when they at places in their life, where they're not in a mentally good place, when they're too young, and they began to contemplate questions that are too big and questions that fundamentally aren't going to change their life. And they let these questions wreck them emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. And I think often with no great outcomes, I don't, you know, I see the existential crisis people have and often they just end up a nihilist. And it certainly doesn't seem to militate better behavior, deeper relationships, or better sense of community. So I've often said, you know, you know, sometimes I'll get angsty and existential, and I'll think to myself, yeah, this is us, or this is forbidden to think about. And there's a great XKCD comic for one of the, there's a woman who's sitting in a chair, and the comic says like, you know, she says something like, why do I exist? And someone pulled out a super sucker, like a water gun says, oh, she's getting existential again. I love the idea that when we get existential, someone she shoot us with a water gun. And so yeah, I find these questions to be sometimes meaningless, honestly. And even when they're not meaningless, I don't know that they actually cash out or anything interesting or useful. And this is also the reason why I'm very skeptical of all this talk about enlightenment and no citizen. And all of this, it seems like a lot of work for not much difference. And the world are frankly not much difference in people. So I'm very, I'm pretty skeptical of it. Before we go to the subject of enlightenment, why do you think it is that this sort of an existential crisis is so valorised culturally? Particularly, I think, in intellectual circles that it's almost right of passage seems to be something that some educators aim to induce and see it as a necessary stage in breaking the student, I think, into it's spiritual hazing of a certain time, intellectual hazing. Yeah, I think that people who are hurt, hurt people, hurt people hurt people. And I think that part of the, and this is a conversation I've been having with John Varvaki in the, and sort of in secret, and we're about to start having this conversation in public. I think that modernism gave us a lot. It also left us bereft of a lot. And one of the things it left us bereft of are cohesive communities of value, which shares certain symbols and certain shared meaning. And the modernism broke that, it destroyed it, and proudly so. And, you know, when I think that that was very dangerous, I think it was an important step for those people to break out of their intellectual and spiritual prisons. But I think they threw the baby out with the bathwater and they left us very bereft of a lot of those technologies. And in the wake of being bereft of those technologies, many people experience a profound crisis of meaning. What I sometimes refer to as the, the meaning famine. And that meaning famine, which is very bad for many people, I think that people go through that, that meaning famine and they, because they suffer through it, they think that somehow it's important that other people suffer through it. And I don't think that there's inherently any value in suffering. I don't understand that logic. I don't think life is suffering. I don't believe that either, who gets that wrong. And I think that it's hazing. It's because my life is empty and meaningless, and I had to go through the sexual crisis, and you have to go through it, because we're all in the same boat. And my answer is, no, we don't have to go through this. We can build communities of meaning. We can build symbolic structures of meaning. We can cherish our lives and live good lives very full of what is meaningful. And there's no reason to have to go through that. And there's nothing glamorous or good about it. So yeah, I don't, I don't buy it at all. I think that there's lots of wisdom to be had from the traditions that wrestle with those questions, but SART and existentialism, I think are very powerful traditions. But meaninglessness is an option. And I think it's a choice. And I don't, I don't, I'm not going to indulge in that kind of like weird, masochistic stuff. It's never appealed to me, never understood it. And again, I think a lot of it's born out of nonsense questions, like, why do I exist? I don't think that question means anything. I think it's a meaningless question. And I think contemplating meaningless things, you know, do electric sheet dream of green dreams, screen for a co on or short story or whatever, but doesn't the sentence doesn't make any sense? Why contemplate meaningless sense? And I think one of the meaningless things that people tend to contemplating is things like why do I exist? I just, I don't under, I don't understand why people are wasting their time with those kinds of questions. I think another force against meaning is the momentum of deconstruction as an intellectual project, the idea that if you can deconstruct something, if you can poke holes in it, pull it apart, then you've conquered it, or you've transcended the need for it. I don't think that necessarily logically follows if you can take a table apart, you still need someone to put your coffee afterwards. So, you know, but on the other hand, that's quite a force too, I think, along with inducing existential crises, I think equipping students with the habit of deconstruction and a feeling of superiority that can come along with that. They don't necessarily, those things don't necessarily go hand to hand. I think deconstruction can be very useful indeed, but it can, it seems, can it perhaps run a little wild like fire in a, in a house in the hearth is useful, but fire through the, through the whole house is not good. I wonder about that. So, do you have any thoughts on that momentum of deconstruction and particularly intellectual spheres? Yeah, it's a hammer, right? It's a hammer that most people, you know, if you say hammer in the hand of a three-year-old and, you know, undergraduate students being taught Derrida and taught how to do engaging deconstruction without actually learning the tradition as a disaster and it is a disaster and it's led to an intellectual disaster, monumental portions in the West. I remember encountering deconstruction as an undergraduate and thinking like, what's a big deal about this? Like, why would anyone, like, it's clever? Like, man, and, and I guess I was also my sort of like working-class origins of like, I don't trust clever stuff. When I, when I meet clever people, you know, I'm like, I don't trust that. I don't trust that impulse. It's like, especially witty people. I'm like, eh, I don't know. It's something I have some distrust of. Yeah, deconstruction of postmodernism. I've, I think are, I, they're going to be careful painting with a broad brush, but I'd, if I could throw it all on the trash, I would. I don't think it's of, of much intellectual merit. I think it's, I think a lot of that deconstruction was born. It's a very French thing. It was born out of the failure of 1968 when the, the big uprisings happened in 1968 and there was a real hope in the world. The world would fundamentally change through whatever mechanism people thought the world was going to change. That failed. And I think the failure of that led to extreme intellectual nihilism and the, the gutter of that was deconstruction. And then that, that became fashionable in French intellectual circles. And for whatever reason, a bunch of Americans at Yale and other places in the UK as well, followed that fashion. And I think that it's a gutter fashion that ultimately is, it results in nihilism. And I don't get, whether it's Foucault or Derrida or Baudrillard, that whole clique of people that for whatever reason became intellectual, the intellectual fashion of the 1990s and 2000s. I think it was really easy in the 80s and 90s and 2000s to be a nihilist, because like things were pretty good. Like the 90s was like a pretty good time. You, you could, you know, the 80s was still a time where you could, you could work a good job, make enough money and buy a house. And you weren't totally living in the threat of nuclear annihilation anymore because so union was coming apart. And materially, things were getting better for a lot of people, working class people in some ways, and depending on where you are, obviously. I don't think we can, I don't think we're, we're staring down the barrel of fascism and climate change. It's going to disrupt the world in ways we can't imagine yet. We don't have the luxury of nihilism anymore. This is not the 90s. And so I really blame that intellectual generation of indulging in intellectual nihilism and deconstruction and equipping young minds to tear a world apart that was already coming apart to tear it apart intellectually and giving them no tools by which to build meaning and then being cynical about the possibility of meaning. That oh meaning is silly, like we live in a world that's, you know, how can you be religious? How can you believe in anything? Because everything could be deconstructed. It was a disaster. And it is, I think it's killed, frankly. I think it is, it is caused intellectual debasement to the point, to the point where I think it's actually caused real harm in people's lives. Young men, especially, I think it's, they really hurt them a lot. Young women too. But young men, I think it's, I think the crisis of meaning has led to a lot of these gurus, like George, like Peterson and even this, whatever the guy, whatever the guy in Romania is, Tate. It's led to these horrifying gurus and their people are so profoundly bereft of meaning in their lives that they'll turn to anything. These cults, I think, really. And it's really terrible. I remember in undergraduate this stuff being fashionable, and it being fashionable just to tear things down. And it was clever to show how, you know, how to deconstruct a book or whatever. I'm like, yeah, but then you're bereft of the beauty of that. And do you really want to live in that world where you're clever and beauty is destroyed and meaning is destroyed? And what you're left with is the, you're the king of the ruins. Yeah, I have no, that project has always struck me as, I don't know, it's a, it's a kind of an intellectual accelerationism that doesn't strike me as, it doesn't strike me as good and doesn't strike me as it actually is, especially clever, frankly. It's like someone blowing their house up and then trying to look clever on the top of the ruins. That person's not terribly clever, are they? I wonder if it's the critical deconstruction itself or the implication that sometimes goes along with it, although I don't need necessarily, that if you can do it, then you don't need the thing anymore. You mentioned that if you're taught deconstruction before you're taught or or even just without also being taught at some point, what you refer to as the tradition or or a canon or whatever, some sort of foundational basis of something. Then you've got one, you've got, you've got one side but not the other. Yeah, you can't, you're teaching people to deconstruct the Iliad and to cancel it because it's violent, which is another part of this deconstruction culture, I think, is this sort of like, let's cancel things we don't like or offend our sensibilities or whatever. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a titanic disaster. And like you said, I think it ultimately leads to the fact that you don't have to think anymore. You can just like wave around your cancellation and you can wear your, the fact that you don't read the Iliad because it's violent and bad and you can wear that as a, as a, as a badge of honor or something. It's a, it's a kind of anti-intellectualism that I think is extremely toxic. Yeah, that is an odd outcome of one's intellectual triumph that, to declare, I haven't read the Iliad because I'm moral, because I'm virtuous, I haven't. Yeah, and I won't. Yeah, yeah. I no rely on YouTube. No, no, no one should. And we will cancel all the dead black guys and you know, et cetera. And again, when you read, again, if you and when you read people like Fanon, you know, who I've written on Fanon, I think that's not the, that's not what their project is, you know, that's not what they're up to. But again, the, the gutter of it is this fanatical anti-intellectualism, which I think it's, I don't have any appreciation for that. But yeah, also like, yeah, I find, I find a lot of that culture to be, to be terribly misguided and self-depriving ultimately. I wonder if we might take a little bit of our own medicine in that case. And if you might recommend, I know you're a champion of order, didx, and education, broadly available, not just sequestered in expensive elite places and that sort of thing. So if somebody said, huh, I actually quite like to start to read, start to learn about the thing that's being deconstructed, the thing that I wasn't taught, or the thing that isn't being taught, or if I went to university, I wouldn't be taught. This tradition, this canon, or that you're alluding to, how would you recommend, what would you recommend an order guide act do if they wanted to begin to get in contact with that? I mean, Harvard has the great books collection. There's a great book selection. I think we'll put out by the Encyclopedia Britannica. You can buy that entire collection for 100 bucks. I think it's like 30 volumes. And if you spent the rest of your life just reading those books, you would be intellectually far better off than most people come out of philosophy departments and literature departments. I mean, if you just spent the rest of your life reading Shakespeare, I think it was Karl Marx that said that everything he needs to know about human nature, he could learn Shakespeare. There you go. I think I think literally you could confine. You could you could sequester yourself and just read Shakespeare and you'd probably come out intellectually superior to people who spend their time deconstructing whatever. I mean, yeah, I so yeah, I I'm a very boring traditionalist becomes the stuff like there's a reason why classics are classics. They reveal something profound about the human experience about human nature. They reveal something profound about love and beauty and suffering and trauma. I mean, the Iliad teaches us profoundly about the reality of violence and trauma. We have to be exposed to those things because they're part of life. Yeah, in the same way that the touristy places are touristy places for a reason. This is like people going to Paris and looking down their nose because they're not they're not going to go life or tower because it's a tourist trap. I'm like, it's a tourist trap for a reason. Like the fact that you don't like that because you're like fancy and better than you're just cutting off your nose despite your face. And I think that people who look down their nose at the classics like Shakespeare or the Iliad or the Divine Comedy or what have you. Yeah, I think that, like I said, for Autodidex, you can go on eBay right now and you can buy the complete great books collection. I think put out in fact, they put it out every year. So there's just dozens and dozens and dozens of complete copies about a whole set for my my niece. I think I got it for $190. If you can spend $200 on all the kinds of things that we waste our money on, you can buy the greatest collection basically of of world literature. And if you spent the rest of your life just reading that, I do think you'd be better educated, more rail rounded, more thoughtful, better read, than anyone sitting around reading postmodern French philosophy. You know, the great thing about those books, that great books of the Western world and Psychopaedic book, Channinger series, put together by Adler and Co from University of Chicago, is that they're the kind of books people buy. They're like exercise equipment. They're the kind of books that people buy and never read. Just like the traditional. So what that means, the good thing about that is that if you do get a second hand copy on eBay, there's a pretty high chance those books have never been opened, even if they're from 40 or 50 years ago. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And again, at least the previous generation still had the wherewithal to have them. You know, like it shows you how bad things have gotten for it. Now it's even having them is somehow, you know, a shame, like how there you have all the books by all those dead white guys, at least a generation or two ago, you know, the idea was at least you had to have them to show that you were trying to have some connection to the classics. And I'm not saying we should not be reading, you know, other, Chinese literature, Indian literature, African literature, of course, we should be reading that stuff. But, you know, am I going to tell you to go buy a $400 copy of the Rigveda? That's the best edition out there. Sure. If you can afford that. Yeah, go, we should study all this stuff. But I think there's a handful of classic steps to Western texts that we should all appreciate. And we should appreciate them not just because someone has declared them to be worthwhile, because I think there's real wisdom. And I think they've survived for a reason. And they haven't survived just because a bunch of people said they're good. I think that there's real wisdom, we're a wisdom to be added. They're not exhaustive with wisdom, obviously, but they are. There's certainly wisdom in them. So let's talk a bit about enlightenment, then. Of course, there are many different advertisements. There are many different ideas of what that is. And you said that this idea, chop wood, carry water, and then you get enlightened, and then you chop wood, carry water. What happens after enlightenment is the question? Well, same thing that happened before, actually, except now you're enlightened. So presumably, it's different. And sometimes that difference is described as being in a dream. If you were in a dream, you take the dream to be real in a certain way. And then enlightenment is like recognizing your dreaming. And you still dream, but now you're lucid. Now you're aware of your dreaming. So you relate to the dream in a different way, that tiger that's chasing you, or maybe I don't know, dare dies chasing you, whatever. And suddenly it seems very, very serious. And then you realize that it's just a dream. And now you can relate to that dream differently. So that's one way. Sometimes enlightenment is thought of as waking up from a dream. Other times, enlightenment is thought of as waking up in the dream. So you're still chopping wood and carrying water, but there's something quite different about it. And people seem to really prize that. I wonder if you might comment on the way I presented that. And yeah, also, I'll add one other thing to the mix, which is last time when we were discussing this a little bit towards the end of the interview, I asked you, if you think people have actually achieved enlightenment, and you said you think they have. So that's another interesting data point. Of course, what enlightenment? So I'm wanting to put my comment on all that setup. So I guess the first thing is that it's so the two things. One, I'm just very lazy when it comes to this. And it seems like a lot of what it takes to be enlightened. It's just a lot of work. I'm not doing I'm just not going to do that. I'm not going to spend my life doing it. Just not going to spend eight hours a day meditating. I'm not going to. I'm just not. I got other things to do. Like, I have other things that I do in my life that. And so if it if the task of getting enlightened is being in a monastery on top of a mountain and that's written out to my whole life and sit around and eat bowls of rice and live in a monastery or, you know, sing chants all day or whatever, it's not going to do that. That just I look, I just look at that in a way and think, no, just like to like, it's just too much work. So it's just like, I'm just going to be lazy and not do that. The second part of it is, if this is a dream or what have you, it's a persistent enough dream that no amount of anyone being enlightened in history has changed the dream much. Like, no one's reversed gravity. No one's changed the way neutrons work. No one's like, no, no person's enlightenment or even the sum total of everyone who's ever been enlightened has not made a much of a dent in the way the sun works or the way the black holes work or the way that Andromeda is going to collide with our the Milky Way at some point. And that's going to this galaxy and that's going to like, fundamentally, it just seems to have no impact on reality. Now, it seems to have a lot of impact on people's lives. And in that reality, that seems to obviously, that's very important and influential. But it just seemed like for such a titanic thing and for such hard work that people put into it, it seems to be a very little consequence ultimately. And so when I look at it, when I look at all the work that goes into it, and I look at the actual outcomes and the consequences of it, it doesn't seem appealing to me. And I've met lots of decent people who seem to leave very good lives who are very kind people who have always been kind people. I'm thinking of a particular woman from our congregation who she's the daughter of Holocaust survivors. And she's just the most wonderful one of the most wonderful people that I know and being in her presence, just like, she's just lovely. It's a lovely person. And I don't think that she would claim to be enlightened. I don't think she'd ever done anything to be enlightened. She's just an Ashkenazi Jew is just a good person. And I've met other people who claim to be enlightened and they're horrible, horrible people. I think of all those like monks that were enlightened and they went off to the Crusades to kill people or all those Zen monks in Japan who were happy to crash themselves and become kamikaze pilots or whatever. So I guess when I look at it, it seems like a lot of work and it doesn't seem to have a lot of outcomes and it doesn't even seem to make you an especially good person. You know, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernardo Clairvo, probably some of those powerful mystics in the Western tradition, enthusiastically supported the Inquisition, enthusiastically supported the Crusades. They sent thousands of people to their death, horrible death, far away from their homes, in the interest of killing people they had never met, to reclaim land that they had never been to. And if that's the end goal, if that's what comes out of enlightenment, I mean, I'll pass. I'll be on enlightened. Now chop wood, carry water. Now I'm fine with that. I'll carry on. I'll keep educating. I'll keep doing what I'm doing, raising my kids the best I can. But I don't see that at the end of the day, it caches out in anything. Yeah, a lot of work doesn't seem to be of huge consequence and it doesn't seem to make people better people. And when you, to me, when you add all that up, it's a lot of work, doesn't seem to change the world fundamentally, and it doesn't produce good people. Why in the world? It boggles my mind. And it's funny because when I say that, I say, I'm kind of like not interested in enlightenment. People get offended. But they sometimes get angry, which is a funny thing to become angry at. But this is why I think one can have it. One can have the experience of enlightenment. And I think there's even data to be shown that people who, this is in the wellness community, people for whom enlightenment and these kinds of things are top priority. It's actually a good predictor for narcissistic behavior and narcissistic personality stuff. There have been studies that have been shown this. And that's my experience overwhelmingly. It's the people who claim to be on that path and to be toxic narcissistic people. Not always, but I definitely met my share of those people. So yeah, just like, even as a predictor, it doesn't seem even as a predictor of behavior and personality. I find it to be untrustworthy and I'm very skeptical, very skeptical of it. So yeah, people who meditate a lot. I like, worry about that. When people get offended and they react with anger, what's the response usually when they say something back to you, what's their rebuttal? Oh, it's this that I'm not enlightened. So you don't know what you're talking about? You're not enlightened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who are you to say? Who are you to say? It's you know, it's like a blind person saying they don't like colors. Or the colors aren't real or something like that, which I wouldn't say colors aren't real. I do believe people have experiences of being enlightened. I do think that that happens. Clearly it happens. But yeah, to me, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. And it's as simple as that for me. People can claim to be enlightened. They can claim to have magic powers. They can claim to be, well, have God on speed dial. And when the result of it is kamikaze pilots and inquisitions, like really, that's that's that's what it caches out into. I'll pass. I wonder if the same critique could be made about lots of things, education, for example, or fealty to tradition or one's group. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's why I would say again, the tradition should have a vote, not a veto. When when traditions are peer pressure from dead people, when political ideologies can't be questioned, when we're told that not thinking is a virtue and that our behaviors can be justified because of some higher order justification, whether it's the the political suspension of the ethical or the religious suspension of the ethical. When we're told not to think and that that behavior is justified on some higher order register, slam on the brakes, slam on the brakes as hard as you can. So truth, yeah, I I totally agree. I, I think that when when when fealty to belief systems and fealty ideologies or fealty tradition become a mechanism by which to not think and to not think critically and to get away with bad behavior. Yeah, no, slam the brakes. Slam the brakes in the name of want in the in the just in the idea of thinking. That's again, like when you're told not to think that's a great time to start. When you're told that you can't question, that's a great time to start. Um, and it may mean that you keep doing the same thing. It may it may very well mean that, you know, sure, like I thought about this and so I don't get so I don't get set with people, you know, or I sometimes people like, how can you be in community with people who don't share your metaphysical beliefs? Um, then like easily, because if they're sharing those if they have beliefs at a different than mine, they come to them from a reasonable position of criticism, then I can respect, I can respect them because they're doing the work of thinking even if where they come to is very different than where I come to. I can at least trust at some level that we can engage in a dialogue because they're, they're engaging in an ongoing process of reconstituting how they're living their life and what they're thinking about. What I can't do is a person who is simply dogmatic about something and thought is no longer there and therefore they're simply doing what what they're told I can't do. What can you do with that? But yeah, I think that when we're told not to think about the question, and again, this is a funny place because when you're when we question the value of enlightenment and people get angry or people get upset about it and that tells me instantly, ah, I'm on to something. That when it's the unquestionable things, those are the things that lie at my interests. I've got some other topics to go to as well, so we're not going to do this forever but it's very interesting indeed. What's the difference between the kind of injunction not to think that you're pushing back on here and the injunction not to say ask questions about why one exists and things that you had previously said were good from say the tradition of Judaism. What's the difference between those two embargo on investigation? I think that I think that the difference between them is that that questioning a tradition should be obvious why one should be able to do that. It's just what we've inherited and what we've inherited just because we've inherited doesn't make it right or wrong. I think that the wisdom of questioning these big existential questions, it's less of an embargo on on questioning them but more I think pointing out that that the questions are meaningless. And so I think it's to say, look, let me do let me do you a favor and let you know in the front end these questions don't actually mean the thing and that they're nonsense questions. And so I think that it's just sort of a shortcut for that but again what I ever tell a student who's having an existential crisis to stop. No, like, okay, let's figure out the tools by which to think through this but whatever or try to induce that in a person? Oh god no. Yeah, it's abusive and frankly. So yeah, and this is again, there's a whole tradition of this whether it's in the east with things like coons or in the west with something like existentialism. I don't know. I don't have much of an interest in and throwing fuel in the fire of nihilism without the, you know, and again this is the difference between coons and other kinds of things like the vanity of the world, the vanity tradition of the west, the vanity tradition in the west and the co-on tradition and the east and things like that, they did that because on the other side of it, there was a community of people building meaning. Like it was part of a process by which you came up the other side and a community of people supporting you through meaning. That doesn't exist anymore. It's just like the vanity tradition bereft of any community to support you. And so what you're left is just staring at the skull knowing that, you know, as I am, he is and as he is, I will be and that's it. But I think that's an incredibly dangerous position to put ourselves in. And it's a dangerous thing to do again, like I said, I think it's abusive for teachers to do that to students. Because you punch the clock and go home and they go back to their dorms and cry and take trouble. You know, it's, yeah, it's not like I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a, yeah, I think it's a bad, I think it's, I think it's dangerous. It's very interesting indeed. Another argument that people might respond with, category of argument is argument from their own subjective experience. Their own mystical experience, for example, the classic one is I know God's real, he talks to me every day. Or, you know, you may laugh, of course, I'm being, I'm being slightly sort of facetious about it in a way or humorous about it. But, or, as you said before, well, I am enlightened or I have tasted level one of sex or whatever. And it's real, I know it's real because I've experienced it for myself. And that, what higher category of truth could there possibly be than that, which I verify with my own experience? So that's, that's a sort of type of argument. And you yourself have had mystical experiences, I'll quote you from your FAQ. The question is, have you ever had a mystical experience or a paranormal experience? And your answer is, I've had what I would call mystical experiences during meditation practice and under the influence of psychedelic drugs. I don't think such experiences are indicative of further metaphysical truths. I've never had an experience that I would consider supernatural or paranormal, I would like to. So, what do you make of this type of argument? What do you, how do you see this sense of the subjective experience of God or enlightenment or something like that, being sort of the ultimate? Yeah, I think that mystical experiences are very, they can be a very important epistemic value to the person having them. But they, I think that there are of no veritable, because they can't be otherwise tested. And I think it frankly experiences of all the metrics by which we have to vet the reality of something. I am the most skeptical of individuated experience. I think it is highly untrustworthy. I think there's overwhelming evidence to indicate how untrustworthy experience is, whether it's memory or cognition or even the site that I'm having now, binocular visions of persistent optical illusion. So, I'm very skeptical of arguments from experience. And I think that there's overwhelming empirical data to show that experience is untrustworthy. Now, I would never deny anyone their experience. I would never say you didn't have that experience. That's categorically stupid and hubristic on the, on the, on the extreme. What I would say is that something of being of high epistemic value to me doesn't extend to anyone else. That is to say, we shouldn't engage in epistemic imperialism, but because I experienced something, it must be true and therefore you should experience it as well. And it's a silly saying, because I love someone a whole lot, you should too. This book has I have an experience of something doesn't mean that you should have to have that experience of it. It also doesn't mean that that experience is true. People have all kinds of delusional experiences. You know, I'm sure we've all experienced our cell phone vibrating in our pocket only to check it. It didn't vibrate. It was an illusion. So, yeah, I think that mystical experiences are clearly happening to people, lots of people, probably more frequently than we were willing to admit, I think hallucinations happen more frequently than we were willing to admit. I think we have a hyper fixation on, on baseline consciousness, which I think is foolish. But yeah, I think these, these kind of limit experiences happen much more frequently than we were willing to admit. And I think they can be very, very, very powerful. I would also say that those experiences being had under psychedelic influences are also very powerful and are fundamentally not different than them being had and non psychedelic experiences. I don't, I don't, I neither privilege nor shame, the value of psychedelic experiences. But I think that none of them, no experience, ipso facto, is a, is a final metric for the, the verticality of any metaphysical claims, derivative of those experiences, mine or anyone. And I think that again, I would say further that when we, when we, when we make the leap outside of that, it's what I would call epistemic imperialism, because I experienced it as true, must be true for everyone. And therefore, I can begin to do, to, to do objective truths from that experience. I think you're, I think no one's entitled to that move. Shinseng Yang calls that the mystics mistake. The mystic has a experience of being one with everything, for example, to use, you know, very loose term. And so then the mystic thinks that everything is one. Yeah. Yeah. And again, I've had, I've had those experiences, the oceanic experience in these, and they're profound. But also, you know, I, you know, experience God, psychedelic states, I'm like, okay, God, it's great that I'm, you know, chatting with you on 500 micrograms of LSD, you show up tomorrow. God never shows up. It's very inconvenient. But what do you mean by hyper fixation on baseline consciousness that you feel we have, we have a hyper fixation on baseline consciousness? I think we have, we've inherited, and this is, again, one of the tragedies of modernism, that we have this idea that human beings are by default rational actors and baseline consciousness is the default, that is to say, like sober, everyday consciousness that is, you know, the sort of normative of a certain, you know, majority of people. I think we've fixated on that. We, we, we save that because that is statistically normal. That is also ideal. And anything outside of that is pathological somehow. That's a real, that it's objectively wrong. One, and two, I think it wanted, it really does great harm to people who are not neuro, who are neurodivergent, with which that is a sizable chunk of the population. I think it, there's an ethical idea baked into that, whether we like it or not, that somehow if you're outside of those parameters of baseline consciousness, somehow you're morally bad. Man, this is why we treat mentally ill people, that somehow they're bad. They need to be warehouse or treated or fixed. I think that's a terrible way of thinking about consciousness. And I think it also marginalizes people for whom, what we will call hallucination, which I don't like that term, but for whom hallucination and other kinds of experiences that outside of that baseline are common. And I think it also makes us live in a sort of a schizophrenic reality, where we have to deny that we're having these experiences quite frequently. And so I'll give an example of grief hallucinations. The vast majority of people experience grief hallucinations. That is to say, within 24 to 48 hours after losing an important person, the person dying, most people, overwhelming majority in these studies, reports smelling them, hearing them, seeing them experiencing the person they're grieving. And most people experience this as overwhelmingly positive in an overwhelming important part of the grieving process. The fact that we can't talk about that publicly without being deemed mentally ill or crazy or you believe in ghosts or whatever is extremely toxic. And so I think we have to be willing to be open to the possibility that the human baseline experience is actually a much broader bandwidth or something. And we need to be much more comfortable talking about the much further range of human experiences when it comes to things outside of that, outside of that. And absolutely, we need to shell this, I think, toxic enlightenment idea that anything outside of a certain kind of rational engagement with reality, or even internally, the idea that there's a baseline rationalism, anything outside of that is somehow deviant or bad, morally speaking, all of that needs to be shelved. I think as much as I love the enlightenment, as much as I deeply committed to the enlightenment, I think there are real mistakes the enlightenment made, and I think that's absolutely one of them. So I'm very open. And this is why again, I'm very open to mystical experiences, very open to psychedelic experiences, very open to a range of experiences. And I think that ghettoizing those experiences, again, as part of the greater social pathology that has deprived us of how we make meaning and how we preserve meaning, because a lot of meaning making is not rational. And valorizing the rational over and against non-rational experiences, I think is a, I think it's an a priori mistake. And what would you prefer in favor of that? If we can shell that, what would you rather have? I think a greater appreciation that the human experience is going to be much broader than baseline consciousness, and that baseline consciousness is actually much more complicated than we are a bunch of rational actors, which is simply not true. And I think that honoring and cherishing those kinds of limit experiences, non-rational experiences, mystical experiences, as an important part of the human experience, of which a great deal of meaning is is derivative. I think that's a mistake. And so again, this cuts into a way for me, because I'm very skeptical of experience, but I'm also extremely skeptical of how we ghettoize certain kinds of experiences. So, and again, this is a place where I get it from both sides, science and sort of rationalistic people really don't like the fact that I want to battle rise with the kind of experiences. And then the mystic people really don't like the fact that I'm, you know, apparently, which, but I'm also saying, yeah, your experience is also not indicative of any reality either, even if they're very important to you. And so I really hold both of these positions, which again, makes two very different groups of people, I don't know, angry or they don't like that for some reason. Yeah, I can see how that would piss people off. I mean, if you're pissing the right people off on both sides of the debates, because you're trying to hold some kind of nuance, then and again, you can say I'm wrong, but at least I'm trying to be wrong and a very nuanced. I'm trying to be wrong and I'm trying to be less wrong and trying to let nuance get me to be less wrong. And, you know, as far as I'm an intellectual, whatever intellectual is, I figured, when we abandon nuance, what are we doing? I don't know. I think that both of these things are holdable at some level. If you say that a mystic's experience is not indicative of reality, perhaps one of the reasons that might rattle them up a bit is because, of course, it's coming from somewhere. It's indicative of something, may not be indicative of the interpretation that one applies to it. Well, this means enlightenment level six. Well, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but it's presumably coming from somewhere. Even a hallucination is real, a real hallucination. So it's taking place within reality to some degree. Sometimes I've heard people say that these different ways of knowing or modes of knowledge, rational or mystical, maybe we could say, or irrational, maybe we could say it like that, are good for different things. And that the problem comes when we try to apply one type of knowing to, in a certain way, that it's not really good for. For example, I feel this is true. And so therefore, I'm going to, I don't know what would be the case, adjudicator, a legal dispute based on my sort of intuitive feeling or my dream last night or something like that. That probably is, you know, without any need to hear the evidence, don't need to hear the arguments. I've got a good feeling about this guy. I think I think he's innocent. That would be presumably a misapplication of what could be of enriching contact with one sort of intuitive dream life and so on. But you wouldn't necessarily adjudicate a law case on that basis. So do you think there's something there about the way in which it's not so much that the modes of knowledge themselves are problematic is that they're being applied or used in problematic ways? Do you see something like that or am I off the mark? It could be. I'm perfectly open to the possibility of varying kinds of epistemological appropriateness, right? We would say that there are specific domains and there are certain kinds of epistemologies that are appropriate for those domains. I'm fine with that. Even some degree of epistemological relativism. But what I would say is that when we begin to operate in the world of propositions and insofar as we think propositions are adequate to describe states of affairs that obtain, and we might call that either a completeness theory of truth or a coherent theory of truth or a correspondent theory of truth, any theory like that, whatever they are, insofar as we're going to try to tell the truth, and insofar as the way we're going to do that is by working in propositions, then we have a set of rules for that, and that would just say that at least in that domain, which actually might be a relatively small domain, frankly, if we're going to do that, and we know what the rules are, the rules are logic. They're deductive and inductive reason. But it could be the case that there are other epistemologies that are operative and other domains of human experience. I'm sure there are. I mean, it would be bizarre, frankly, to me, if all truth were exhausted by propositions. I mean, we just know that's not true, actually. We know that's mathematically not true, logically not true. But at the same time, if Girdle's right that we have to choose between something like completeness and coherence, then I'm going to go with coherence. And insofar as anyone wants to make arguments, then they're going to have to play that game. And that's as far as I think, as far as it can go. But again, if someone tells me that they've had a mystical experience, they've experienced oneness, I'm not going to say prove it to me. I think that's an example of what you're talking about. It's a misapplication of a certain kind of a certain kind of truth procedure. And it probably doesn't admit it doesn't admit of that kind of truth procedure. And you're not going to get the meaning that that person's experienced out of any truth procedure. So it's a it's a misapplication. And frankly, it's kind of imperialistic that all knowledge has to be rendered into propositions and then formalized. Otherwise, it's not knowledge. And I think the mistake the logical positive is made. I think it's a mistake that early Wittgenstein made. And he admitted as much later. So yeah, I think that's a mistake. But it is, I do think that's not to say that because Girdle and because of these kinds of deconstruction and stuff, that all truth goes out the window, we no longer have to play by any rules. And now everything's radically relativized. And my truth about history is that, you know, George Washington didn't really exist. And that's just as true as he did exist. I think that's that's that's rubbish. But but again, I don't think that I don't think that one is entitled to metaphysical beliefs merely by merely by mystical experience or any experience, frankly. I mean, just because I think something doesn't make it true. I mean, or just because I experienced something doesn't make it true. I have all kinds of false memories. We all do. Like we have to be skeptical of our experience. Well, this has been very interesting indeed. I wonder if I might ask you another question or a slightly different, different theme here from your, yeah, for your work. To quote you again, you say, if your field of inquiry brings me primarily into contact with philosophers and intellectuals, regrettably disregarded by the modern philosophic canon. I'm curious about that. Who are these philosophers and intellectuals discarded by the modern philosophical canon? I wonder if you might say something about those. Yeah, I think that there's a range. So for instance, I'll give you an example. I, you know, I got this stupid PhD in philosophy. And I never encountered in the entirety of the time I spent five years or whatever, really more than that, the four years of undergraduate, two years of another masters, another four, no, five years on top of that. So in all of that time, I never once read Marcellio Ficino in an academic setting. Never. I never read Bruno, hardly read any medieval people, never read Occam, never read, you know, never read Proclus, never read, you know, touched barely Plotinus. So we have a canon, and that canon has been shaped largely by the enlightenment and really by one person, a student named Ruchar, who wrote the standard history of philosophy in German, and then it was translated to English, and that became the way we tell the story about philosophy. And, and he purged philosophy. He thought that there was philosophy, and there was a bunch of paganism. And paganism basically tracked to what we now call neoplatonism and Western as a character edition. And he basically said it's not worthy of study, and he shelved it. In fact, he literally edited out of the future editions of the book, by the time it got translated to English, the edition that was translated to English, that edition, all of them had been edited out. And so they went into the refuse bin of history. And Walter Honegraf has a great book about this whole process. And so what I want to do, and it's, again, it sort of seems, sometimes people think of it as revolutionary, but it shouldn't be revolutionary at all, I just want to do philosophy. And if we're going to do the history of philosophy, we need to tell the whole story, whether we agree with that story or not, I don't agree with Plato. I think Plato's crazy. I think the world of the forms is the most bizarre idea. It's had a huge impact on how we think about reality, and he deserves to be taught, no matter what I think about it, he knows to be steelman, he needs to be taught rigorously and not mocked, he needs to be taught like, no, this is very powerful argument. The soul, for instance, is totally derivative to him. The fact that most of us believe we have souls directly comes from Plato. So to me, it's just an easy question of, if we're going to do philosophy, let's just do the damn thing. And if we're going to do the damn thing, we're going to do all of it. We can't leave people out because we don't like what they believed, or because they don't agree with our enlightenment values, or because they were pagans, or because of whatever. So, yeah, those figures, to me, I want to focus on those figures, because basically, who else is going to do it? It's not going to be the tiny group of people like me who say, all right, let's do philosophy, let's just do it. And, you know, these guys deserve, they deserve their, they deserve their day in the sun, they deserve to have their argument, steelman, as much as possible, and they deserve to be part of the conversation. So if we're going to do it, let's do it. And if we're not, let's be honest about what we're not doing. And the academic philosophy will not be honest about that. Because what they'll have to admit is it's being repressed, and two, what they'll have to admit is they don't know anything about it. And then that starts the vicious loop. Well, I don't know anything about it, so I can't teach it, and therefore, it doesn't get taught, and therefore, no one else knows it as opposed to you're a smart person, you can read Renaissance philosophy, spend a summer reading Renaissance philosophy, and then teach a class about it. But Renaissance philosophy is too Catholic, too hermetic, too pagan, too irrational, goes into the trash of history. I think it's an incredible shame. And one of the reasons why another reason why I say it's a shame is because even if I don't believe in it, it's still spiritually powerful for so many people. There's still so much intellectual and spiritual value not being tapped, that the idea that I don't agree with Ficino, and therefore, he shouldn't get taught, and then deprive, possibly deprive, so many people of these ideas that could go so far into making, helping them make sense of their experience and making sense of the world, and spiritually having valor for them, what hubris for me to gatekeep what shouldn't shouldn't be taught because I believe or disbelieve that that's the ethic that rules today. Again, I deeply dislike Gnosticism as a belief system, but I find it a very repugnant belief system, especially the world denying Gnosticism. I don't agree with it at all, but it's powerful for some people. For many people, clearly, there's lots of views on it on my channel. It's helping some people make sense of the world, and the idea that I would not give it the best presentation I can just because I happen to disbelieve in it, so I don't know. That's very gross to me. It makes me feel like I want to take a shower thinking thoughts like that. What are some of the intellectual and spiritual values that you think's being left on the table when we overlook these figures? Awe. When you read Plotinus, when you read Proclists, when you read down bookus, when you read Fachino, when you read Brupruno, awe, there's a deep sense of awe that the world is beautiful and that beauty should be cultivated and in beauty we can experience God. I don't know if I believe any of that. I do believe in the power of the experience of all, and I do believe in the power of the experience of beauty. I don't know if that leads me to God or not. It certainly leads me to all in beauty. I think that when we delete that out and what we are left with is Aristotle's logic. I'm not opposed there, so I'm all about logic, but logic bereft of all is a grave. It's a grave. All bereft of logic is a madhouse, and I don't think I want that either. I don't want either of these. I don't want the grave of logic where everything is austere and cold and true, in order I want the madhouse that is all run wild. How often do you hear people coming out of philosophy departments with an experience of all? They come out with a logic chopping, deconstructed mentality, and that's not the totality of philosophy. This is not. I think that all is a very, beauty is a very important focus on beauty. I think that another big aspect of these philosophers that I think we get lost when we show them is how important the human being is. The centrality of the human being. I think there's dangers in that, but Renaissance philosophy is dominated by the idea that human beings is dignified, that there is dignity to being a human being. Dignitas is an important thing, and I think that at some level we've abandoned the idea of human dignity. This is how we can just demonize other people, and we can not see them as human and not see their inherent dignity. We can bomb them and kill them and discriminate against them and things like this, but if I see dignity, whether that dignity comes from being made in the image of God, the way it is for Fachino or Pico, or if it just comes from the idea that we're in this together, we're on the same boat, and my place on the boat is no better or no worse than your place on the boat, and I have to treat you with the same dignity and I expect the world's a better place for that. So I do think that there are real values to be had from these philosophers that have otherwise been marginalized, and I think their marginalization has left philosophy deeply bereft of the very important values, that as a terracism, that the occult, mysticism, that these kind of philosophers offer, and I think that we would be better served to at least have access to them even if we fundamentally disagree with them. I wonder if that deficiency in people's intellectual or meaning diet, you crave for something you've deficient in, and you might snack on all sorts of things that try to scratch the itch. I wonder if psychedelics, the move towards psychedelics that so many do with such enthusiasm, is a searching for that all beauty, something like that. And if so, are there other behaviors you see people engaging in that you think, I think you have an old efficiency, I think you're searching for orange beauty, I think you should read some Fachino or something like this. Yeah, I don't know if the reading Fachino will do it on its own, but yeah, I think that maybe we all we all suffer from an all deficiency, or we're all in this meaning drought. I think we're just all in it, I think it's just that's the baseline, it's not like some of us suffer from more or less, but I think that there are weird interesting, easy ways of overcoming it. The experience of the sublime and the third critique, I think art is a powerful way, music is a powerful way, community is a powerful way. Sometimes my favorite way of experiencing a little touch of all is I have an email that I get sent every time the international space station flies overhead. And every time it flies overhead, if I can, if the weather's good, I go out and I look at it. And there's something about watching that star that we put in the sky, full of human beings from many, many planets working together in space to try to figure all this out. And I can watch it, in fact, I can call it with my hand radio, and I've called it with my hand radio. And I've heard them, you know, crackle back through the, through the ether and acknowledge the fact that I'm making a call to punk a metal flying through space at 25,000 miles an hour. It's breathtaking. It's breath taking. But yeah, I would say get a telescope. Let's get a telescope and go out and, you know, look at, look at Saturn. You know, one of my favorite things is to take, I have a six-inch top Sony, and I love taking it out and showing people Saturn for the first time. And every time there's a moment where they look into the thing and they, to see that beautiful object is hanging in the dark with the beautiful rings. What a great feeling. And I think that we should cultivate that experience. And I think we can do a lot more to cultivate it intellectually. We can cultivate it. We can cultivate through art, cultivate it through love, and cultivate it through through science, frankly. I think that science also sells itself short because it doesn't do the work of instilling all in people. Otherwise, it just makes it a bunch of exams you have to take, kills people's love of math and science. I think we could do a great deal more. And I think, again, I think that it's, we should, we should turn these questions around. And the question is, again, it's odd, like, how do we go find all the, to me, what's bizarre is that we have to ask the question at all when it's there. And again, I blame institutions. I blame the academy for turning chemistry and mathematics into a bunch of quizzes and not into, wow, like, we understand what we're made of, like, DNA, when you can take a swab out of your mouth, we can look out at a microscope and we can see, like, these are the building blocks of what we are. As opposed to, here's a quiz about it. And here's some stress. And here's some anxiety. And here's how to get it. Here's, here's, are you going to get a job? Let's take everything we've done that is so impressive and so beautiful and let's turn into a quiz and stress and then evaluated totally in terms of how you get a job to participate in capitalism. And we wonder why people are killing themselves. We wonder why people are medicated. We wonder what the substance abuse problems are through the roof. We wonder why intellectuals have miserable lives while being in, we have being in intellectuals, the best predictor for mental health challenges and self harm. Of course they are, because we've, we've taken the intellect and we've, we've subtracted out any sensible, any sense of community, any sense of meaning. What do you expect that? What do you, what other outcomes? I thought I had one more question, but I think now I have two. The last ones are reading this, so that's an easier one. What do you think of this trend of tactical religion to do with this awe and meaning and so on? There's a bit of a trend, I think, of people converting joining religions. I don't mean to imply when I say it's a trend that it's somehow good or bad or shallow. I'm not saying that, but people saying, okay, I'm going to join a religion, I'm going to join a church, you mentioned John Vervakey and some of the people associated with him. There is this trend, I think there, I'm going to become an Orthodox Christian, for example, or I'm going to become, I'm going to join my synagogue or my whatever and participate in the rhythms of the Sangha or the rhythms of the community life and join that, and I'm not sure what I believe, but I want to start acting out some of those patterns and rhythms and see what happens. What do you think of that trend? I and Hersha Ali recently converted to Christianity and it seems largely because she feels it's an important civilizational force, naturally. So what do you think of that trend? I think that it's provisionally, I think it's the good. Pascal has this, people forget that part of Pascal's wager is not just the wager on belief in God, but it's also, he says, well, just start doing stuff and maybe the belief will come, kind of fake it till you make it. I guess my position is, I would say, don't convert to a religion because religion is only exist. Join communities of value, and if the community of value happens to be a religious community, then great. But I would say that I would be skeptical of convincing people to go convert to a religion because religions aren't real things. Religions are abstract things that human beings do, but I would say that I would encourage people to join communities of value, and that community of value could be anything, could be a bowling league, could be all kinds of things. But the antidote, one of the antidotes to meaninglessness and isolation is not to be isolated. That's one of them. And I think that if you're not going to be isolated, we have the great luxury of being able to choose what kind of communities we want to be a part of, and I think that the best way to do that is to think about their overall values that that community shares. Now, all of those values aren't going to agree with all of your values, and that's great because one of the great things about being a community is that you have to actually negotiate difference, which is one of the things that we've now gotten inside these echo chambers, we've gotten inside these internet worlds where we can pick and choose and we can curate our experience so that everything agrees with us. And that's a surefire way of being terribly wrong, being radicalized, being very isolated, being unable to deal with the world because the world doesn't agree with you. It's not going to be with all of you, of course. And being able to negotiate differences that are important predictor for, I think, overall mental health and success. And so, yeah, I'm very, I'm with John, with John Riveki. In fact, he and I are talking tomorrow about kind of getting more public about thinking about this in a more serious way. We're quite close to each other, even Toronto, and I'm going to Troy run a few hours away. And so, and I will say anecdotally, this is only anecdotally, we've had a huge influx into my community of converts, people converting to Judaism. And I find it interesting because when they say, why are you converting Judaism, it's not because they believe in all the tenets of Judaism, it's not even they even know many of the tenets of Judaism, it's because it's a community of value. And they're like, if this community has these values and those values are somehow downstream of the Talmud or whatever, well, I want to get in the community to have that shares these kinds of values. And then I want to approach that kind of the tradition and see where I fit into the tradition and see what kind of conversation I can have with the tradition. I find that to be an incredibly healthy impulse, very healthy impulse. And again, that's, that's, you know, whether it's Christians or, or even atheists, even if you're part of an atheist bowling league and you get around you, you could vech, you could vech about how you hate religion. Great. Like, I don't think hate's a great value, frankly, but it's certainly better than just shouting into the void or Reddit, at least you're bowling yourself. I don't know. So, yeah, I would say that people, I would highly encourage people to join communities of value. And especially when those communities aren't totally your values, even if they get most of your values, that's, that's, that's, that's going to be a net good. Thank you very much, Justin. This has been so fun and interesting. I know you're a book guy. We talked about that last time. I mean, you're really a book guy. So perhaps we could end with, you mentioned, okay, great books of the Western world, University of Chicago, and it's like a pretty botanical set or the Harvard set, for example. What about these disregarded philosophers and thinkers? What, I don't know, top three, four is five, too much of an ask? Books to, books to read, if someone says, that sounded, I have no idea what you're talking about, but that sounded quite cool and interesting. I'd like to read something about that and not only about it, but I'd also like to read it. So not only secondary literature, maybe even primary literature, if it's possible to penetrate things. What would, what course would you give someone of course, I should also mention, and perhaps you'll also mention your own YouTube channel, which is full of these great resources. And I'll link it, of course, I'm sure everyone's heard of it. But in your case, you haven't and you're listening to this, it'll be linked in the show notes. But in terms of books, what reading course would you give to somebody who was interested now curious about what you'd said? I get this question so much and I always give the worst answers. I need to like actually like just write down my answer to this question. So I have a stock answer to this question. So the first book I would recommend is Valtter Honegraff's The Western Esoteric Tradition, Western Esotericism, a guide to the reflects. This is the best introduction to Western Esotericism. And so what I would recommend someone to pick that book up, you can get anywhere it's cheap. It's going to come out in a new edition soon. But pick it up, read through it, and then go to the bibliography. So let's say you're interested in Kabbalah, or you're interested in Fachino, or you're interested in whatever, Neoplatonism. Then go to the bibliography of that book and then start drilling down into that bibliography. So the book is fantastic as an introduction. It's just as fantastic for its bibliography because Honegraff gives very good reliable sources in several languages, English, French, German, whatever. So that's the book I would start with. That's the book I would start with. As for a book, primary literature, and that'll lead you to the primary literature too, obviously. The quintessential book that I would recommend for people to read is Agrippa's Three Books of a Cult Philosophy. That's going to put you right into the middle of the conversation. And Agrippa's interesting because he's inheriting a lot of magical traditions coming from the Middle Ages, but also comes from the classical pagan world. But he's also in conversation with developments in the Renaissance. So he puts you right into the conversation about magic and philosophy and religion and all of that, right, in the middle. It's not exactly an easy book to read, but one could read it in a couple of weeks, get through it in a couple of weeks. It's also out on some new translations that are really good. I would really recommend Eric Perdue's translation. The Little Pricey. I'm sure it'll come out in paperback at some point soon, but Agrippa's Three Books of a Cult Philosophy. I'm not sure about to teach a whole class just on Agrippa this spring, but I think he's so important and so overlooked, even by people who claim to be influenced by him. I don't think he's actually read very closely. I would recommend people pick up a copy of Bentley's, The Gnostic Scriptures. Bentley has a great compendium of Gnostic texts. So these would be things like the Gospel of Thomas, the Apocopon of John, but also some medieval Gnostic texts, like the copars. So this gives you a window onto alternative ways that, for instance, Christianity could have developed. And I think for many people coming out of the Christian world, this just gives you another angle by which to seek Christianity. And it gives you, again, as for people, either post-Christian or Christian, it just gives you access to more Christian technologies for understanding what it is to be Christian. So it just expands the possibilities of what is constitutive of a Christianity. So yeah, I would pick up Bentley's, The Gnostic Scriptures. Another book that I'd recommend. Look at my shelves. It's a great book by Jones. It's called The Philosophy of Mysticism. This is a great text that's really analytical, a real philosophical analysis of mysticism, both like what's capable of and what it's not capable of. So it's one of the best sort of philosophical analysis of mysticism. So I would say if you're interested in mysticism, Jones's book, The Philosophy of Mysticism, it's fantastic. As far as other philosophers go from this time period that could be worth reading, don't try to read all of Plotinus, the Eniads. It's just too hard. But I would recommend reading the Eniad on beauty. It's a sixth Eniad. It's number, Eniad number six. It's typically the one that gets sort of anthologized. If you're looking at a neoplatonic reader, that's going to be one of the main ones going to get anthologized is the sixth Eniad on beauty. That's fantastic. In fact, I think you can get almost all of neoplatonism from that sixth Eniad. It's definitely where Plotinus shines the brightest. He's a terrible writer. The sixth Eniad is good. It's quite good. I think if you were to do those three, Eniad six, Valka's book gives you a great, Onograss book gives you a great introduction. Grippa freely firms you, firms you get you firmly in there. I think that Jones's book, The Philosophy of Mysticism, really gives you a critical eye to mysticism and a rigorous philosophical way of getting into mysticism in general. I think those would be good starting points and every time I get this question, I give totally different answers. I don't know. I guess for me, what I always fall back to, my go-to book is always Ecclesiastes, Cohellet. If people say if you were to shipwrecked, what's the book you would take with you? It's always to me Ecclesiastes. Cohellet is to me, as my north star. When I feel exceptionally happy, I go wreak Gohellet. It's like, not to be down a notch. If I feel especially sad, I go wreak Gohellet. Yeah, things aren't so bad. So that's always my go-to when I want to meditate on the meaningfulness and meaninglessness of reality. Cohellet is always Ecclesiastes and things that should always my go-to book. Well, thank you very much for those recommendations and for another fascinating conversation. Dr. Justin Sledge, thank you very much. Thank you, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening to another Guru Viking podcast. For more interviews like these, as well as articles, videos and guided meditations, visit www.guruviking.com.