I always love the moment where Jonathan just lays his cards on the table and says things like "there is a god behind the internet" or "the ocean has an angel."
You can just see how Jonathan's beliefs that we have heard from him many times are being cumulated here and built upon by John. Very great conversation. Now THIS is a psychedelic conversation.
Boy oh boy, John and Jonathan are about to start speaking the same language. I look forward to that day when the 2 worlds truely collide, they have never been as close as this and i am enjoying the ride.
I’m Muslim, but my friend (studies Christianity and Buddhism) sent me a link to your video with Jordan and the Bishop. Well my interest was peaked and so I’m now a new subscriber. Excited to hear this.
Saw the "Four Horsemen..." as well. Just excellent. As an Orthodox, I am solidly in Mr. Pageau's corner. But Dr. Vervaeke was on fire! Just wonderful. I could listen to these discussions all day. Thank you all.
I hear enormous arrogance and hubris attempting to appropriate God and His angels as some function of human collective intelligence. And at once small mindedness in his inability to acknowledge Presences existing independently of human though.
@@eleventylevity bingo! Once you’ve tasted the experience that “I know NOTHING” touching the hem of His garment in deep prayer, you see that WORDS are not the language that captures the experience of God.
@@borneandayak6725 I wish, but this conversation is happening in a very small corner of the world, relatively speaking. A few million people engaging in this topic is not likely to bring a new age. But there's always hope.
John Vervaeke is amazingly honest and able to use his cog sci framework to grapple at a reality that is ultimately larger. In contrast to someone like Sam Harris who uses his very limited framework to constrain reality in it.
John and Jonathan, These conversations have been the access point for so many of us to set our eyes on things above. I have watched as the insights from your dialogues have played a key role in improving my life. Please continue to have these conversations with each other!
Wow! The convergence of attendance made me think about the Divine Liturgy - all of the senses are activated during the Liturgy - see the beauty of what is happening, touch the icons and the candles, smell the incense, hear the Word of God being sung throughout the entire Liturgy, and it all comes together with the sense of tasting the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. And we experience all of this together when we come together at church to worship God together. It is how we trust our experience of God as being Truth. So cool!
Thanks a lot for the kind words and for all the support over the years, John and Jonathan. I wonder how closely John would come to the western Christian view of angels as unchanging. In Aquinas for instance, because angels are unchanging, I don't think we would associate 'consciousness' to them in any straightforward way. They're 'intellects' and they have the kinds of effects described in this video, but calling them 'consciousnesses' would be a bit of a stretch. Anyways, thanks a lot for the discussion! It's the closest thing I've ever seen to a dialogue between Aquinas and Maximus on angelology!
Rupert Sheldrake in his book says (playing off of Aquinas and Dionysius & Hildegard of Bingen) that angels intuit, not analyze or have discursive reasoning. They just…see or know. Also they (he and Matthew fox) say that angels evolve. So…🤷🏼♂️ . Explicitly on page 113 of their book “The Physics of Angels”. Quoting Aquinas, “ what is yet to be has not yet got a nature through which to resemble those ideas; hence it cannot be known through them.” (From the question, “Do angels know the future?”) ST 1, q.57, a.3 FYI
@@j.p.marceau5146 You should check out Nate Hile's recent talk with a very interesting Nigerian young man. Mainly on the Trinity. Great stuff. I think you'd find it stimulating. ua-cam.com/video/R4owtR4j-7M/v-deo.html
@@WhiteStoneName Thanks It's really interesting, in the preceding answer in the Summa, Aquinas speaks of a kind succession of intelligible concepts: Although the angel's intellect is above that time according to which corporeal movements are reckoned, yet there is a time in his mind according to the succession of intelligible concepts; of which Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. viii) that "God moves the spiritual creature according to time." And thus, since there is succession in the angel's intellect, not all things that happen through all time, are present to the angelic mind.
On the notion of attention being the thing that rules in and rules out: it occurred to me that the word praise is etymologically related to the word appraise, which means to judge or to qualify, even to catalogue or describe. From the dictionary “assess the value or quality of”, essentially to rule in or rule out.
Attention in worship, paying close attention to the words that I sing in the choir during the Divine Liturgy, leads to having the experiences that the words speak of…”Let us who mystically represent the Cherubim, and who sing the thrice holy hymn to the life creating Trinity, now lay aside all cares of life!” “Let this communion be neither to my judgement or condemnation, but to the healing of soul and body.” And it is…
The 4 Horseman episode was great, loved watching. I also really appreciated Jonathan having Bishop Barron and John on afterwards, also for those interested please check out Paul Vanderklay's breakdown as it was very helpful for me at least. God bless you all
Weird synchronicity as I see the notification for this while watching a music tutorial by a completely different channel actually titled "Collective Intelligence"
16:00 There's a guy on UA-cam called MemeAnalysis that does symbolic interpretations of memes. He says the Internet is a DEVOURING MOTHER - ready to give you anything you want but never lets you go. It's the collective anima. What do you think about that?
I really like this. It's no coincidence that the emergence of the collective anima and devouring mother comes about at the same time as the Karen meme.
The idea of attention also makes sense in regards to how the Orthodox talk about dealing with the temptation of demons; not to pay attention to them, not to let them land in your mind and instead focus on God.
58:00 - John's point is spot-on here. A great eye-opener for me was realizing that "images" of space are almost entirely greatly marked-up/false-colored images if not total artist renditions.
Well they are real shapes of gas clouds and what not, but yeah most of them are like representations of what they would look like if we could see in ultraviolet wavelengths or something if I remember right.
11:17 this was an intuition I had a while ago actually about many things in the world. I'm not explicitly a Christian, but I was raised as a Baptist so to a certain extent those ideas are baked into my psyche and I'm not one to say I believe in God in the traditional sense, but Jonathan's example of social media acting as a giant, decentralized will possessing an observable telos is how I see most of the universe. Essentially, whatever one can say about God and Satan, they are definitely AT LEAST "giant, decentralized wills possessing an observable telos." They could in fact be far more than that, and obviously the Christians have a thoroughly fleshed out system of ideas that states exactly so (including the alteration of "personal" rather than "decentralized"), but I think anyone who's been paying even a modicum of attention can't reasonably say they are any *less* than that. My intuition specifically was that there are at least two of these things and they seem to be at war with each other. They seem to represent chaos and order in a very Petersonian sense. I wouldn't say either is good or bad, but they have clear goals that oppose each other. Part of me is tempted to attribute the Christian god to the will that pursues order, thus making the will that pursues chaos Satan, obviously, but any self-respecting Christian would probably bring up the fact that things are way more complicated than that. In any case, I think it's undeniable that there are certain forces in the universe that are at war with each other, and on the most grand of scales I think there are fundamentally two of them. There could be an infinite number of them for all I know, at either lower or higher levels of resolution compared to the two I mentioned previously, but I just can't get away from that feeling that something like that is going on.
Thats so interesting that you percieve God to be order, and Satan to be chaos. I feel you have that backwards actually! Rather..since chaos is NOT random but long form order..that God is chaos, and Satan is order (order meaning strict rigidness, determinism, lack of spontaneity..lack of life basically). True chaos is the ability to do anything..but at the right moment, in the right time, in the right context/domain. Control seems to me to be about always monitoring and categorizing and usefulness..which lends itself to authoritarianism and narcissism..which is the opposite of life, growth, playfulness and exploration and emergence. Control to be seems to also lack intuition and the ability to sense into context/domains to act appropriately yet spontaneously. I do agree that control is not bad or good..its useful but only in the right context. Im not sure that a spirit of Control can understand the Spirit of Play/Life/Exploration tho, hence the "battle" between them not being able to find common ground or unify or peacefulness. Its like trying to get a colorblind person to understand color perhaps...they just cant relate to it as a concept or felt experience (unless they try out some of those Enchroma color correcting glasses and realize color for themselves).
Oh, finally the question. Are transpersonal beings conscious? That is a key question! Haven’t got there yet just excited to see it in the description 😄 EDIT 1: And yes John that was a great point! Meditation is one of the triad of concentration/meditation/contemplation and people can create an imbalance if they focus on only one. EDIT 2: Finished when you were getting to the crux of the matter. I hope you start with the consciousness question next time.
It's effectively a question of are there only objects and verbs, subjects and verbs, or subjects verbs and objects? Basically it's the question of materialism vs idealism vs dualism. Is there a ghost in the machine? Is consciousness fundamental or emergent? I personally think that consciousness is fundamental and not emergent so I don't think a hyperobject like the internet is conscious, but I do think that both us and God are subjects not objects, with a consciousness, and the body is just the receiver and manifests the consciousness in a physical form much like I can attempt to try and draw a perfect circle that exists in my min and it manifests as an imperfect drawing of a circle.
@@Pietrosavr See, I also think consciousness is fundamental, but I take a panpsychist view, which not only allows for things like the internet to be conscious, but all manner of things.
I so appreciate Jonathan’s, John’s, Paul’s, And Jordan’s conversations on these topics. You are all, always 100% sincere and open in your conversations above all else. This is so rare and appreciated in these times.
I'm at the point in listening to so many Jonathan Pageau videos that I take notes on the insights I'm getting, including additional insights that arise in my own mind on the same subject but relating to something else. The video continues to play in the background and while I'm writing my additional insight down one of the next things out of Jonathan's mouth has to do with the same additional insight I'm in the process of writing down. It sure feels like were participating in a shared experience of the logos together. Wild stuff.
I can hardly wait for part II. You guys were at the crux of closing the gap between the top-down and bottom-up approach to grasp reality. You both have answers, how and if you two can reconcile your answers is the key.
V is such a decent man. He spends a lot of time hedging his disagreements that has to be for the camera as both P and VanderKlay both trust him. Good talk. I learn a lot.
If we just substitute spirit for hyper -object, all kinds of things make more sense. Applying hierarchy to spirit and consciousness seems to work really well, I'm not sure why John doesn't see how well that works.
I really hope you guys talk about Rupert Sheldrake and morphic fields and how that relates to angels & Neoplatonic thought and church fathers. He wrote a book with Matthew Fox called “The Physics of Angels”.
@@mostlydead3261 latour seems like an interesting chap from Wikipedia. What do you like about Gordon White? I can find less on him in a quick search. He’s an author and occultist?
Don’t confuse trustworthiness with certainty, that was useful; even in a minority of one the truth remains the truth. Always look forward to you two talking. Hopefully we’ll get another one with you guys and Vanderklay again, he’s good at extrapolating what you guys are talking about and putting a different spin on it. God bless you both, was a great conversation as always.
I love u guys, this honest probing for truth just fills me with joy and hope. I don't care what we find, just the fact that we search, honestly search is a wonderful thing. 🙏
31:00 Vervaeke's description of channels for creating trustworthiness (and meaning) relates to the problem Bishop Barron spoke on in the Catholic Church's loss of the sacred. They took away the beauty (visual channel), the incense (olfactory channel), the Latin/chant/sacred music (auditory channel), and the kneeling rails and communion on the tongue (touch/physical channel). These are just a few examples. If our senses help us create trust and engage in meaning, then it is no wonder why the Novus Ordo Mass has led to a decline in the Church.
Good catch. It also explains why so many (me included) couldn’t go back to NO once TLM was experienced. It’s been hard to explain outside of “reverence” but this seems like a reasonable explanation.
@@alphabeta8284 Same with me. I have been to the TLM a few times but still regularly attend the NO and it's frankly a lesser form of worship. Vervaeke also described how we put our attention and meaning on the same thing as those around us, and I can't help but think of the focus of the congregation at a TLM vs. a Novus Ordo.
@@phoult37 But I have to say, when you go to a proper NO, it is also illumines the invisible Mystery. I don't know where you are, but I got a chance to visit NO in Poland over Christmas (going to adoration in 2 hours :)), as well as daily mass during the current Christmas octave. I must say, this is how the NO should be celebrated. I feel that my soul leaps into God's majesty, I am truly transported. Perhaps a part of it is that I cannot understand the language, but since I know the form of the mass, I know what's happening and can rather focus with all my non-verbal senses. It's hard to explain (also my wife translates the homily for me :)). So I have hope for the NO.
Vervaeke and Pageu have the most generative conversations in this space of any other two interlocutors. Can you please have a conversation at least twice a month?
With good health and cheer in mind, if my finger is twitching without my conscious control due to illness then healing it might involve consistent rehabilitation exercises to train the muscle and the brain to work together again. In the same manner with higher beings, if my day-to-day life is unhealthy, then training myself with religious exercises or a physical discipline like yoga can help put me back in order with the higher aspects of life that connect us all together. Thank you for sharing your discussions, they are helping me sort through my first things.
that hour flew by! I was in the zone the whole time, its crazy that John also mentioned Vygotsky who coined the term the "zone". Very much looking forward to part 2, thank you Mr.Pageau!
I’m gonna need to listen to this talk a couple times to really get what’s going on fully but when they started talking about hyper objects representing the shared parts (if I’m not mistaken) of a system or people etc it was surprisingly clear to understand and helped to tie everything together
The IQ bell curve of thinking about God is Left: God is personal. Middle: God is abstract or impersonal. Right: God is personal. The fact that we are personal beings and the most intelligent beings we’ve encountered (the closest thing to god) suggests that the being or intelligence that made us is likely even more personal than we are, not less
Could be both in that god is a personal abstraction of the an “impersonal” (rather “transcendent”) being, often so grand as to be transcendence itself.
Spot on! A lot of Internet personalities that get heaps of praise and attention are stuck firmly in the middle unfortunately and are leading people astray
I think this may be one of the better conversations I've heard on metaphysics which is what this is I think. John V understands there are limits to materialism and it's what allows him to converse w Jon P in a meaningful conversation.
Thank you very much for this conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it because it didn't go so far over my head that I couldn't understand it. I particularly enjoyed seeing or feeling a movement of relationships as fluid. Thank you.
This is fascinating given my recent immersion into Bhakti practices, thinking of the power of singing the holy names in a group. It explains a lot about the practice of deity worship and other group ceremony as well... @ 42:00 going into the train guru worship is considered so important as the gateway to Transcendence of perspective and self. Deep stuff here. Thankyou for expanding the consciousness. 🙏❣️ Haribol!
This is why Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, of all sacrifices, He is the chanting of the holy name. Where attention guess, energy flows. Connecting to source requires the simultaneous dual relationship of personal effort and divine mercy.
Also as a health coach, this conversation on awareness is really important to understanding how to be more effective in directing the personal attention and intention of the client. Wow
If you think there's not a way of separating consciousness from the body, you missed a whole lot on eastern practices.... 1:10:28. Of course practicing both complete embodiment as well as soul consciousness is a personal endeavor which requires effort and time. It's taught in the Vedas that Krishna resides in every atom, and each soul (unit of individual consciousness) is no larger than that. So it's considered that consciousness is literally the very thing the entire universe is composed of. 🕉️🙏
I do my inner work with the Angels and Ive found that they all have directions and applications that ultimately build the House of God when used together.
Truly beautiful dialogos, exemplary with true love, charity and affection between them. Agape. Truly beautiful dialogos. Very excited to witness the follow-up after the initiation of the topic. It's a conversation I've been having with myself for forty years. Intentions set to truth and re-uniting science and Christianity. Braiding the cord, weaving the web.
Thank you Gentlemen for a fine discussion. The reflections on the use of social media and its platforms were thankfully sane and circumspect ( or so it seemed to me ). Prof Vervaeke's articulation of attention, intention, and how it works with prioritization, salience, etc., was helpful and , I believe, how it really works. Somewhere around 8 or 9 minutes in Prof Vervaeke spoke of people who are becoming aware of "connectedness" and attention, with the issues of salience and relevance realization, but not necessarily embodying these "qualities" to their own flourishing, and to that of their communities. There may be good reasons for this, and some may find it impossible to make "the connections" that their communities want to "bind" them too. And you both went on to talk about the positives and negatives of community and individuation somewhat. Very helpful. One of you made a reference to Hitler and the hypnotic attention he accessed in large crowd events. It is chilling to read what he wrote about propaganda and the psychology of its use in his book. I don't know nothin about angels and principalities, but all I can write about that is . . . hold it . . . someone's knockin at the door. Gotta go.
Finally! I learned about Angels indirectly from John: he pointed me to Tom Cheetham and his work on Henry Corbin, Angels, and the imaginal. Blessings for y'all's work. Ibn Arabi believed the imaginal entities are real.
Awesome! Glad to see this subject discussed. I think there’s a really strong case for internal/transjective experience of pieces of consciousness attracting input and operating as internal personalities. I think it’s an intersecting area between orthodox religion, Jungian/post Jungian thought, theosophy, and now science and psychology. A strong argument about one’s capacity for light, teleology and mentor ship is to be made here too, against certain elements of Jung, and the post Jungians, and it’s a nuanced argument that I think butts up against middle grounds and the total archetypal landscape that even Christianity had to integrate in many ways and cannot harvest the entire field. This leads to a difficult space where final ontological commitments and exclusions I think are going to have to be argued over, and co-exist with some personal and community elements being voluntarily chosen, and engendered by traditions, rather than just asserted on everyone beyond what can actually be asserted with finality. I think it definitely drives nails into the popular, decadent romanticism and chasing experience for its own sake, and solipsism, and can find a core meta-ontology that affords traditions, personalism, and exclusionary institutions. What I don’t think it will garner is “proof” of one religion and everyone returning to that and dismissal of anything outside it that complicates it’s final authority, or the way some of the comments and community just use these arguments to re-instate a religious positivism, and at a certain threshold level the arguments dilute and are captured by the two prevailing visions of our time, nested in modernity. I don’t think it’s all a conspiracy theory by mean old church fathers, and there are many, many, factors outside Christianity at play here, and these traditions have in many ways kept this concept alive, made sophisticated ways to access it, and deal with dangers, and there are negative effects of esotericism in our history, along with the discovery of science and power of it and technology itself. However, I don’t think you can avoid a runaway train of positivist and materialist sections of different Christian religions that upheld nominalistic, and Descartes for ownership of truth, and a logical endpoint of this with multiple non-Christian factors leading to a general, at net discarding of full cosmology, angelology, and personalization and mystical elements being discarded, because they were not always easily contained (in addition to legitimate concerns given over salience.)
You absolutely have to continue at the spot you ended the discussion. That point feels like the furthest point you can go as a "non-religious" person without becoming "religious" in the sense that Jonathan is a "religious" person.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, but this one changed the way I think about a lot of things. And i probably only understood 10% of what was happening lol
This was amazing. One of my favorites from either Vervaeke or Pageau. Generally my perspective lines up moreso with Vervaeke, but there are points here where I relate strongly with Pageau's propositions. This terrain between their ideas feels quite relevant to me. I'm pretty excited for part 2.
Loving these conversations.....All I can think is Dr. Michael S. Heiser (author of The Unseen Realm and Supernatural) should be part of this. He would bring another biblical Ancient Near East theological/cosmological understanding to all of this.
On the internet as The One Ring, my friend Richard Emerson of The Ancient World channel and podcast, w Sean from Mythos and Logos were just touching on this and how it interacts with different people with different levels of power. Glad it’s being seen and discussed by John and Jonathan.
That was great - you complemented each other and that afforded me sense of dawning understanding of what you were talking about. I would love to see Jordan Peterson involved into that discussion of the reality of the hyper-objects/forms/archetpyal patterns and hierarchy and the participation in Christ. This metaphor in particular I found compelling: like my finger is to myself, I am to the ideas/values that inhabit/possess me. I would also like to hear a evolutionary argument for how distributed cognition co-evolves with the personified patterns of reality and how these afford the individuals better perception of and conduct in allignment with these patterns. Thank you both for doing this!
This is how I've always viewed my faith. It is the encompassing definition of humans, how they think how they act the joys and the sorrows, as well as the definition of the universe. Everything can be explained within the framework of our faith. It seems the natural conclusion for purely scientific avenues of observing human nature and the natural world to come home and seek resolution within Christianity. My personal theory regarding suffering also falls within this realm. I think humans are in a constant state of suffering, since we are cut off from our natural state of being with God as in the garden of Eden. Even when we lack any form of physical suffering our soul aches and this can be observed in the mental illness crisis we have now, especially in most first world countries. That suffering is only relieved when we are as close in communion with God as we possibly can be. I do want to be careful here though and recognize mental illnesses that do need medical treatment and should of course seek that when necessary.
Thank you both so much for continuing to dialogue and sharing such rich insights; this was amazing. It seems like there's a contradiction in Jonathan's view, because he simultaneously claims that principalities are conscious beings that can exist independently of joint attention, in contrast to John's view of these collective intelligences as existing transjectively, lacking self-consciousness and activated through participation, and yet Jonathan also claims they require physical body, just as our consciousness requires embodiment. But then what happens when they become wholly forgotten, at the level of their body? Jonathan acknowledges that everything but God requires a body (and that God's body is the cosmos itself in a sense). Are they ontologically dependent on our attention the way the gods in Neil Gaiman are? That then conflicts with the traditional metaphysics of the patterns of reality as being part of its fundamental structure, part of the emanationist constraints ("heaven") that shape the creative potential of physical manifestation, and these are also normally describing as existing eternally. It would seem there is an equivocation and / or conflation between these two concepts occuring for aesthetic and / or doctrinal purposes. I think a way to resolve this is to understand the particular principalities as they manifest in creation through physicality as being partial aspects of the primordial patterns of reality. I think aspects of Whitehead's metaphysics (a theistic, process-oriented Neo-neoplatonism) are helpful here. The primordial patterns ("eternal objects" in Whitehead's terminology) are defined by their relation to other eternal objects. There is also a notion of the capacity for minds and circumstances to "cut" the eternal objects such that only aspects of them manifest. These could then be said to emerge in time and participate in the consciousness of it's body (the examples of gods of cities ect. as discussed), but there is no such thing as a discrete consciousness or even discrete agency in this sense, as each is a partial "cutting" of an eternal object that is already defined by relation. Now, in the sense that everything participates in God this is true in general (and that everything is part of the omniscient "consciousness" of God, only existing through participation in God in the first place) but here it is also true in a way distinct from analogies to human consciousness. Now, I would be fine saying the principalities become conscious when joint attention is given to them, and *through* the collective consciousness of it's "body" in a sense, and that outside these occasions they exist as abstract patterns constraining potential. The eternal objects in Whitehead (a rendition of Platonic ideas) can be "cut" in innumerable different ways; this would thus be similar to the Thomistic concept Jonathan mentioned of an angel manifesting for every relation between two beings. I'm actually happy with that Thomistic concept if understood in a non-anthropomorphic sense closer to Vervaeke's view, as it shows the primacy of transjectivity, but I don't think it's compatible with at least a simplistic image of Jonathan's proposal, in that it would imply an asymptotic infinitude of conscious beings either being created and retained or created and dying constantly, which would again conflict with the notion of discrete self-conscious agents that require physical bodies to exist in the former case and with principalities as part of the structure of reality in the latter. Our form of consciousness and cognition is tightly interconnected with our particular type of embodiment as humans, as John's work has so thoroughly articulated. Given the tight coupling of cognition / consciousness (certainly *self-consciousness*, see Bernardo Kastrup's work here for explicating this key distinction), and the history of the cosmos, with humans being a very recent development, I don't think one can simultaneously claim that principalities are: 1. Eternal patterns of reality 2. Conscious, especially self-conscious beings 3. Require bodies in the physical world for their existence Furthermore, I think it's quite clear that new patterns of reality emerge (or at least manifest) at various points in both cosmic and human history, which is further explained by the cutting metaphor for eternal objects. Eriugena, who John and Jonathan have a shared respect for, defined angels as "an intellectual motion about God and the causes of things." I think this accords well with the Whiteheadian process view I've presented. I think the concept Vervaeke proposed, that consciousness (or self-consciousness, in Kastrups's language) may only exist at a certain range of complexity and not above or below it, is on to something. Similar to how different emergence vectors (constrained by emanative eternal objects / forms) may have more in common with a vector / strata several away from it in either direction of complexity than one adjacent to it (see Alexander Bard, e.g.: ua-cam.com/video/fLqGNbiCasg/v-deo.html and Gregg Henriques' Tree of Life model of the history of complexity). For example, cognition and sub-physics may actually have more similarities to each other than the vectors next to them (e.g. biology or culture [where I think this topic is mainly at, and it's overlap with cognition] on one hand, or physics on the other. This goes for communication paradigms as well; see for example the amazing work the Center for the Study of Digital Life is doing using Aquinas and McLuhan, on how, for example, the new digital paradigm "retrieves" the medieval scribal paradigm in sharing certain similarities to it, most notably memory (drawing on Thomas' ecology of the inner senses) in contrast to the electric paradigm's focus on imagination / fantasy. As to Jonathan's question on why cultures throughout history have treated gods the way he's describing: the spirit of finesse often affords better results, by treating them imaginally and poetically, and our ancestors obviously didn't have a grasp of cognitive science, among other areas of knowledge. Not all superstitutions are going to or should be retained in this new return to religion. How would the principality of a river or forest exist as something conscious when no one is attending to it? Furthermore, what about the principality of various groves in the forest? Individual trees? Things quickly become combinatorially explosive, at which point Thales' "everything is full of gods" is I think best taken in a Whiteheadian panexperientialist manner, and I'd argue the same goes for the topic at hand. A gestalt does not necessarily possess all the features that make it up *in the same manner* as that feature in isolation. To use Jonathan's favored example, the city of London may have a kind of gestalt agency you can describe using poetic terms, but that doesn't mean every feature in the city contributes because our cognition and consciousness (via Relevance Realization) is grounded in the fact that we are finite biological organisms that *care* about the information we intake. There is nothing strongly analogous to the discreteness of an organism here that affords it's cognition through the will to survive - the city limits are not perfectly defined, and the city's agency extends beyond it's bounds through people, mail, telephone lines and media, ect. Now, I can agree that the city has both a kind of agency, a gestalt form (with fluid borders), a collective consciousness via its inhabitants (including nonhuman ones in the panexperientialist sense), and participates in constraining forms / heavenly patterns / principalities / eternal objects, and in doing so acts as a lesser one at the level of manifestation, and that people's joint attention to a symbolic "face" or faces of the city (names, presiding god, capitol building) can function to help unify those participating in it, but would argue that further claiming that there is a separate, discrete, conscious - certainly self-conscious - agent behind it is grounded more in an aesthetic efficiency in the spirit of finesse than in coherence or plausibility. I also think a way to describe the matter that integrates or at least mediates both positions is that the principalities John and Jonathan described are, if they do have any sort of consciousness, are at the very least not conscious in the way we are conscious, as embodied psycho-somatic rational organisms. To assert otherwise would be a form of anthropomorphism / anthropocentrism. Again I think Whitehead is quite helpful here. Finally, on a somewhat different note, I appreciate, in all senses of the word, what Jonathan said about the activity of God as a constant call of your telos and your capacity to embody it rather than any action being purely God's or a creature's (other than creation itself I suppose). Its a synergistic model; not purely passive or active but a participation. This also maps to God's superjective lure in Whitehead's metaphysics. Thank you both again for the discussion; looking forward to part 2.
"Pay attention" is itself a phrase indicating sacrifice; one gives up their attention to another, "paying" it to them.
I always love the moment where Jonathan just lays his cards on the table and says things like "there is a god behind the internet" or "the ocean has an angel."
Yes!
Cybercommand refers to itself as a fleet.
John Vervaeke has really grown on me.... And I didn't dislike him at all before! Johnathan- You as well! Thank you for this one.
“Deep calling to deep,” was so deep it made me cry
You can just see how Jonathan's beliefs that we have heard from him many times are being cumulated here and built upon by John. Very great conversation. Now THIS is a psychedelic conversation.
+1 for the JBP podcast callback
FIRST! And very excited about this! :)
Now I know what I'm doing NEXT week...
Lol
Lol
@@PaulVanderKlay RUPERT SHELDRAKE. How loudly do I have to yell, Paul!!
First 15 minutes or so: tech Babel. Mammon & the Machine
Boy oh boy, John and Jonathan are about to start speaking the same language. I look forward to that day when the 2 worlds truely collide, they have never been as close as this and i am enjoying the ride.
I’m Muslim, but my friend (studies Christianity and Buddhism) sent me a link to your video with Jordan and the Bishop. Well my interest was peaked and so I’m now a new subscriber. Excited to hear this.
Saw the "Four Horsemen..." as well. Just excellent. As an Orthodox, I am solidly in Mr. Pageau's corner. But Dr. Vervaeke was on fire! Just wonderful. I could listen to these discussions all day. Thank you all.
I hear enormous arrogance and hubris attempting to appropriate God and His angels as some function of human collective intelligence. And at once small mindedness in his inability to acknowledge Presences existing independently of human though.
@@eleventylevity Different kinds of (collective or not) human experience is the only way we can perceive God. Nothing wrong with examining those.
@@eleventylevity bingo! Once you’ve tasted the experience that “I know NOTHING” touching the hem of His garment in deep prayer, you see that WORDS are not the language that captures the experience of God.
As a Catholic, i agree...this will be the new enlightment. Atheism start to crumble.
@@borneandayak6725 I wish, but this conversation is happening in a very small corner of the world, relatively speaking. A few million people engaging in this topic is not likely to bring a new age. But there's always hope.
Verveake is a gift to humanity.
John Vervaeke is amazingly honest and able to use his cog sci framework to grapple at a reality that is ultimately larger. In contrast to someone like Sam Harris who uses his very limited framework to constrain reality in it.
John and Jonathan,
These conversations have been the access point for so many of us to set our eyes on things above. I have watched as the insights from your dialogues have played a key role in improving my life.
Please continue to have these conversations with each other!
Amen to that!
My head is exploding from all the meaning beamed into me from all the cool videos the last days
Bishop Barron AND John in the same week? Thanks Jonathan!
Guys, guys, you are spoiling us!
Any chance of inviting Iain McGilchrist into your circle?
Wow! The convergence of attendance made me think about the Divine Liturgy - all of the senses are activated during the Liturgy - see the beauty of what is happening, touch the icons and the candles, smell the incense, hear the Word of God being sung throughout the entire Liturgy, and it all comes together with the sense of tasting the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. And we experience all of this together when we come together at church to worship God together. It is how we trust our experience of God as being Truth. So cool!
I'd pay so much money to see these two in conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist and Dr. Bernardo Kastrup.
Probably my four favourites too.
Oh please please please!
And Stephen Wolfram.
I can't help but love John. His 'attention' to finding the epistemological correct answer, in scientific words, to Jonathan's ideas are sooo human.
Thanks a lot for the kind words and for all the support over the years, John and Jonathan.
I wonder how closely John would come to the western Christian view of angels as unchanging. In Aquinas for instance, because angels are unchanging, I don't think we would associate 'consciousness' to them in any straightforward way. They're 'intellects' and they have the kinds of effects described in this video, but calling them 'consciousnesses' would be a bit of a stretch.
Anyways, thanks a lot for the discussion! It's the closest thing I've ever seen to a dialogue between Aquinas and Maximus on angelology!
Rupert Sheldrake in his book says (playing off of Aquinas and Dionysius & Hildegard of Bingen) that angels intuit, not analyze or have discursive reasoning. They just…see or know.
Also they (he and Matthew fox) say that angels evolve. So…🤷🏼♂️ . Explicitly on page 113 of their book “The Physics of Angels”. Quoting Aquinas, “ what is yet to be has not yet got a nature through which to resemble those ideas; hence it cannot be known through them.” (From the question, “Do angels know the future?”) ST 1, q.57, a.3 FYI
St. Maximus, pray for us!
@@WhiteStoneName Interesting, thanks for the reference, I'll check out the ST
@@j.p.marceau5146 You should check out Nate Hile's recent talk with a very interesting Nigerian young man. Mainly on the Trinity. Great stuff. I think you'd find it stimulating. ua-cam.com/video/R4owtR4j-7M/v-deo.html
@@WhiteStoneName Thanks
It's really interesting, in the preceding answer in the Summa, Aquinas speaks of a kind succession of intelligible concepts:
Although the angel's intellect is above that time according to which corporeal movements are reckoned, yet there is a time in his mind according to the succession of intelligible concepts; of which Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. viii) that "God moves the spiritual creature according to time." And thus, since there is succession in the angel's intellect, not all things that happen through all time, are present to the angelic mind.
On the notion of attention being the thing that rules in and rules out: it occurred to me that the word praise is etymologically related to the word appraise, which means to judge or to qualify, even to catalogue or describe. From the dictionary “assess the value or quality of”, essentially to rule in or rule out.
Fantastic insight!
Hm.
And "appreciate"?
Attention in worship, paying close attention to the words that I sing in the choir during the Divine Liturgy, leads to having the experiences that the words speak of…”Let us who mystically represent the Cherubim, and who sing the thrice holy hymn to the life creating Trinity, now lay aside all cares of life!” “Let this communion be neither to my judgement or condemnation, but to the healing of soul and body.” And it is…
I am very touched and moved by how this conversation demonstrates the enactment of good faith from both parties. Beautiful.
The 4 Horseman episode was great, loved watching. I also really appreciated Jonathan having Bishop Barron and John on afterwards, also for those interested please check out Paul Vanderklay's breakdown as it was very helpful for me at least. God bless you all
Weird synchronicity as I see the notification for this while watching a music tutorial by a completely different channel actually titled "Collective Intelligence"
16:00 There's a guy on UA-cam called MemeAnalysis that does symbolic interpretations of memes. He says the Internet is a DEVOURING MOTHER - ready to give you anything you want but never lets you go. It's the collective anima. What do you think about that?
Collective anima wow 🤯
@@dejavugh2130 searched what the definition of anima, accidentally typed anema... no further comments...
I really like this. It's no coincidence that the emergence of the collective anima and devouring mother comes about at the same time as the Karen meme.
@@MartinWondergem hahaha, I was thinking more like "the internet is for p0rn" kind of thing, but Karen's also fine :D
@@joshuasy10 oh poor you...
This Conversation was so Intense It Might as Well Be Psychedelic too! Thanks guys.
The idea of attention also makes sense in regards to how the Orthodox talk about dealing with the temptation of demons; not to pay attention to them, not to let them land in your mind and instead focus on God.
Great conversation! In the truest meaning of the term “conversation”. Unfortunately it ended way too soon.
58:00 - John's point is spot-on here. A great eye-opener for me was realizing that "images" of space are almost entirely greatly marked-up/false-colored images if not total artist renditions.
Well they are real shapes of gas clouds and what not, but yeah most of them are like representations of what they would look like if we could see in ultraviolet wavelengths or something if I remember right.
11:17 this was an intuition I had a while ago actually about many things in the world. I'm not explicitly a Christian, but I was raised as a Baptist so to a certain extent those ideas are baked into my psyche and I'm not one to say I believe in God in the traditional sense, but Jonathan's example of social media acting as a giant, decentralized will possessing an observable telos is how I see most of the universe.
Essentially, whatever one can say about God and Satan, they are definitely AT LEAST "giant, decentralized wills possessing an observable telos." They could in fact be far more than that, and obviously the Christians have a thoroughly fleshed out system of ideas that states exactly so (including the alteration of "personal" rather than "decentralized"), but I think anyone who's been paying even a modicum of attention can't reasonably say they are any *less* than that.
My intuition specifically was that there are at least two of these things and they seem to be at war with each other. They seem to represent chaos and order in a very Petersonian sense. I wouldn't say either is good or bad, but they have clear goals that oppose each other. Part of me is tempted to attribute the Christian god to the will that pursues order, thus making the will that pursues chaos Satan, obviously, but any self-respecting Christian would probably bring up the fact that things are way more complicated than that.
In any case, I think it's undeniable that there are certain forces in the universe that are at war with each other, and on the most grand of scales I think there are fundamentally two of them. There could be an infinite number of them for all I know, at either lower or higher levels of resolution compared to the two I mentioned previously, but I just can't get away from that feeling that something like that is going on.
I feel that brother.
Thats so interesting that you percieve God to be order, and Satan to be chaos. I feel you have that backwards actually! Rather..since chaos is NOT random but long form order..that God is chaos, and Satan is order (order meaning strict rigidness, determinism, lack of spontaneity..lack of life basically).
True chaos is the ability to do anything..but at the right moment, in the right time, in the right context/domain. Control seems to me to be about always monitoring and categorizing and usefulness..which lends itself to authoritarianism and narcissism..which is the opposite of life, growth, playfulness and exploration and emergence. Control to be seems to also lack intuition and the ability to sense into context/domains to act appropriately yet spontaneously.
I do agree that control is not bad or good..its useful but only in the right context. Im not sure that a spirit of Control can understand the Spirit of Play/Life/Exploration tho, hence the "battle" between them not being able to find common ground or unify or peacefulness. Its like trying to get a colorblind person to understand color perhaps...they just cant relate to it as a concept or felt experience (unless they try out some of those Enchroma color correcting glasses and realize color for themselves).
Ugh my full time job is getting in the way of me dedicating all my attention to these videos lol
Oh, finally the question. Are transpersonal beings conscious? That is a key question! Haven’t got there yet just excited to see it in the description 😄
EDIT 1: And yes John that was a great point! Meditation is one of the triad of concentration/meditation/contemplation and people can create an imbalance if they focus on only one.
EDIT 2: Finished when you were getting to the crux of the matter. I hope you start with the consciousness question next time.
It's effectively a question of are there only objects and verbs, subjects and verbs, or subjects verbs and objects? Basically it's the question of materialism vs idealism vs dualism. Is there a ghost in the machine? Is consciousness fundamental or emergent? I personally think that consciousness is fundamental and not emergent so I don't think a hyperobject like the internet is conscious, but I do think that both us and God are subjects not objects, with a consciousness, and the body is just the receiver and manifests the consciousness in a physical form much like I can attempt to try and draw a perfect circle that exists in my min and it manifests as an imperfect drawing of a circle.
@@Pietrosavr See, I also think consciousness is fundamental, but I take a panpsychist view, which not only allows for things like the internet to be conscious, but all manner of things.
I so appreciate Jonathan’s, John’s, Paul’s, And Jordan’s conversations on these topics.
You are all, always 100% sincere and open in your conversations above all else. This is so rare and appreciated in these times.
I'm at the point in listening to so many Jonathan Pageau videos that I take notes on the insights I'm getting, including additional insights that arise in my own mind on the same subject but relating to something else. The video continues to play in the background and while I'm writing my additional insight down one of the next things out of Jonathan's mouth has to do with the same additional insight I'm in the process of writing down. It sure feels like were participating in a shared experience of the logos together. Wild stuff.
I can hardly wait for part II. You guys were at the crux of closing the gap between the top-down and bottom-up approach to grasp reality. You both have answers, how and if you two can reconcile your answers is the key.
This conversation makes me think of the Sistine Chapel. The spirit of Man and the spirit of God trying to find the point where they connect.
Glorious dialogue. More please.
God Bless . The Four Horseman, Thank You.
Amazing, the 4 Horsemen of meaning is really enrich me. New subscriber here, and I like your video with Bishop Barron. This is a new enlightment....
So interesting! Thank you. I'll watch this a couple of times, because I know I missed things and I need some time to get other things right.
As I mull on it, the idea that principalities are as real as ourselves trips me out as it starts making sense
This had all my attention 👽
There is something very special to have tracked john and jonathan over a period of years and to have seen dialogos over time
V is such a decent man. He spends a lot of time hedging his disagreements that has to be for the camera as both P and VanderKlay both trust him. Good talk. I learn a lot.
I'm really looking forward to part 2!! Thanks to all involved.
50:00 I feel like a (mostly) veiled aspect of the Hyperobject we all live in has been revealed, become more apparent, in just the last 2-5 years.
Wow! You are spoiling us Jonathan!!!
If we just substitute spirit for hyper -object, all kinds of things make more sense. Applying hierarchy to spirit and consciousness seems to work really well, I'm not sure why John doesn't see how well that works.
I really hope you guys talk about Rupert Sheldrake and morphic fields and how that relates to angels & Neoplatonic thought and church fathers.
He wrote a book with Matthew Fox called “The Physics of Angels”.
I wonder if Matthew Fox is in any way related to Emmet Fox "The sermon on the mount"? Just a thought....
I love Sheldrake! Such a good suggestion, Luke.
yup.. he should also talk to Gordon White and Bruno Latour..
@@mostlydead3261 latour seems like an interesting chap from Wikipedia. What do you like about Gordon White? I can find less on him in a quick search. He’s an author and occultist?
Don’t confuse trustworthiness with certainty, that was useful; even in a minority of one the truth remains the truth. Always look forward to you two talking. Hopefully we’ll get another one with you guys and Vanderklay again, he’s good at extrapolating what you guys are talking about and putting a different spin on it. God bless you both, was a great conversation as always.
I love u guys, this honest probing for truth just fills me with joy and hope. I don't care what we find, just the fact that we search, honestly search is a wonderful thing. 🙏
31:00 Vervaeke's description of channels for creating trustworthiness (and meaning) relates to the problem Bishop Barron spoke on in the Catholic Church's loss of the sacred. They took away the beauty (visual channel), the incense (olfactory channel), the Latin/chant/sacred music (auditory channel), and the kneeling rails and communion on the tongue (touch/physical channel). These are just a few examples. If our senses help us create trust and engage in meaning, then it is no wonder why the Novus Ordo Mass has led to a decline in the Church.
Good catch. It also explains why so many (me included) couldn’t go back to NO once TLM was experienced. It’s been hard to explain outside of “reverence” but this seems like a reasonable explanation.
@@alphabeta8284 Same with me. I have been to the TLM a few times but still regularly attend the NO and it's frankly a lesser form of worship. Vervaeke also described how we put our attention and meaning on the same thing as those around us, and I can't help but think of the focus of the congregation at a TLM vs. a Novus Ordo.
@@phoult37 But I have to say, when you go to a proper NO, it is also illumines the invisible Mystery. I don't know where you are, but I got a chance to visit NO in Poland over Christmas (going to adoration in 2 hours :)), as well as daily mass during the current Christmas octave. I must say, this is how the NO should be celebrated. I feel that my soul leaps into God's majesty, I am truly transported. Perhaps a part of it is that I cannot understand the language, but since I know the form of the mass, I know what's happening and can rather focus with all my non-verbal senses. It's hard to explain (also my wife translates the homily for me :)). So I have hope for the NO.
Vervaeke and Pageu have the most generative conversations in this space of any other two interlocutors. Can you please have a conversation at least twice a month?
Great discussion-I love how these talks give me so much to think about and ponder.
Excellent! Can't wait for Part Two, and John's discussion with Bishop Barron.
With good health and cheer in mind, if my finger is twitching without my conscious control due to illness then healing it might involve consistent rehabilitation exercises to train the muscle and the brain to work together again. In the same manner with higher beings, if my day-to-day life is unhealthy, then training myself with religious exercises or a physical discipline like yoga can help put me back in order with the higher aspects of life that connect us all together. Thank you for sharing your discussions, they are helping me sort through my first things.
What a fantastic discussion! I feel so lucky to be able to listen to such clear intelligent thinkers 👍
Thanks John and Jonathan!
my spirit is lifted hearing this
lifted and expanded
I needed it
that hour flew by! I was in the zone the whole time, its crazy that John also mentioned Vygotsky who coined the term the "zone". Very much looking forward to part 2, thank you Mr.Pageau!
I’m gonna need to listen to this talk a couple times to really get what’s going on fully but when they started talking about hyper objects representing the shared parts (if I’m not mistaken) of a system or people etc it was surprisingly clear to understand and helped to tie everything together
The IQ bell curve of thinking about God is
Left: God is personal. Middle: God is abstract or impersonal. Right: God is personal.
The fact that we are personal beings and the most intelligent beings we’ve encountered (the closest thing to god) suggests that the being or intelligence that made us is likely even more personal than we are, not less
Could be both in that god is a personal abstraction of the an “impersonal” (rather “transcendent”) being, often so grand as to be transcendence itself.
Spot on! A lot of Internet personalities that get heaps of praise and attention are stuck firmly in the middle unfortunately and are leading people astray
Woah yeah actually.
I think this may be one of the better conversations I've heard on metaphysics which is what this is I think. John V understands there are limits to materialism and it's what allows him to converse w Jon P in a meaningful conversation.
Thank you very much for this conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it because it didn't go so far over my head that I couldn't understand it. I particularly enjoyed seeing or feeling a movement of relationships as fluid. Thank you.
This is fascinating given my recent immersion into Bhakti practices, thinking of the power of singing the holy names in a group. It explains a lot about the practice of deity worship and other group ceremony as well... @ 42:00 going into the train guru worship is considered so important as the gateway to Transcendence of perspective and self. Deep stuff here. Thankyou for expanding the consciousness. 🙏❣️ Haribol!
This is why Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, of all sacrifices, He is the chanting of the holy name. Where attention guess, energy flows. Connecting to source requires the simultaneous dual relationship of personal effort and divine mercy.
Also as a health coach, this conversation on awareness is really important to understanding how to be more effective in directing the personal attention and intention of the client. Wow
If you think there's not a way of separating consciousness from the body, you missed a whole lot on eastern practices.... 1:10:28. Of course practicing both complete embodiment as well as soul consciousness is a personal endeavor which requires effort and time. It's taught in the Vedas that Krishna resides in every atom, and each soul (unit of individual consciousness) is no larger than that. So it's considered that consciousness is literally the very thing the entire universe is composed of. 🕉️🙏
I was glued to this conversation and at the end I realised that pretty much no other topic matters.
You have to continue this! Amazing. Cutting edge of this whole conversation !
I feel like I need to watch these videos multiple times to fully grasp the messages. This is such valuable stuff!
I LOVE the clarity about attention! This conversation is poetry
I do my inner work with the Angels and Ive found that they all have directions and applications that ultimately build the House of God when used together.
Truly beautiful dialogos, exemplary with true love, charity and affection between them. Agape. Truly beautiful dialogos. Very excited to witness the follow-up after the initiation of the topic. It's a conversation I've been having with myself for forty years. Intentions set to truth and re-uniting science and Christianity. Braiding the cord, weaving the web.
Thank you Gentlemen for a fine discussion. The reflections on the use of social media and its platforms were thankfully sane and circumspect ( or so it seemed to me ). Prof Vervaeke's articulation of attention, intention, and how it works with prioritization, salience, etc., was helpful and , I believe, how it really works. Somewhere around 8 or 9 minutes in Prof Vervaeke spoke of people who are becoming aware of "connectedness" and attention, with the issues of salience and relevance realization, but not necessarily embodying these "qualities" to their own flourishing, and to that of their communities. There may be good reasons for this, and some may find it impossible to make "the connections" that their communities want to "bind" them too. And you both went on to talk about the positives and negatives of community and individuation somewhat. Very helpful. One of you made a reference to Hitler and the hypnotic attention he accessed in large crowd events. It is chilling to read what he wrote about propaganda and the psychology of its use in his book.
I don't know nothin about angels and principalities, but all I can write about that is . . . hold it . . . someone's knockin at the door. Gotta go.
Great discuss between Jonathan and Ed Helms.
Finally! I learned about Angels indirectly from John: he pointed me to Tom Cheetham and his work on Henry Corbin, Angels, and the imaginal. Blessings for y'all's work. Ibn Arabi believed the imaginal entities are real.
This guys intro is amazing.
Awesome! Glad to see this subject discussed. I think there’s a really strong case for internal/transjective experience of pieces of consciousness attracting input and operating as internal personalities.
I think it’s an intersecting area between orthodox religion, Jungian/post Jungian thought, theosophy, and now science and psychology.
A strong argument about one’s capacity for light, teleology and mentor ship is to be made here too, against certain elements of Jung, and the post Jungians, and it’s a nuanced argument that I think butts up against middle grounds and the total archetypal landscape that even Christianity had to integrate in many ways and cannot harvest the entire field.
This leads to a difficult space where final ontological commitments and exclusions I think are going to have to be argued over, and co-exist with some personal and community elements being voluntarily chosen, and engendered by traditions, rather than just asserted on everyone beyond what can actually be asserted with finality.
I think it definitely drives nails into the popular, decadent romanticism and chasing experience for its own sake, and solipsism, and can find a core meta-ontology that affords traditions, personalism, and exclusionary institutions. What I don’t think it will garner is “proof” of one religion and everyone returning to that and dismissal of anything outside it that complicates it’s final authority, or the way some of the comments and community just use these arguments to re-instate a religious positivism, and at a certain threshold level the arguments dilute and are captured by the two prevailing visions of our time, nested in modernity.
I don’t think it’s all a conspiracy theory by mean old church fathers, and there are many, many, factors outside Christianity at play here, and these traditions have in many ways kept this concept alive, made sophisticated ways to access it, and deal with dangers, and there are negative effects of esotericism in our history, along with the discovery of science and power of it and technology itself. However, I don’t think you can avoid a runaway train of positivist and materialist sections of different Christian religions that upheld nominalistic, and Descartes for ownership of truth, and a logical endpoint of this with multiple non-Christian factors leading to a general, at net discarding of full cosmology, angelology, and personalization and mystical elements being discarded, because they were not always easily contained (in addition to legitimate concerns given over salience.)
You guys are both wonderful, and wonderful together!
You absolutely have to continue at the spot you ended the discussion. That point feels like the furthest point you can go as a "non-religious" person without becoming "religious" in the sense that Jonathan is a "religious" person.
Top 10 conversations of all time
I listen to a lot of podcasts, but this one changed the way I think about a lot of things. And i probably only understood 10% of what was happening lol
My brain is just thirsty for this. Wowwwww
This was amazing. One of my favorites from either Vervaeke or Pageau. Generally my perspective lines up moreso with Vervaeke, but there are points here where I relate strongly with Pageau's propositions. This terrain between their ideas feels quite relevant to me. I'm pretty excited for part 2.
...really enjoying these discussions...
Just as you got going...! Darn cliffhangers. I can’t wait for part two.
Shout out to my boy JP 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Delightful video! Thanks to you both!
For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them. Matthew 18:20
Thank you Both for continuing to explore these topics and sharing this amazing chat with us meere plebs 😃
Loving these conversations.....All I can think is Dr. Michael S. Heiser (author of The Unseen Realm and Supernatural) should be part of this. He would bring another biblical Ancient Near East theological/cosmological understanding to all of this.
Thank you so deeply for everything you do for us ♥️
On the internet as The One Ring, my friend Richard Emerson of The Ancient World channel and podcast, w Sean from Mythos and Logos were just touching on this and how it interacts with different people with different levels of power. Glad it’s being seen and discussed by John and Jonathan.
Mind blown from 42:00 through 45:00
I cannot wot for part two. This was the best conversation ever. Thanks
I can't figure out which one of you two I love more :O)
That was great - you complemented each other and that afforded me sense of dawning understanding of what you were talking about. I would love to see Jordan Peterson involved into that discussion of the reality of the hyper-objects/forms/archetpyal patterns and hierarchy and the participation in Christ.
This metaphor in particular I found compelling: like my finger is to myself, I am to the ideas/values that inhabit/possess me.
I would also like to hear a evolutionary argument for how distributed cognition co-evolves with the personified patterns of reality and how these afford the individuals better perception of and conduct in allignment with these patterns.
Thank you both for doing this!
This is how I've always viewed my faith. It is the encompassing definition of humans, how they think how they act the joys and the sorrows, as well as the definition of the universe. Everything can be explained within the framework of our faith. It seems the natural conclusion for purely scientific avenues of observing human nature and the natural world to come home and seek resolution within Christianity. My personal theory regarding suffering also falls within this realm. I think humans are in a constant state of suffering, since we are cut off from our natural state of being with God as in the garden of Eden. Even when we lack any form of physical suffering our soul aches and this can be observed in the mental illness crisis we have now, especially in most first world countries. That suffering is only relieved when we are as close in communion with God as we possibly can be. I do want to be careful here though and recognize mental illnesses that do need medical treatment and should of course seek that when necessary.
I think you should talk to Iain Mcgilchrist.. I think everyone should to talk to him
Thank you both so much for continuing to dialogue and sharing such rich insights; this was amazing.
It seems like there's a contradiction in Jonathan's view, because he simultaneously claims that principalities are conscious beings that can exist independently of joint attention, in contrast to John's view of these collective intelligences as existing transjectively, lacking self-consciousness and activated through participation, and yet Jonathan also claims they require physical body, just as our consciousness requires embodiment. But then what happens when they become wholly forgotten, at the level of their body? Jonathan acknowledges that everything but God requires a body (and that God's body is the cosmos itself in a sense). Are they ontologically dependent on our attention the way the gods in Neil Gaiman are? That then conflicts with the traditional metaphysics of the patterns of reality as being part of its fundamental structure, part of the emanationist constraints ("heaven") that shape the creative potential of physical manifestation, and these are also normally describing as existing eternally. It would seem there is an equivocation and / or conflation between these two concepts occuring for aesthetic and / or doctrinal purposes.
I think a way to resolve this is to understand the particular principalities as they manifest in creation through physicality as being partial aspects of the primordial patterns of reality. I think aspects of Whitehead's metaphysics (a theistic, process-oriented Neo-neoplatonism) are helpful here. The primordial patterns ("eternal objects" in Whitehead's terminology) are defined by their relation to other eternal objects. There is also a notion of the capacity for minds and circumstances to "cut" the eternal objects such that only aspects of them manifest. These could then be said to emerge in time and participate in the consciousness of it's body (the examples of gods of cities ect. as discussed), but there is no such thing as a discrete consciousness or even discrete agency in this sense, as each is a partial "cutting" of an eternal object that is already defined by relation. Now, in the sense that everything participates in God this is true in general (and that everything is part of the omniscient "consciousness" of God, only existing through participation in God in the first place) but here it is also true in a way distinct from analogies to human consciousness. Now, I would be fine saying the principalities become conscious when joint attention is given to them, and *through* the collective consciousness of it's "body" in a sense, and that outside these occasions they exist as abstract patterns constraining potential.
The eternal objects in Whitehead (a rendition of Platonic ideas) can be "cut" in innumerable different ways; this would thus be similar to the Thomistic concept Jonathan mentioned of an angel manifesting for every relation between two beings. I'm actually happy with that Thomistic concept if understood in a non-anthropomorphic sense closer to Vervaeke's view, as it shows the primacy of transjectivity, but I don't think it's compatible with at least a simplistic image of Jonathan's proposal, in that it would imply an asymptotic infinitude of conscious beings either being created and retained or created and dying constantly, which would again conflict with the notion of discrete self-conscious agents that require physical bodies to exist in the former case and with principalities as part of the structure of reality in the latter.
Our form of consciousness and cognition is tightly interconnected with our particular type of embodiment as humans, as John's work has so thoroughly articulated. Given the tight coupling of cognition / consciousness (certainly *self-consciousness*, see Bernardo Kastrup's work here for explicating this key distinction), and the history of the cosmos, with humans being a very recent development, I don't think one can simultaneously claim that principalities are:
1. Eternal patterns of reality
2. Conscious, especially self-conscious beings
3. Require bodies in the physical world for their existence
Furthermore, I think it's quite clear that new patterns of reality emerge (or at least manifest) at various points in both cosmic and human history, which is further explained by the cutting metaphor for eternal objects.
Eriugena, who John and Jonathan have a shared respect for, defined angels as "an intellectual motion about God and the causes of things." I think this accords well with the Whiteheadian process view I've presented.
I think the concept Vervaeke proposed, that consciousness (or self-consciousness, in Kastrups's language) may only exist at a certain range of complexity and not above or below it, is on to something. Similar to how different emergence vectors (constrained by emanative eternal objects / forms) may have more in common with a vector / strata several away from it in either direction of complexity than one adjacent to it (see Alexander Bard, e.g.: ua-cam.com/video/fLqGNbiCasg/v-deo.html and Gregg Henriques' Tree of Life model of the history of complexity).
For example, cognition and sub-physics may actually have more similarities to each other than the vectors next to them (e.g. biology or culture [where I think this topic is mainly at, and it's overlap with cognition] on one hand, or physics on the other.
This goes for communication paradigms as well; see for example the amazing work the Center for the Study of Digital Life is doing using Aquinas and McLuhan, on how, for example, the new digital paradigm "retrieves" the medieval scribal paradigm in sharing certain similarities to it, most notably memory (drawing on Thomas' ecology of the inner senses) in contrast to the electric paradigm's focus on imagination / fantasy.
As to Jonathan's question on why cultures throughout history have treated gods the way he's describing: the spirit of finesse often affords better results, by treating them imaginally and poetically, and our ancestors obviously didn't have a grasp of cognitive science, among other areas of knowledge. Not all superstitutions are going to or should be retained in this new return to religion.
How would the principality of a river or forest exist as something conscious when no one is attending to it? Furthermore, what about the principality of various groves in the forest? Individual trees? Things quickly become combinatorially explosive, at which point Thales' "everything is full of gods" is I think best taken in a Whiteheadian panexperientialist manner, and I'd argue the same goes for the topic at hand.
A gestalt does not necessarily possess all the features that make it up *in the same manner* as that feature in isolation. To use Jonathan's favored example, the city of London may have a kind of gestalt agency you can describe using poetic terms, but that doesn't mean every feature in the city contributes because our cognition and consciousness (via Relevance Realization) is grounded in the fact that we are finite biological organisms that *care* about the information we intake. There is nothing strongly analogous to the discreteness of an organism here that affords it's cognition through the will to survive - the city limits are not perfectly defined, and the city's agency extends beyond it's bounds through people, mail, telephone lines and media, ect. Now, I can agree that the city has both a kind of agency, a gestalt form (with fluid borders), a collective consciousness via its inhabitants (including nonhuman ones in the panexperientialist sense), and participates in constraining forms / heavenly patterns / principalities / eternal objects, and in doing so acts as a lesser one at the level of manifestation, and that people's joint attention to a symbolic "face" or faces of the city (names, presiding god, capitol building) can function to help unify those participating in it, but would argue that further claiming that there is a separate, discrete, conscious - certainly self-conscious - agent behind it is grounded more in an aesthetic efficiency in the spirit of finesse than in coherence or plausibility.
I also think a way to describe the matter that integrates or at least mediates both positions is that the principalities John and Jonathan described are, if they do have any sort of consciousness, are at the very least not conscious in the way we are conscious, as embodied psycho-somatic rational organisms. To assert otherwise would be a form of anthropomorphism / anthropocentrism. Again I think Whitehead is quite helpful here.
Finally, on a somewhat different note, I appreciate, in all senses of the word, what Jonathan said about the activity of God as a constant call of your telos and your capacity to embody it rather than any action being purely God's or a creature's (other than creation itself I suppose). Its a synergistic model; not purely passive or active but a participation. This also maps to God's superjective lure in Whitehead's metaphysics.
Thank you both again for the discussion; looking forward to part 2.
Frank Herbert does a cracking job with the phenomenology of prophecy in Dune, Messiah.
1:02:21 this is what I, we, need to learn