The Meaning Crisis

Episode 1 - Introduction

Mindfulness Revolution. Showed a book from Barry Boyce. Intersection of Buddhism and Cognitive Science.

"Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom" by Michel Ferrari & Nic M Weststrate. From contemplative traditions to neuroscience. Wisdom is hot. Showed the book "How to be a Stoic" Massimo Pugliucci. Why is this a thing right now?

Interest in psychedelics. Why is this interest now?

Happiness is a topic that has always been popular. The topic of meaning in life is coming up more. Not just content, but meaning in life. "Transformative Experience" by L. A. Paul. It is no coincidence.

We are going through a mental health crisis just now. People are worried of losing touch with reality. Expressions of cynicism. Abandonment of trust in political and judicial systems. Religion affiliation is declining.

"Zombies in Western Culture" Vervaeke, Mastropietro, Miscevic. People talk about being out of touch. Sense of more and more bullshit. Social media is causing people to be increased depression and loneliness. A sense that we are stuck. The crisis is the meaning crisis. Also ecological crisis.

What is meaning? How to cultivate wisdom to generate and enhance this meaning? What is the crisis? Why is it important? Why did this arise? Connections between meaning, wisdom, and self transcendence. Altered states of consciousness. How is intelligence connected to altered consciousness? Shamanism. Ritual. Flow state. Psychedelics. Awakening experiences. Experience more real than real. Lives are better afterward. A cognitive scientific account of enlightenment.

The darker aspect of meaning making. Self deception is endemic. Foolishness is not ignorance.

Cognition and meaning is tied together. Meaning is a metaphor: there is something in their life that is like meaning for a sentence. Impact your cognition. Connect you to the world. The most meaningful experiences are ineffable. One thing: "To know is to have a special kind of belief" so there is a lot of culture around belief.

Other kinds of knowing important for therapy: recover lost kinds of knowing. transform not your beliefs, but how you see things: your sense of self and your sense of realness have to be transformed.

Need a structural functional account of meaning. Compare to historical account of meaning. Dialog. Proposes a real response to the meaning crisis. Awakening from the meaning crisis. It is complex and difficult. With rigorous rational explanations, and with credit to original authors. Minimize jargon and technicalities.

Why is meaning part of humanity? Meaning making is tied to cognition from way back in evolution. When did our humanity come into form? How much is tied to meaning making. Upper paleolithic period: 40,000 BC. At that time is a radical change. Art. Culture. Cave paintings. Good evidence for music. From an enhancement in cognition. The first use of calendars: days, moon, years. Projectile weapons developed at that time. Start to develop thin spears with bone tips, with spear thrower. Not just thrusting jabbing tool, but throwing. (project == throwing) (object == thrown against) (subject == throwing under) Different kinds of meaning. Time. Space.

"Supernatural Selection, how religion evolved" Matt J Rossano. There is a radical change in human cognition. Between 30,000 and 60,000 years ago almost extinguished. Move to coasts. Change diet. But most important: broad trading networks. Developed rituals for dealing with challenges and social network. Cognition is participatory. Interacting with people who are not in our kinship. Rituals for coming into relationships of trust. Shaking hands. How are you? To answer, you have to express things in the other person's perspective.

"Mindsight" Daniel J Siegel. Ability to pick up on other people's mental states. That that allows you to pick up on your own: metacognition and mindfulness. Myth of the temptation of the stranger. Initiation rituals to avoid this. Pain and fear shows commitment. Requires ability to regulate emotion. To de-center. Non ego-centric perspective.

Third kind of ritual. Exaptation. "After Phrenology" Michael L Anderson. Tongues did not evolve for speech, but now critical for that. Same tube for breathing and food. Something evolved for one purpose is exapted for another purpose. This happens in the brain as well. Shamanic rituals.

"Shamanism" Michael Winkelman. Shaman is an archetypal figure. Looking for a scientific explanation for why shamans are so successful. Sudden explosion in cognition. "The Mind in the Cave" David Lewis-Williams. The brain existed already, not hardware change but software change that reuses functions.

Psychotechnology - systematic use of a tool that enhances cognitive abilities. "Natural-Born Cyborgs" Andy Clark. Brain starts to model those tools you use. Feel your way to car parking place. Everything in our environment is tool (other than naked me). You can use cognitive things as tools as well. Fit your brain. Literacy. Using writing there are many additional problems you can solve. Shamanism is a set of psychotechnologies.

Why this rise in neo-shamanism? Sleep deprivation. Intense long hours dancing and chanting. imitation. Clothing. Mask. Isolation. Wilderness. Psychedelics. "Waking from Sleep" Steve Taylor disruptive strategies for awakening experiences. Disrupt the normal ways of finding patterns in the world. The way you find patterns is profound. The nine dot problem. Think outside the box. Solving is hard because of the way you framed the problem. Even saying to think outside the box does not get them to change their frame. the shaman can disrupt this and get new insights, new patterns others are not seeing. Shaman is trying to get the perspective of the deer. Participatory Knowing. Manipulating the "meaning" of things, but not a charlatan. Wisdom.

Questions

• Is the sense of apocalypse new? What evidence do we have that it was not there in the past?
• What role does meaning play in life?
• What does "self-transcendence" mean?
• What is exaptation?
• What is a Psychotechnology?
• What role does the shaman play and why?
• What is participatory knowing?
• How do rituals effect your ability make meaning?
• What is wisdom?

Episode 2 - Flow, Metaphor and Axial Revolution

Shamanism - significant changes in their attention. "Flow state" Michale Cy_. Boredom, Flow, Anxiety. Need an environment where when your skills improve, your benefit improves. Flow induction machines. (video games - addictive because of this flow state). Addictions run off machinery that is evolutionarily adaptive. Martial Arts. Music. Jazz. Rock climbing. Flow state is deeply positive. More flow == more meaning in life. Universal across cultures.

What does it feel like? Deeply at one with things. Lots of metabolic work, but feels effortless. Self consciousness disappears. Autobiography management disappears. They like it. And it is where they do their best work. Training in mindfulness helps people get into flow state.

Why is it so good? Rock climbers need to break the frame, change what is relevant, change yourself to fit that. And you have to keep doing that. Jazz musician, have to constantly restructure again and again. Flash of insight. Ah-ha. Extend this cascade to make it last longer and you have flow state. Constant flashes of insight.

"Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge" Arthur S Reber - Tremendous capacity to pick up complex patterns in the environment. People can tell when they are being stared at. Could report this. But people introduced non-random, and the blindfolded person was learning the pattern. A lot of psychic abilities are this ability to pick up on complex patterns. If you ask them to figure out the rule, they actually get work. Implicit can not be replaced with explicit.

"Educating Intuition" - Robin Hogarth - intuition is actually this implicit learning. "Mind Reason and Being-in-the-World" Joseph K Schear. You know how far to stand from somebody, and what angle to stand at. But you would not be able to say exactly what the rules are. We also have bias and prejudice for when this fails. Why? Problem is that there are two kinds of patterns: correlation and causation. Bigger weddings and longer marriage. "Better Angels of our Nature" Stephen Pinker. Want to pick up on causal patterns and not correlational ones.

Good implicit learning is: Good information learning, tightly coupled feedback, errors matter. This is the same as those needed for flow state. These conditions are optimal for learning, and that is why flow is enjoyed. We like learning. Shaman is getting into flow state. Enhanced implicit learning. Insight cascade. Reinforce each other. Flow enhances cognition. Not verbal insights. Almost mystical experience. Healing and transforming people. Your brain is getting areas to talk to each other, that don't normally talk together. Connect them. You take for granted, but this is special.

Metaphor is a metaphor (meaning bridge and connecting). Metaphors bridge between things. Do you "see" what I am saying. Do you "get" my "point". Half way "through"" the talk. Hope it not to "hard" for you. Shaman was connecting areas. Want to figure out? use an analogy, use a metaphor. Generators of metaphor. Bones, cards, tea leaves. Flow exapts some of our basic machinery. "Soul flight" - getting high. More comprehensive graph is like being higher up, oversight. "supervision" is a metaphor for shamanic flight.

Neolithic revolution 10,000 YA is beginning of agriculture. Stone -> bronze -> iron. Another big change 600 BC (800 - 300 BCE) Axial age produced thinkers that we read today. Things from the bronze age are not relevant in the way that Axial Age civilization is relevant. What happened? More cities disappeared than at any time in history. Dinosaur empires disappears, but gave room for new forms of social organization. Bottleneck. New psychotechnologies. New: alphabetic literacy. Cuneiform was very difficult. Alphabetic literacy is easier to learn. Easier to share. Can correct it. Can work on more than immediate memory.

Metacognition is awareness of your own mind. Alphabetic allows you to be more aware of your own thinking. Get second order thinking.

Coinage was invented. Money teaches you to think in abstract symbols. Numeracy. Enhances transcendence. Also more aware of how self-desceptive you are. Self correction, and self deception. Sense of responsibility. Chaos and war was part of natural order, but after axial age, became aware that "we" are cause of wars. The is no enemy greater than your own mind. No ally better than your own mind. Creates violence, but also the only solution to violence.

• is deeply at one with things related to enjoyment of flow? (Skiing)
• causal patterns vs. correlational patterns.
• What is soul flight?
• how do coins change the way we see the world?
• what is the axial age?

Episode 3 - Continuous Cosmos

Myth does mean a "falsehood that is widely believed". Instead here he means "to take patterns that are intuitive and to explain them."

Continuous Cosmos - human beings experience deep connection between things. In Egypt the pharaoh was a god-king. Gods were like us but just more powerful. Gods are glorious, shining with power. Not morally better. We can only understand this as something metaphorical.

Cosmos moves in large cycles. Trying to get back to the power of creation. Nostalgia. Natural / social / divine worlds are contiguous. Wisdom is power. (live long and prosper)

Mythological Way of Thinking: two things. Everyday world is an illusion, crime, delusion, suffering, violence. The real world is the pure understanding above that, what the wise people see. This is a radical change. You want to be transformed out of the everyday world. The shamanic flight exapted to be about self transformation. Meaning is not just connectedness, but connection to the real world. The idea of self changes: not just how you fit in, but how you can grow as a person. (Growing is always "up"). The great disembedding. The idea that we are strangers in the everyday world, and we belong in the real world.

What you think about your mind is actually from culture that you have internalized. You can't imagine not being literate.

Foreshadow: scientific view is destroying mythological view, and returning us to a continuous cosmos. We can't live the mythological world. How do we overcome self-deception without the mythological view. This is a great reembedding.

Ancient Israel. Grammar of the bible vs. grammar of your own cognition. It is about how you think. "Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ" Nietsche: "I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar." We are filled with the God grammar of the Bible. The redemption story shapes our sense of self in world. Psychotechnologies have become part of the grammar.

A psychotechnology of understanding time to explain stories. Radical? Hindu cycle of rebirth is a terror, and your goal is to be released from the cycle. Myth future is open. You actions can change the future, God liberates them to the promised land. Meaning and morality. "I am" is the god of the open future. You can shape it. (Free Will) "of course" this is a course, a way, a path.

Kairos - 'the right, critical, or opportune moment' - "Systematic Theology" Paul Tillich.

Da'ath - special knowledge that is unique to the consciousness. Participatory. It grows. You change it while it changes you. (sex = knowing) Making love is participating. Faith did not mean believe what is without evidence. Instead, it meant the participatory course of change. Relationship. Or, if not on course, you trespass (course goes off course)

"In Hebrew, the word for knowledge, or gnosis, is daath דעת. It is usually spelled in English as daat, da'ath, or daath. This is a kind of special knowledge that is unique to the consciousness. It is not related to the intellect. It is not related to belief. It is not in the form of thoughts, words, ideas, concepts, theories, dogmas, books, etc. Rather, it is a kind of conscious knowledge related to the soul, that has to be put into practice so that this special, internal knowledge can grow and build upon itself, and elaborate the creation of the soul."

Sin - Not doing something wrong, but falling off course. Open future, all is possible, but sin steers you away from there. God has to redeem to get you back on course.

Prophet - not about telling the future. Instead a "telling forth" to wake you up to how you are off course. Therapist statement that wakes you up.

We think about ourselves in there terms, as if we are on a journey. This is part of our way of thinking.

Fluency - Greek added vowels to the alphabet. Increasing the ease to read something makes it more believable. A lot of fluency is the flow state. Also standard left to right. Created democracy, which makes debate more important. Rational reflection is invented.

Pythagorus - time of the "divine men" which rediscovers shamanic principles. Invents the octave. "thunderstone ceremony" Trapped inthis world but we can fly above it, transcend. Give us the word cosmos. Universe is not cosmos. Cosmetic comes from cosmos - how beautiful and ordered the universe is. Radically beautiful.

Socrates - Epitomizes the Greek form of the axial revolution. Do you actually experience the universe or the cosmos.

Questions

• what is the connection between meaning and morality?
• what is kairos?

Episode 4 - Socrates and Quest for Wisdom

Soul flight has been changed into an escape from reality.

Socrates - Different interpretations, but he follows the particular interpretation from _. Remember, people thought they talk to the gods. Everyone should visit Delphi. Oracles always talk in vague, cryptic terms, except when asked about Socrates being the wisest human being. Gods can't lie. "Know thyself" is not just to know your history. Instead "participatory knowing" into the principles that are operating in you.

Confirmation bias is a big problem today with social media.

Socratic method. Two kinds of people: natural philosophers vs sophists. (philia & sophia).

Thales in three lines:

• all is the moist - water is everywhere, sub-stance means under the standing. Thales is trying to invent how to think scientifically.
• the load-stone has psyche - magnets have move, psyche means breath or wind, trying to find the force behind everything),
• everything is filled with gods - ontology is the study of the structure of reality. Ontological analysis is using reasoning for this. Trying to see into the depths of reality. Awe, wonder, and making sense of things = sacred.

Anaxagoras - also influenced Socrates. Natural philosophers give you truths without transformation. do not indicate how to be a good person. Knowledge is not wisdom. Truth without relevance.

Athens was a democracy (for Athens born males) and this makes argument very important. Sophists were debaters: argue without necessarily believing what is true. Relevance shapes how we see things. Rhetoric and advertisement. Salience is what you care about. Belief about the shampoo is not important, but instead salience of it is.

Bullshit and liar are different things. Liar says P when not P. Bullshit makes you disinterested in whether something is true or not. Salient things are relevant to you. Bullshit matters because it separates relevance and salience from truth. You can't lie to yourself. Lying is about believing. But you can bullshit yourself. That is still self-deception. Bullshit about directing attention. Directed attention makes things more salient. Your attention can be captured by salience. Cycle that feeds on each other. Something becomes salient, and you lose the ability to focus on other things. Sophists are against that attempt to avoid self-deception.

Relevance without truth. Power is disconnected from truth. Socrates wanted both: truth and salience.

Aporia - the state where you don't know what it going on. We are driving by things that are salient that we don't understand. Bullshitting ourselves. Some people: I need to transform myself to make salience and truth fit together. The wisest man knew what he didn't know. To realize what you really don't know. Unexamined life is about putting these two together. Wisdom is the result of this examination.

Ta erotica - Knowing what to care about. Coordinating cares with what is real. Properly care. Draw out the better self. Knew how reason and love go together. (Frankfurt) Caring well reduces capacity for self-deception.

• What does he mean by relevance?
• What does he mean by salience?

Episode 5 - The Cave

Skill and wisdom couples knowledge with salient / relevant. What is transformative and what is true should be coupled together.

Plato: bedrock of western spirituality. Sacred is an inexhaustible fount of insight and intelligibility. How can beloved Athens kill beloved Socrates. Two worlds mythology. Hebrew said we are moving forward in history. But Plato gives a scientific answer, begins psychology.

Why do humans do foolish things? Inner conflict, divided against ourselves. Dieting. Procrastination. Inner conflict and self deception are tied. Different centers in the psyche.

• man = head = reason = truth/false = long term goals = abstract = understanding
• lion = chest = thymos = social animal, honor/shame (not guilt) = midterm goals = cultural meaning
• monster = stomach/genitals = appetite = pleasure/pain (not bad, but different: immediate, now) motivation, salience

Ability to work together is human superpower: adaptive. "Breakdown of Will" - George Ainsley.

Discounting is how you reduce the salience of something. Something present is much more salient, but future much less so. Future things are less probable. Many many particular deaths, but want to avoid all possible deaths. Blind to each individually ends up blinding you to all in common. (This would blind you to any general situation.)

Fighting the monster: abstract thought and symbolically represent it. Man can learn. Lion can be trained. Man and lion together can tame the monster. Inner harmony is optimal relationship and fullness of being. Inner conflict dropped. Peace with yourself.

Story of the magic room, government hired us to raise you and follow the script. Now you know the truth. The relationship would no longer be real. (1) reduce inner conflict and (2) better connection to reality. Better knowledge of yourself, you get better in many ways, in a reinforcing cycle. Less conflicted.

Myth of the cave: Self transformation and contact with the world is connected. I have to change in order to see the world, and when I do, I see better, and change more. Participatory knowing. We accept the shadows as reality, because we don't know. Cave journey upward. Eyes need to adjust, stop, and then continue. Source of light is beyond understanding. Can't tell the others what they saw. Enlightenment is not just an eastern idea. Coming into the light. Myth of self transformation, wisdom.

Anagoge. Coming more and more in contact with reality and inner peace. We become more and more real. Matrix movie, Neo = neoplatonism. Reason and spirituality are not opposed to each other.

Pythaogrean side of Plato. Idos is form. More like a paradigm. What is the real pattern of something. Not just how you know it, but what makes it what it is. Definition of a bird: there is something more important: the structure/functional organization. This makes the whole greater than sum of parts. "gestalt" "logos" What is the logos of a bird. Intuitive grasp, but hard to explain.

Questions

• why is "meaning" tied to "transformation"?
• form is what something is? Or just something we recognize?

Episode 6 - Aristotle, Kant, Evolution

Aristotle looked at how things change / grow. (meaning related to growth) What makes a block of wood act like a chair, table, or ship. "Actuality" is what make something act like something. Form (Eidos - structural/functional organization) makes it act. The wood has "potential". (information - put something into a form and it acts like something).

Living things form themselves.

Humans are connected to reality. Model from Newton: change occurs because of causal impact. A -> B -> C. "because" this causal relationship seems to solve problems. Kant says this gives an account of how to explain things. Prevents circular explanations. Humuncular fallacy: theory of how we perceive things. But cause has to be independent.

But living things are problematic. "Self-organizing" coined by Kant. Feedback cycle. He concluded the biology was impossible. Alicia Juarrero points out a gap in biology and physics. Dynamical Systems Theory. Causes are events = actuality. Constraints are not events, instead the form is possibility. Possibility is shaped by constraints so that one thing is more possible than another thing. Tree are a process that cause a form, but the form constrains the events. Science depends on potentiality to be a real thing. F=ma is not an event, it is a shape, it is a limit on what is possible.

Enabling Constraints - make things more possible. Selective restraints reduce possibilities. Theory of natural selection is the first dynamic systems theory. Called a "virtual governor" and a "virtual generator". It is an engine. Feedback cycle required - sexual reproduction. Conditions in the environment reduce the opportunities; scarcity of resources. Variation increases the options. Evolution depends on ideas from Aristotle.

Meaning: how does growth develop? how does meaning develop? "Character" not your personality, your general constitution. The character can be cultivated. Acting out of character is usually a criticism. (virtue == virtual engine). What is the virtual engine on personal development. Spend time on hair and appearance. How much time did you spend on your character? Golden mean is a way to cultivate character. You are a self organizing process! Are you just letting that run? Or trying to structure it so that the process grows and develops in a positive way? "He is not living up to his potential." Grow up. self-organization == self improvement.

Wisdom is gaining the ability to cultivate virtues so that you actualize your potential.

Akrasia - when you know what the right thing to do is, but you don't do it. You have the right beliefs, but you don't have sufficient character. You are not actually driven by the right things. Live up to your potential.

What makes something "well made"? Its structural-functional organization does what it is supposed to do. We are self-making. (more than self organizing.) autopoetic. Plants are selfmaking, but humans are conscious. Psyche is from moving, and the mind is the thing that makes you move. Mental things. Rational things. Aristotle says your purpose is to become as fully human as possible. Most rational == more human.

Episode 6 - Aristotle, Eric Fromm

(the summary of this episode is quite good, but not replayed here.)

Rationality is understanding you can be self deceptive. Reflective realizing the capacity for self deception and delusions, and realizing how to transcend this. Aristotle. You have to structure the psyche to avoid self delusion.

What is it to truly know something? Knowing is not just being able to describe it. Instead, someone who can make one (cause it to be) really knows. they have the idos, the structural functional organiation. Like a blue print

-- not sure I agree. The blueprint does not actually have the idos, but it shows the idos. The chair maker does not have the form of a chair in their mind, they have a model of the form. He says the minds actually "takes on that structural functional organization." If it takes the form of a chair, then it is a chair. Only chairs take the form of the chair. You can have a model or a representation of that, but that model is necessarily simpler than the real thing.

-- consider an electronic "schematic diagram". This is what the circuit designer uses, and it is NOT the actual structural functional organization of the circuit board.

When we make sense of things, the patterns in our mind matches the patterns in the world.

When you hear something, you make sure your sense are working well, that the environment is appropriate, and also others agree with you. These are the kinds of checks you do to assure that your understanding matches reality.

Things move because there is a place they "want" to be. Drop the pen moves to where it wants to be. Water wants to go down. Fire wants to go up. Natural motion. Everything has a natural drive, just like you. If the earth is rotating the pen should fall behind you.

conformity theory. If the thoughts match the world, you then understand it. "World View"

agent versus arena. A agent if capable of persuing a role. The arena is the right place for the role. Coidentification: they play off each other. Football player and the stadium. You are always assuming an identity, and assigning an identity to other things. To get a coherent and functional point of view.

Meta-meaning relations. Worldview attunement.

Episode 8 - Buddha and Mindfulness

Fromm: being mode and having mode.

Buddha: Sidhartha Gautama. Living in the palace is about "having" things. Leaves the palace: sees a sick person, sees an old person, sees a monk. Pursues asceticism: give the body tremendous pain and suffering to deny the properties of the earth. Starves to bones, but it is not working. Annihilate yourself still has a self. Negation of self indulgence is not transcending it.

Lyre strings: Too tight is just sa bad as too loose, so he discovers the middle path. Not just median, but optimize. A little girl saves him (demeaning) and gives rice pudding.

"sati" is remember and bring it to mind. It is what it is like to be in the being mode. Trying to remember/recover the being mode. This is translated as "mindfulness". Stephen Bachelor book "Alone with others".

Sati is like waking up. Recover my world and my self. Leo Farraro on Consciousness.

People teach how to get mindfulness, but much of the explanations leave out the concept of Sati. Must distinguish the language of training from the language of explaining. How you explain it should not be confused with how you understand it.

Spotlight metaphor for attention. Mindfulness is usually explained as a feature list, but you can't understand the idos: structural functional organization. (1) being present (doing/state), (2) non judging (doing/state) (3) insight (trait), (4) reduce reactivity (trait). Missing the idos. Need to map this to psychology and cognitive science. How do the states cause the traits?

"being present" means something like right concentration. Paying attention, but what is the model for attention? (Ellen Langer Mindfulness) Instead of demanding "concentrate" instead a kind of exploring and opening up. Renewing interest. Involved.

Attention is not a spotlight. It is instead about conforming to what you are interested in. Attention makes things more salient. (Christopher Mole - Attention is Cognitive Unison). Walking is something you do. But practice is optimizing something else. You pay attention by optimizing some other process. See -> look. Hearing -> listening. Pay attention is both.

Episode 9 - Insight

Attention is a hot area in cog sci. (Wayne Wu Attention, Sebastian Watzel Structuring Mind).

Tapping exercise. You can be aware of things, and aware through things. Awareness of the cup, then aware of the probe, then aware of the lingers. When aware of the fingers, the cup disappears. And vice versa. Attention is this kind of recursive structural thing. "Indwelling" the probe when you are focusing on the cup. Transparency to opacity transition. Same can happen with literacy: you don't see the book when reading it.

Also, the attention is couched in the context. THE CAT example. Gestalt and features. Bottom up and top down. Spotlight metaphor can not explain this. Dynamic self-organizing processes which optimize themselves. Everything is nested. Scaling up: Grabbing bigger patterns to look more deeply into the world. Scaling down: Stepping back and looking at individual features.

Verpassina: pay attention to their breathing. Usually we don't pay attention to our sensations, but instead focus on the world. Meditation we take a look at the features. Meditation == move toward the center. Contemplation based on "temple" and looking up into the world. Meditation is scaling down, and Contemplation is scaling up. Tai Chi Shuan is moving back and forth between these.

Nine dot problem: Difficult because they take it to be a "connect the dot problem" You need to break out of that frame, deautomatize cognition. Take something that is subconscious and make it conscious. This is an opacity shift. Do "chunky composition" is breaking up the gestalt. Scale up to make a new frame, but then scale down to break up gestalt. Moving back and forth you get a better fittedness to the world.

how is being present making you more insightful?

If you only scaled down -- you get the "pure consciousness event." Stepping back, and you start looking at the mind. Eventually you reach a step where you are only conscious, and not conscious OF anything.

What if you scale up infinitely -- Resonant At-Onement.

Third state: state of non-duality. Includes both and transcends both. Prajna. Awareness is deeply to the depth of awareness and deeply to the depth of reality. both at once. This leads to a comprehensive insight. Insight into existential modes of being. This is how you remember the being mode. Enlightenment. Flow state.

Are you a god? no. Angel? no. What are you? I am awake. Sati. fundamental insight into what it means to be a human being.

Why are people searching for this? Why the psychedelic revolution? Altered states can bring about a powerful transformation. Sometimes this can recapitulate the axial revolution. That was a dream, this is real. When you come out, and the opposite occurred: that was more real, that was really real, and this is a dream. Sati is trying to remember what this was like.

(Quantum Change Theory - Miller / C'de Baca) Core of Satori. Core of all the world traditions. Radical modal transformations. Surveys: 30-40% have experienced these.

Really important: after this experience, they report these are the most important experience in their life. Capacity to find life meaningful. Isn't that the core of meaning? What kind of knowing is this?