Yeah. There's so much I want to riff on in everything you just got into. One that I want to touch on is I love Damer. I had a lot of early Ted episodes with him on. So I've had a bunch of conversations with him. And I don't want to like overstep my knowledge of his ontological take. this idea that, you know, oh, either, you know, either we did come out of matter, the ground of the earth, whatever, you know, there's a lot of people who are more spiritual that would reject that, right? That would say like, no, no, there's got to some purpose. There's gotta be some teleology involved. There's gotta be... My view of this conversation has changed a lot. And I think, you know, John Vervacki's like, transjective take helps to some degree, that it's like, yeah, of course it's bottom up. But bottom up makes no sense without an attractor. Unless there's some kind, and he likes the platonic terminology of like, the one or the form of the good or whatever, as do I. But I go further than John in that I do think that there's like what we could call spiritual, archetypal, immaterial realms that are truly at play and that in some sense are more basic and more superior. And then I'll clarify by what I mean by that, what I mean by that, that cause the bottom up growth of life forms. And what I mean is like, if you look at the work of someone like Michael Leven, Michael Leven is this cutting edge biologist who's studying like how organisms self-organize. And then what happens if we just like interfere with the bioelectric intelligence layers on flatworms and stuff and we move their eyeballs around and like. Basically what he has figured out through a sort of from my understanding. A sort of like negative. Kind of reinforcement it's not even negative reinforcement because it's like he's interacting with something he's interacting with some kind of intelligence that's self-correcting and responds to the feedback that you're giving it. And it makes no sense to say that that is just that organism's intelligence because it's too smart to be a worm, right? It's too smart to be, like, there's this agency, this architecture unfolding that he actually calls platonic. And And I've heard him use the word Pythagorean in another interview. So it's like, I think there's a way that it can be both in that actually to have, not even to have the truth, but to start to approach the truth. You got to be like, how is it, how is it possible that both this is true and this is true? Like, because if I can create a scaffolding there that is more than bias and more than just, you know, seeing what I wanna see, then I think you're actually getting closer to the truth. And yeah, I mean, there's so much more I could say about this, but I won't take it any further because I've already been rambling a lot. I

was just thinking about the origins of life that you were just describing, and the sense of this sort of underlying teleology, order, purpose, just a process of the universe itself. And yeah, I don't know, it just strikes me that we are pretty much the only, or probably one of the only cultures we know of who have suggested that it's not the case, that there's some kind of order, teleology, intelligence to the universe. And I think the thing of Terrence McKenna again recently, and his quote has gone around a few times in light of recent political events, and the attempt at this assassination of Trump, and that's just the weirdness and unreality of that. Yeah, so awkward. McKenna talking about in whatever it was, 1996, he's like, things are going to get weirder and weirder as the complexity intensifies and as he saw the universe as this novelty selecting and ever intensifying process that's selecting for novelty. Then things are going to get so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. I think because we're in that here in Bala'u, people are rediscovering Miquela, which is amazing. And so there is a sense of the rational edifice that we've built around the intense intelligence and strange inside of the universe is breaking through it. And I have this theory that I call the age of breach, which is really about the way the internet acts as a mechanical unconscious and our unconscious desires, mimetic energy goes into the internet, and things like QAnon sort of ferment and form and take on a new life, and then they breach into the real world. And so far, they sort of, they have an impact on the real world, like January 6th, like, holy shit, or, you know, the various weird things are increasingly happening. But then they don't really last because in a sense they're not fully formed. They're of a different realm. They're of the realm of symbolism, desire, fluidity, online, anything you really want to be true can be true. Your identity can be whatever you say it is. But actually in the real world, in a lot of ways your identity is defined not by your own egoic desires, but by the world itself. That's a very comfortable idea, I think, for individualist cultures. And likewise, your fantasies about taking over the country, they don't really last when you're in the reality of the embedded system. So that process, I think, is somehow a sign of things to come in that the center cannot hold. And we have to bring in, like you were speaking to, an understanding that isn't an either-or. It's not a top-down bottom-up. Either there is some kind of order or there isn't, but something completely different that understands the hidden order but in a different way.

whole riff about reality being this novelty selecting phenomena, I mean it's so compelling and what's so eerie about it is that one interview where he really goes into it as far as I know is very close to his death. So there's this whole lore that stems from the ancient world about how when you're close to death, you have this mantic ability, you have this seeing ability. Socrates talks about this before his execution, that he's like, I'm already something of a mantis, the Greek word for seer, and now that I'm close to my death, like, he basically, he does a couple of things that are kind of mantic. One of the things is he sort of makes predictions about his accusers having not great lives and like things happening to them. But putting McKenna in that spot where he's in that interview, I'm thinking of where he's sitting in the jungle and he's really talking about it's just going to keep getting weirder and weirder, you know, like that that whole thing. He's obviously so right. is nothing to do but talk about it. But the thing that I think he missed and I've been talking about this kind of a lot recently too, because I've been diving back into a lot of Robert Anton Wilson, like Cosmic Trigger was like such a huge influence for me and my like whenever I first came across that book in my I think it was my 20s, but I was rereading it to just see like how does it land now? How do I, because have you read that one? Uh

no, I know all the, and I've read sort of bits and pieces but I haven't read it cover to cover. I think

you'd love it just because you would relate so much to it at this point in your life, like as somebody who's had a lot of high weirdness experiences, but you're also, I mean man, he was doing the exact same thing that we're doing now in a pre podcast, pre internet world where he's just he's collecting this multi modal. Scientific esoteric psychedelic worldview where he's like friends with leery friends with Alan Watts taking a bunch of LSD taking a bunch of mushrooms like. with ritual magic, experimenting with different meditation techniques. And he's just coming back and trying to collect it all in this postmodern way and not postmodern in the like dismissive sense, but just, I am a modern being grappling with all of this shit. And, you know, his, his big takeaway was always to remain agnostic and realize that you're in a reality tunnel and you're not going to see reality as it is. And how this relates back to what we were talking about is, is while you for sure can't disagree with that take. One, I don't think that that actually, I think that side steps the question of reality. It doesn't eliminate the fact that there is something true and there are these mysteries that point to something true. It's just that you can't get to them. But I think that that's a cop out because what I think you can do is in that sort of John Vervacke kind of way is engage in true, what he calls, anagaghe. You can identify the direction of truth and just keep getting closer and closer to it through using all of your faculties or you can not, or you can just be like, oh, we'll never know. It's all whatever I want it to be, you know, and just go with whatever your bias is. And I think those are two very different things that lead to two very different outcomes. One brings you closer and closer to some kind of coherence and actual wisdom and one doesn't. And I think part of the reason why, as you were pointing to, a lot of these people suddenly 180 into something like a traditional religion is because they just want coherence so fucking badly. They want something, they're like, I know there's not nothing. I don't know what there is, but I know the world's just getting too crazy, it's getting too novel, there's so much ontological shock going on. I need something solid. I need to just like put my faith in this and let it, you know, I'm going into it. And that's, I mean, there's so many people, I think, that that just doesn't feel right to, you know, like, it doesn't feel right to me. I don't think, I would guess it doesn't feel right for you. I would guess it doesn't feel right for a lot of listeners. And that's why I'm just so personally into this middle path of thinking there is higher truth, thinking there is a higher reality, thinking there is something that we could call God. There is something that we could call spirit. But it's nebulous. It requires constant course correcting, constant nuance, and it's like the only thing that you can get to, the only way you can get to it is through a sort of like negative theological bend in like being like, it's not this, it's not that, it's not this, it's not that. And in doing that, you create this negative space around what it actually is, and you get this very blurry idea of what it is through experience, through study, through being, through constant engagement with it. Maybe that's the difference between a philosophical path and a religious path, I don't know.

Yeah, the difference maybe between what Jung called the religion and the creed. True religion being that deep inquiry nature, and the creed just being like you go to church on Sunday because it gives you that coherence and that order that you're looking for. You mentioned post-Ladirality, and I think there's something to what you were just saying. There's a useful that I found. Do you know the pre-trans fallacy? Have you heard of this? It's from Ken Wilbur's integral studies. It's probably the most useful model integral came up with. I think it ties into what you were just talking about. The idea is that you are going to lay it to post-modernity or try, if I can keep the thread. But the idea of the pre-trans fallacy is that let's say you have these kind of three positions you have the pre-conventional tradition then the conventional perspective and then the post-convention so for example let's say like relationships pre-conventional is like total dependence a totally dependent on others like a date right the then the conventional one is like no I my own person I'm independent, right? I mean, I don't need other people. I'm independent. I'm my own person. And then as you get older, more mature, then there's a recognition of actually I am dependent, but it's not the same type of dependence as the preposition. The dependence of any mature, self-actualized, individuated adult who is dependent on the community and is equally also independent in many ways and is a part of a rich, thriving ecosystem. And they're dependent on the ecosystem, they're dependent on the eye, and they have another styling and humility around that. It's a really different position, but they're both dependents. This is the pre-trans fallacy because people look at one thing and they're like, oh yeah, but that's the... You've said the same thing. Very often the post-conventional perspective gets confused with the pre-conventional perspective, because they both sound the same, but they're actually really, really different. It requires a sense, a level of wisdom, nuance, practice, understanding, and patience to understand the difference between them. I think we're going through a similar thing with post-modernism, or just the idea of truth itself. You have the pre-conventional of like, yes, there's truth and it's my truth or my religion's truth and everyone else can fuck off.

Then

you have the conventional, the perspective now, which is kind of where we're at socially with post-modernity. There is no truth. Unless we have a post-truth world, but we also have whoever you say you want to be is the truth of who you are. There is no arguing with it. Everything is effectively meaningless. There is no ground of being for all of this playing with identity and ideas and the whole idea of truth. There's no ground of it. It's just like fucking chaotic swill. And then you have the post-dimensional perspective, which is like, no, there is, that's what you were just voicing. There is such a thing as truth. There is such a thing as a cohere. There's a nature, there's truth with a capital T. And there is also the ability to cohere around something beyond us that is also real. Now, it's really tricky because of the pre-trans fallacy to hold that position because then people are like, oh, what? Like a kind of God of the sky? Right, of course.

Yeah.

You're consistently trying to explain the position that you're holding. And it's kind of exhausting as well. Everyone will have an example of this because usually it's something you have thought about a lot. So it could be like music, could be whatever. We all have an example where we're holding a more post-conventional position compared to pre-preet. And so I think this is something we're going through socially at the moment where we know that that conventional position that we're now in of there is no such thing as truth, and everything is just kind of chaotic upside down, post-modern madness. what Wilbur calls an a-perspectival madness. There is no solid perspective you can take because they're all equally valid. And as Wilbur points out really cleverly, there is no truth, but of course, the fact that there's no truth is a truth. So it's completely paradoxical, broke all the way down. It's completely nonsense, right? And there is no way to run a society or to have real coherence or real connection and compassion with one another from that position. It doesn't work. And so now, so then you get some of the new atheist types like, and there's a few of them, either toying with or directly just converting to Christianity, because they're like, okay, we were wrong with our particular position, so we're going to go back. Do

you know of any off the top of your head who have done that?

Ayaan Wursi Ali is probably the most high-profile one, who was sort of the, there was like the four horsemen of the apocalypse and she was sort of the fifth. But the horsewoman would be a new atheist. Oh, he's leaving

out the ladies. That's how they

do it. Oh, he's leaving out the ladies. Yeah. But there's also just a lot of, just, you know, people who are like big names in that space that might have a podcast or so. And, you know, there's also, you can be like Jordan Hall, who's a brilliant thinker. He, you know, he's got a very beautiful story of his conversion and why, but, you know, Jordan was looking for a religion, that sort of religion, and he did a few recordings with John Breveky around this, and they were in conversation around that. And then it was like, now it's Christianity for me, which is... It's kind of... I get it. I get it, and I respect it. But I think, looking at it socially, what I'm really interested in is it's not a solution for where we move forward as a collective. I don't think it's a solution to go from, okay, this postmodern mess here in the middle in the conventional perspective, it's all working. Let's go back to pre-convention and just be like, you know what? It's all fucking explained by religion. a, as a, as a, psychonaut, I can't, I can't do that. I just can't do that. I tried. I didn't really try, but I kind of, I've really sat with it and been like, should I just do that? Should I just like go, I just go full Zen or you know, whenever I might be. Right. Right. Like I love Zen. I've learned a lot from it. I love Taoism. I've learned a lot from it. My outlook is really Taoist. I'm like, should I just do it? Should I just go fucking full Taoist? And I'm like, nah, and I feel like you're probably the same. It's just not, it just doesn't feel like the truth to me. It's maybe lots of truth, but it's not the answer.

Yeah. And this is again why I'm just becoming such a, I've never put it this way, but such a dick writer for Platonism, because it's just like, it gives you both. It gives you all of it. It gives you... There is transcendence. There is divinity. Those things are not separate from the world. They're in the world. They're all over the world if you know how to see them, if you know how to recognize them. And as you progress in your journey, and this is where I think we've lost whatever the progression means. Because I think there were very likely initiations. I think there was like an esoteric vein to Platonism. And there's scholarship on this that by people way smarter than me who have spent their whole lives researching the fact that there are clearly unwritten doctrines in Plato. And he's constantly pointing toward different Pythagorean wisdom that you only get through initiation. And we know, you know, he went to Eleusis, all these other things. But there seems to be this recognition of the fleeting importance of all kinds of wisdom. Like, and that one is not, you can't dispense with any kind. Like, you have to have the rational education, the math background, the geometry background. And somehow, that increases your ability to appreciate the mystery when you do experience it. And that they're all like backwards and forwards compatible because they're all part of one tightly knit reality, right? And I love that. And it's also extreme. And it's also another thing I just love about it is it highlights the importance of dialogue, right? That there are these kinds of truths that you can only arrive at through interlocutation with other people who are seeking truth. So yeah, there's just so many things about it that I love. But I guess I would give credit to religions in that I think they can evolve too. They can evolve their understandings of what their truths are. And clearly, you see, if you just look at the Catholic Church of a thousand years ago versus today, we could probably, if we were scholars of this, we could probably list hundreds of doctrinal points that they've softened on or changed or something, right? So they can evolve to some degree and maybe provide an important foundation at the same time so I don't write off religions or think they're wrong or think that anybody shouldn't belong to one. I want to make clear that I'm not saying that, but for me, I'm with you. I can't justify why I would belong to this and not that. Why I would put my faith in this text and not that text. And that is a postmodern, I suppose, perspective that I can't do away with, is that I see in a sort of perennial philosophy kind of way that there is important wisdom in all of these paths. And there's like a golden thread that runs through all of these wisdom traditions and religions. And I love and appreciate all of it. But I'm also not going to like prostrate myself to only one in particular and discount the others. That's another big problem for me. I just can't do that. But I do think that leaves a giant hole. And one of the holes that leaves for me is like ritual. How to think about things. What to call things. Because I do think that these things are important and serve a function. And I've played around somewhat extensively with some of them. But it also still, there is still always a part of me that feels like I'm larping. There is still always a part of me that feels like it's like, I'm just doing this now. And I wonder how you've grappled with that, because I know you've tried so many modalities over the years too.

I mean I Grapple is definitely the right word. I I find this Absolutely as well. This is such and I think a lot of us have this Experience who do I consider ourselves like spiritual but not religious right which I hate the term But I don't know where else I really fit into it But you know, it's it's exactly that it's you know the temp The respect I have for established religions is that they have those tried and tested frameworks and forms and ritual structures that allow for a connection with the divine. And I think there are a lot of different to connect to the divine. I don't think they're all the same and I don't think they're all routes to the same type of experience, same kind of understanding. But I think there's many paths. I'm not like a sort of generalist, sort of like, oh, it's all equally valid or it's all equally the same thing. I don't believe that. I'm not really in a position to say what's valid or not in terms of spirituality, but in terms of at least valid for my own quest, let's say. And so yeah, this question of having you put it well, laughing, right?