Bernardo Kastrup — The Man Behind the Ideas: Identity, Truth, Philosophy, and Psychotherapy

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i want to start off by letting you know what i really like about you and that is how out there you are with who you are you don't seem to hide behind an academic detachment and i respect you for that i think that's a big deal it's uh it's unavoidable to me that's the best i can tell you it's not something i thought up uh it's just the way it is i can't be any different yeah when you think something is bologna you say so i mean you even write a book about it which is which is not to say that in my normal life i am so brutally honest uh with people around me and i i have a minimum of so of social skills i think uh but when it comes to these discussions it's it's very close to my heart so it comes very naturally to me as well when people put forward ideas that i think are self-evidently wrong it's unavoidable for me to just say it and i say it this is nonsense and let me explain why i think it's uh nonsense so it it may come across as i miss the word now again and they there are people in academia who call me the it's not the angry philosopher it's something less uh less offensive than that but it's something in that direction um so that that's where it comes from i am i i feel very passionately committed to the subject uh to the idea to the ideas that are being exchanged and discussed and argued for because i think um philosophy is central to human life and and i think maybe arrogantly that people who do not think like me that philosophy is central are just estranged from themselves uh and from life i think philosophy is the primary human activity in a sense since we've managed to extricate ourselves from you know the the normal pressures of having to find the food shelter i mean we still fight that most of us still fight that but at another level not in that natural level where we used to be one more time this thing about being estranged from ourselves and life what was that what did you say there i think well i i believe to observe around me that some people are very distracted with insignificant and banal stuff like where they have the latest pair of shoes and even the fun they have tends to be more a distraction than a fulfillment activity and and when you are in that mode of trying to distract yourself out of the realization of our phenomenal condition as living beings on this planet that have to constantly fight the second law of thermodynamics to stay alive and we are who are guaranteed to eventually lose that fight um i mean these are tremendous thoughts and and and they are just an appreciation of the real of the reality of our situation and that is philosophy but i see a lot of people around who make their very best to distract themselves from from these questions these these observations this reality this is part of what i like so much about you you seem to be a truth seeker through and through the question of the truth of our lives excuse me seems to be really central to who you are very much and that well i i think i end up seeking the truth but my commitment is not to the seeking my commitment is to it is to truth ultimately which is not to say that i think we you know monkeys evolved on planet earth can ever truly cognize every salient aspect of the truth i don't think we can i don't think we have any reason to believe that our cognitive apparatus has evolved to get to that point but i think what we owe to ourselves and and to the rest of the planet and each other is to be honest about our best guesses regarding the truth um if we already know enough to know that a certain narrative about the truth is flawed fatally flawed we owe it to ourselves to each other and to the planet to move away from that narrative and towards a better narrative which will not be the absolute expression of the ultimate truth uh but it will be closer to it so i that is ultimately my commitment i feel through every pore in my skin every every every artery in my body that um self-deception is not fine uh and we are masters at self-deception i mean that material is more mainstream physicalism is the main narrative about the nature of reality today despite everything we know regarding the the the the failed argument behind it regarding the empirical evidence that contradicts it and i'm not talking about anything paranormal i'm talking about evidence from laboratories uh despite all that it's still the mainstream narrative i think this is irresponsible this is this is not acceptable we can do better than this we know better than this and we owe it to ourselves to each other and to the planet to be responsible and acknowledge that that we need to take a step forward or at least a step away from what we already know is wrong yeah you make my heart sing there's something very you have some kind of integrity that really moves me um and what you just said said there um makes me wonder if you don't mind how did how did materialism or physicalism how did it how did it get underneath your skin well there was a phase in my life in which i sort of was a physicalist but not because i thought it through just because the entire world around me sort of took that for granted so i was a an unthinking materialist i was a materialist because i didn't think it through i just sort of yeah okay then that's that's the rule of the game where i am right now and i didn't give it much thought because i was busy with other things i was working at cern uh in switzerland which is sort of you know the the church of physics and not necessarily the church of physicalism but the church of physics and then and i was having loads of fun i was completely absorbed in my work and so physical is more materialism was just the environment where i was in and the moment when it started getting under my skin as you put it was when i started thinking it through and i know i i have two widely different educations i have education in the humanities and education in the in the heart sciences in the heart sciences i have a phd in computer engineering and i used to work on ai artificial intelligence and in my late 20s i was doing work on that and of course when you're building something that is supposed to be intelligent you're very close to asking well if it's intelligent is it also conscious and if it's not why is it not or what do i need to do to make it conscious and asking these questions of course means asking about the foundations of materialism or physicalism which which states that com arrangements of matter somehow give rise to to conscious experience and and then i began to think it through and very quickly after you begin to think it through deeply with your hands on it not purely conceptually but almost from an engineering perspective very quickly it you realize that this makes absolutely no sense it somehow formed hypothesis it doesn't even require empirical evidence to be dismissed because it's internally contradictory and it does not have explanatory power it doesn't explain anything in that it doesn't explain experience and experience is all we have um so that's when it happened just brilliant well i think you said somewhere that you spent 10 years really thinking hard about this yeah yeah from my mid 20s to my mid 30s i was trying to find an alternative for myself i was not thinking about writing a book but you see we we are story centered beings we need a narrative in terms of which to relate to ourselves to each other and the world and once the physicalist narrative for me was okay now it's off the table you know i cannot if i'm honest to myself to logic to reason and to evidence i simply cannot take this seriously um then i landed in a vacuum of narratives and for a human being to not have a story in terms of which to relate to the world is is is not acceptable it's not it's not a stable point um you immediately start looking for an alternative narrative and i did that for years i think i landed on idealism rather quickly because it you know it's it doesn't require much elaborate thinking you know basic reasoning is enough to indicate the direction but having had the experience that i had just had with materialism i didn't want to commit to that alternative very quickly i thought i need to close this story i need to really stand on firm ground before i really commit myself to this and that's what i did for 10 years so only at the point in my mid-30s when i thought okay now now i am on solid ground i feel pretty confident about this then i started the writing and publishing came even later than that wow and and schopenhauer was influential right he had a role in his thinking had a role in in how you arrived to your positions not at that time no i didn't i was not aware of schopenhauer at that time i think the scholar who influenced me most from the very beginning was carl jung i had reds in my in my teens so i think jungian thought was in the back of my mind throughout even if i wouldn't have maybe i wouldn't be able to report that to you back then i wouldn't have known it explicitly myself but i think it was in the back of my mind all the time schopenhauer came later and schopenhauer was a sort of a confirmation after i wrote the idea of the world yeah which was my seventh book in which i made the i think the most uh solid uh case for for idealism from a post-enlightenment perspective you know in other words based purely on explicit reasoning and laboratory evidence after that i sort of felt relaxed like okay i did the core of the job i was supposed to do this the idea of the world is a sort of completion um and then i started reading more leisurely and then i came across schopenhauer and lo and behold everything he said matched with what i was thinking and had had written about um except that uh he went deeper he went more into the implications in into what it all meant for life uh he went almost into a sort of self-help about how to leverage that understanding to to reduce sadness to to reduce um suffering and uh and i thought that was phenomenal and then the other thing that i immediately realized was how misunderstood and misrepresented schopenhauer was in academia and and and i was scandalized by that it was actually this second this latter part that motivated me to go and write a book about schopenhauer which i've been reading and really enjoying um you brought up suffering and schopenhauer you saw sort of a self-help component so i'm very concerned about helping people alleviate neurotic suffering and the way the way that i do that is to help people look underneath the hood and face emotions and psychological conflicts that are customarily swept underneath the rug part of what i'm hoping for today with you is that we can look at the intersection of mental health and philosophy or philosophizing for that matter um i'm particularly interested in the implication of your ontology when it comes to what drives suffering and what alleviates it have you spoken to it but are you able to to elaborate on that sure um i give a lot of thoughts to this because i'm a human being too and i suffer too as you alluded to some of our suffering is because of things in ourselves that we don't recognize that we don't to speak a technical term we don't metacognize things that we experience but we don't know that we experience we don't tell ourselves or acknowledge to ourselves i am experiencing this shame or i am experiencing this regret or i am experiencing this trauma or i am experiencing this fear or anxiety we don't tell ourselves let alone another that we have these things in us because we don't want to recognize them we have this naive idea that that we can wish away the bad part of our feelings and i think that's when it all goes wrong when a young wrote extensively about this if you deny parts of yourself it comes back as symptoms so you will develop you know obsessive-compulsive disorder and that something will happen what you regret will come back and bite you on the rear end and it will be worse than if you could develop a relationship with it explicitly another point of suffering i think is rumination and and and and that has to do with our ability to self-reflect and by by ruminating you know by telling ourselves constantly a particular story about what the past should have been and what the future might be uh we sort of feed our regret and depression on the one hand and feed our anxiety on the other on the other hand um and i think both things to be solved to be truly well solved to be truly integrated and be rendered less harmful require a a philosophical perspective because they are both related to meaning and a psychotherapist and i'm sure you have given what i'm about to say a lot a lot of thought yourself even if you didn't arrive at the same conclusions um what happens in in in a therapy room is largely a search for meaning because as viktor frankl said in the 20th century you know the will to meaning is the ultimate will it's higher and above freud's will to pleasure or or or nietzsche's will to power the will to meaning is is the ultimate it is the ultimate not the panacea but it it is the holy grail of psychology if you can find meaning in what you are going through you integrate it in your life you sort of develop a mature relationship with it you don't necessarily stop paying but you stop ruminating suffering but meaning is not something that the therapist can can just have the patient give to the world because it becomes a form of explicit self-deception you know we cannot project meaning onto the world and expect that that will be healing because it it's you we are conjuring up the meaning and then trying to believe that it's real i mean it doesn't work for the meaning move which is the ultimate move to to really be effective i think it has to be grounded on a i'm going to use the word belief but it has to be grounded on a belief that is substantiated in other words we have to see that life and the world have intrinsic meaning in and of themselves and not only the meaning we want to project onto them the letter is a form of self-deception the former is a reality if we see that reality the reality of the intrinsic inherent meaning of in the world in every event of our lives and and in our very lives if we see that intrinsic real meaning then the therapist can perform the alchemy that he or she is expected to perform and in in that sense i think psychology and philosophy particularly metaphysics are joined at the rib uh psychology in fact is a product of philosophy they were not separated the 20th century separated them artificially because our philosophy went down a path that the psychologists couldn't follow because it was a nihilistic path so we psychologists had to use a caesar and cut the connection because otherwise they would be dragged down to hell with our metaphysics which was going to hell and now has landed in hell but if our metaphysics finds its path back i think we'll be in a position to be able to reack knowledge that psychology and philosophy are intrinsically joined at the hip and it will be okay to acknowledge that again the divorce between the two are you at all referring to freud sort of distancing himself from nietzsche and not not acknowledging his influence is that one example that's just one example even jung to whom i have probably the greatest respect he often tried to separate what he was saying from philosophy quite explicitly he he he will explicitly say i am a scientist i am not a philosopher and then other times he would say precisely the opposite towards the end of his life he would acknowledge he he had done philosophy all the way along but in his earlier days when he was professionally active he explicitly tried to distance himself and and the reason they did that was several fold um in the case of freud who was a physicalist he didn't have to divorce himself from philosophy because philosophy was uh physicalist because he himself was and his old psychology was to some extent a bit nihilistic but he distancing himself from philosophy because philosophy itself was becoming associated with uh unsubstantiated speculation uh which is of course not what analytic philosophy is today it's not uh even what philosophy arguably was in the time of freud we already had william james for instance and schopenhauer who were not doing unsubstantiated philosophy they were both grounded in science but there is this notion that philosophy is unsubstantiated speculation more akin to theology than to science because it was a nico of the late middle ages with scholasticism and scholastic philosophy was a type of philosophy that already started from the conclusions the conclusions of the scriptures and which and then tried tried to find a substantiation to to to justify those conclusions and that's not how philosophy is done you don't start from conclusions you start from data and then you derive a conclusion from that so this link in the west um by the time of freud was already over 500 years old and it was very strong even though scholastic philosophy was not nihilistic on the contrary it was meaning affirming uh it was unsubstantiated so that was freud's motivation news motivation was the opposite he was very meaning oriented but he realized that early 20th century philosophy was going down a path he couldn't follow and i he denied a holistic path of materialism which he considered outright ridiculous and he wrote it multiple times in his technical corpus that that was a ridiculous metaphysics but he felt that was a battle he couldn't fight he was already fighting the battle of psychology he couldn't fight at the same time the battle for the heart of philosophy for recovering the intrinsic meaning of the world so he explicitly divorced himself from that and re-acknowledged it only towards the end of his life in his 70s and early 80s so yeah that divorce uh has has a history already of over 100 years yeah wow yeah i got the sense that um that they were concerned about being accepted by the scientific community and they had to be really firm or stringent about not coming across as woo-woo in any kind of way that certainly was the case of jung in the case of freud i think freud was a sincere physicalist so that was not an issue for him and what happened after them uh towards the mid mid 20th century with the skinner and his black box of behaviorism and all that stuff that was psychology becomes science aim views psychology wanted to be more materialist than science itself was as if that somehow would affirm their validity so i think things went very downhill to the point that uh behaviorism which was mainstream in psychology 60 years ago 70 maybe was anything but a psychology it was a psychology that denied the psyche denied the mind denied the soul uh and and where i mean it was ridiculous uh and today we may think it's ridiculous but something completely analogous is happening today with religious studies the chairs of religious studies in most universities are atheists so you look at what we do we sort of invert the whole situation so at that absurdity that happened back in the 20th century we shouldn't dismiss that oh we were naive back then no no we're still doing it in another fashion in another way we have to guard against against that part of our psychology which denies itself we have that in us this self-denial we deny our own psyche we deny the meaning intrinsic in our very existence we deny our own nature as mental beings um and if we don't be careful with it this denial can can translate into a world catastrophe as it has almost done in the 20th century you're you're speaking to my heart right now this is the essence of my area of concern and passion which is carl gustav young's concern about a psychology without a psyche um it's very concerning to me for obvious reasons but also because as therapists if that's our view i think it can easily translate into an overly technical and mechanical way of approaching our patients and it happens a lot i think there are a lot of therapists who work in that way yes um which is unfortunate yeah yeah that's right i'm dying to ask you so because i'm i've fallen in love with your work that there are these things that jump out at me that i go you know it doesn't sit so well with me so i'd love to see if we can find common ground um in some of your writings and in some of your interviews you you take the position that the personal self is an illusion and i see danger with that in terms of the individuation process in terms of the psychology without the psyche i understand that at some level you're trying you know you're piecing together you know mind at large and this oneness of things but i've seen it so many times i mean in my own life and in the life of my patients is that when we when we pit one polarity against the other like self-concern against selflessness it actually reinforces neurosis it makes us more neurotic and being at war with ourselves is you know not helpful obviously so would you be willing to perhaps speak to this concern and maybe help me understand you better i think it's a completely valid concern and it's one of the dangers of interpreting what i say in a way that i didn't intend which may not be the fault of the interpreter just it's just because you know you people come from different perspectives and when they hear something they fit what they hear into their own perspective we cannot do anything better than that and sometimes this refitting leads to a misunderstanding i think you are completely right that sometimes our psychological problems can originate from a lack of respect for our own individual preferences our own individual notion of comfort and we allow ourselves to be abused we allow ourselves to have our space stolen from us we allow ourselves to be impinged on by the values of others and we don't do justice to our own individual selves and what we stand for in the world so i think that's uh it's bad when we do that uh respect for and a certain notion of our individual agency is is critical for psychological health so let me let me go all the way out and sympathize entirely with what i think you mean uh when you said that so what did i mean then when i said the personal self doesn't exist what i mean is it doesn't exist as a independent agency i think what we call our individual selves are forms of manifestation of nature what we call a person is a particular way nature is expressing its potentialities for whatever end as such we just are nature emotion we are something nature is doing through us we do not exist as cut off agencies that uh inhabit an alien world we are that world in a particular form of manifestation and understanding that in the way i understand i think is very very conducive to psychological health because it allows us to not take ourselves too seriously which can also be psychologically detrimental for instance we take ourselves too seriously when we beat ourselves up in regret of something we've done in the past and we forget to be kind towards ourselves as fallible expressions of nature that we are not know-it-alls you know we there are many things we don't know and and it's okay to be compassionate for our own lack and our own faults and weaknesses and shortcomings so it is in that sense that i think we should not take ourselves too seriously um and and the notion of fundamentally individual agency i think is damaging as well because it puts such an unnatural and unrealistic demand on ourselves i i don't think that is justifiable by theory or healthy from a psychological point of view now as expressions of nature we should be respected because nature is doing something through us so although we are not individual agents there is something happening through us that has its natural value so to completely disregard that is also not fine and that's what i think people do when they become quote selfless and they allow their space to be intruded upon they allow their values to be disrespected wait what is it what is it that they do when they when they allow that impingement and abuse they are then not recognizing the value of what nature is doing through them but that doesn't mean that they are fundamentally individual agents that kind of self-respect is not it doesn't rest upon this notion that we are fundamentally individual agents it only requires respect towards nature in our recognition that we too are part of nature okay so you don't think that creates a polarity a binary not in the way i i myself see it now of course i'm a father human being and when i communicate it i don't communicate it without the nuance and subtle subtlety that i feel myself yeah so i fail i consistently fail in communicating and i've come to accept that as part of the game but the way i experience what i'm trying to say entails no conflict of polarities no not none at all i will demand a minimum space for myself when it comes to how others treat me but i do that not because i think i am an individual agent i do that out of respect for what nature is trying to do through me i respect the two not the individual agent which i think doesn't exist i respect myself as a particular form of expression of nature i take that seriously because i think nature doesn't do anything cavalierly and and as that form of expression i will express it in such a way that there is space for that expression if you know what i mean i will not willingly accept others from preventing that expression but while doing that there is no idea in my mind that i am an individual agent that takes himself very seriously no what i take seriously is nature doing what it's doing through me you see what i mean i do i do and i think i'm grocking you it but it's so easily lends itself to this interpretation around self-denial and and being at war with our basic instincts sort of somehow that there is something wrong with having self-concern as if self-concern needs to be divorced from concern for others as opposed to a dialectic and i'm glad you brought up this point because now i see how dangerous it is a possible misinterpretation of what uh of what i i'm trying to get across um i i respect the expression of nature but that doesn't in my mind require that i be an individual agent with a will of its own in fact the contrary because i've come to respect myself a lot more since i've dropped the narrative of a personal agent and i tell you why i no longer fight what the nature is trying to do through me in philosophy some philosophers in classic philosophy since the time of socrates philosophers would talk about a diamond and by that they didn't mean a demon even though the word is derived from diamond a diamond is not malicious a diamond is morally neutral it's just an aspect of yourself that you don't identify yourself with it's the voice in the back of your mind telling you what to do or what not to do and sometime that sometimes that goes head-on against the ego's intent the executive ego may want one thing but the diamond that big voice in the back of your head the back of your mind is saying the opposite uh and and that leads to conflict because we take the executive ego seriously as an individual agent that is separate from the voice of the diamond and at least in my own life that was the conflict the conflict was precisely my narrative that the executive ego was an agent as opposed to just one voice that in a chorus but that's a different paradigm what you just said there isn't it to have the to to say that the ego is one voice of many is one thing which i can really get behind but to say that it needs to be seen through as an illusion in favor of the diamond it seems really like you're creating conflict uh no but that's not what i meant i don't mean that it's an illusion in favor of the diamond i think the diamond too is an illusion i think all the characters are illusions in the sense that they are not individual agents in and of themselves they are forms of expression of only one subjectivity only one field of phenomenal subjectivity that underlies all nature and it expresses itself through many voices so i take all voices equally seriously in the sense that i take them all to be illusions in this specific sense that they are just expressions of one transpersonal field of subjectivity but by taking as i did before the executive ego as an individual agent and the diamond as another i would pitch one against the other in an inner war and i have done that for years for many years for many years i struggled against the diamond trying to assert the wheel of the executive ego and if my experience is representative then i can tell you with very high confidence it's a struggle that cannot be won you cannot win from nature if you if you perceive yourself as an agent separate from nature and you go to war against nature not death outside nature but the nature in you you will lose that because the executive ego is like a rower in a little boat in the middle of the atlantic while the greatest storm of the century is happening now you may row in a certain direction but if you think the boat should go in the direction you're rowing you are delusional because there are much greater transpersonal forces at will within you and the diamond is just the nickname we give to those transpersonal forces so for me i enormous step in my own psychological piece was to give up on that war so now i i allow the trans personal to express itself through me and the executive ego is now a two of metacognition the executive ego observes sometimes complains sometimes suffers well often enough suffers but his primary function is to observe and cognize but it's you though isn't it it's not apart from nature all of it is us right the true our true selves my true self is the same as my subjectivity when it's devoid of narratives is the same as the subjectivity in you so that's what i meant by by understanding that we are not individual agents fundamentally but i didn't mean by that that we should disregard uh this particular expression of the transpersonal subject which has the form we call bernardo or johannes yes so bernardo how do you square what you just said with carl gustav young when he talks about that actually central to the process of individuation is is becoming your own person i mean where there's distinctions and boundaries i mean that's nothing to scoff at right i mean that was really hard that was part of of his his ontology um so who said that can you repeat the name oh carl gustav young oh yo young himself okay yeah yeah about individuation how he like i remember this one interview when he talked about being 11 years old and sort of coming out of a mist and where he recognized himself as not just one of many things but this sort of i am-ness and so how do you square that with what you just said i'm interested um what uh jung described when he came out of that mist if you if you read it carefully you realize that what's happening there was the rise of his metacognitive ability his ability to not only experience but to know that he was experiencing and and he called them the i am i am in the history of philosophy and even the history of mysticism is an expression of self-awareness and self-awareness what is self-awareness what's the more technical term for for it it's meta consciousness or conscious metacognition it's the recognition of one's own phenomenal states they're the explicit re-representation of one's inner representations in other words you don't only experience you know that you are the one experiencing and and that's critical because without it you don't have pain you are the pain without it you don't see a table you are the table you are the experience metacognition is what is required for you to separate yourself as subject from the contents of your experiences so now you are on the table now you are the one seeing the table now you're not the hunger you are the one experiencing the hunger you see now you're not is that real or do you see that as this is real yeah metacognition is real no no no i mean the implication of metacognition but the implication is real there's an experiencing subject apart from yes yes yes because i think that way too but it seems to be at odds with the ego is yes i'll get there i'll get there so this recognition is important because it's what allows subjectivity in the universe to recognize its true nature in respect to its own activity in other words before metacognition we are the particular patterns of excitation that we call experiences and there are many of them it's like you know you have one lake but that lake can have many forms of ripples of different shapes sizes heights speeds direction so a lake can ripple in infinite ways but the only thing happening is the lake because what is what is a ripple a repo is a pattern of excitation of the lake there is nothing to a ripple but the lake there is only ever the lake and the lake is only ever won so it doesn't matter in how many millions of ways the lake ripples the only thing going on is the lake you cannot lift the ripples out of the lake the ripples are patterns of behavior of the lake patterns of excitation of the lake now before metacognition you only see ripples because there is only experience and experience are those patterns of excitation metacognition is what allows you to raise your head and realize i am the only thing going on everything else that i call experiences in their variety are the patterns of excitation of my subjectivity and this is a crucial step in cognition that is only allowed to happen can only happen if one develops the ability to re-represent experiences in other words to metacognize to become self-reflective to become self-aware and i think we are nature's means for developing this self-awareness otherwise it's a universe of diversity the only way to go back to to the lake as opposed to the ripples is through metacognition and i think we are taking the very very first steps in that direction now for jung individuation i think entailed two things it entails first an explicit recognition of our experiences what he called the the contents of the psyche and he separated between conscious and unconscious but what he actually meant was phenomenal consciousness and metacognition so that's one step but to say that for jung an individuated being is an individual agent i think is inaccurate because for him individuation entail the metacognition even of the collective unconscious which is a transpersonal field of the psyche so by becoming metacognitive of that and recognizing that as part of yourself you almost by definition can no longer be an individual agent the moment you recognize the collective unconscious as being you or you as being a segment of it philosophically speaking the concept of a fundamentally separate individual agent is off the table and then you might might ask well why why did he then call it individuation because what is individuated is the metacognition that that ability to metacognize your true self may exist in you and not in another the other may remain unconscious of the other's true nature the extent of one's true identity so an individuated being is an individual in the sense that it has a field of metacognitive awareness that is particular to him but what he understands as a consequence thereof himself to be is not individual by definition because it entails an awareness of the self with a capital s you know the archetype of the self not only the image but the lucia the the the substance uh behind that archetype and it entails integrating it as well as your personal shadow and the collective shadow uh so an individual individuated self is a conjunctive oppositorium to use a jung's words he is an individual as far as his ability to metacognize which jung called consciousness but he is a transpersonal being encompassing the whole of nature in so far as that which the individual cognizes as being himself you see the point yes yes that that sounds reasonable i think i could get behind that i think we have to discuss volition and freedom and autonomy so so let me think out loud just a second so if we go with your or actually let me set the stage this way um a conglomerate of my patients let's call her jane she's married to bill and bill is abusive he treats her poorly [Music] and he puts her down he's unfaithful and she just feels bad about herself and maybe let's say for sake of discussion she listens to one of your interviews and you talk about the freedom of the slave and she's going well that's me i'm the freedom i'm doing freedom of the slave obviously misinterpreting you obviously um and but what happens in therapy right is that if we're successful which is not always the case but if we are and i do my job well and she does her job well then when she comes out the other side having worked through a lot of emotions that were repressed that she actually has a sense of being in charge of her life life she stands up to bill she has a sense of a solid sense of self where she sets boundaries she's not going to take crap from anybody no one and she ends up leaving bill and has a pretty good life feeling in charge of her life no longer organizing her life around giving people what they want people pleasing or reactively denying people what they want through defiance her life is no longer organized and by this reactive paradigm she's actually organizing her life around what's best for her and so what i'm trying to wrap my head around as i'm listening to you is how do i square that experience which i've had with hundreds and hundreds of patients and myself for that matter um with what you're saying and so if we go with the metaphor of the ship on the stormy ocean right i can grant you undoubtedly i can grant you that there are these major impersonal forces that bear on us right that influence us of course no one in their right mind would deny that but my concern is that that narrative or that view denies the fact that we can actually if we put our minds to it we can at least keep the boat dry we can take buckets of water and get it out of the boat we have some agency we have some control over we can make the journey more enjoyable by by the by the dimension of blood sweat and tears meaning effort and i'm concerned my concern is that the way you frame it it it sort of minimizes the importance of that dimension i'm sure i misunderstood you but that's how it receives in me i'm very grateful to you are doing this because you're making me suddenly aware of how my words can be legitimately interpreted in in a way that i never intended them to be so this is an opportunity to to make a clarification i didn't even know was badly needed so i mean in that sense i'm very happy we are doing this today thank god we are doing this um look i i the freedom of this slave what i meant by it if i frame it in the metaphor of jane's case with bill being her former husband an abusive former husband this is how i think the metaphor would be correctly interpreted jane is a slave but bill is not the master the master is within jain the storm in the ocean is within jain and so there is a sense in which the recognition of the slave within but also the master within and the ocean within is of is an expression of self-respect if you say if you consider the self to be everything that's happening within which goes far beyond the executive ego but includes all kinds of transpersonal forces that are expressing themselves through what you call you respecting those transpersonal forces as they express themselves through you is critical and it's precisely what the metaphor is trying to do so yes you're a slave but the master is within the master is not bill yes you're about to drift in the ocean but the ocean is within it's not the market pressures of the economy outside you know what i mean so to self-respect in the way you portray it to your patient is precisely to recognize the master within to recognize the ocean within it's precisely to to acknowledge their validity in face of the world outside or bill is to say no bill you you're not going to do this because what nature is trying to do through me is going a different direction and nature will express itself in that way you are not going to stop it but that thing that is expressed in itself is not your executive ego it's not your personal preferences i mean we we don't choose our professions to a large extent and if we do choose them we probably chose wrong and we end up changing at some point in life we are moved by transpersonal natural forces and by saying in the context of my metaphor that we are slaves to that what i'm trying to do is precisely to grant validity to those transpersonal forces expressing themselves through us as opposed to bills to the bills of the world so the question of personal preferences aside and then just to the gist of what you said besides that we can get to that but let's see here so are you refer when you talk about the master within are you referring to what you in your book on why material in why materialism is baloney when you speak to the amorphous eye the witness the eternal witness the eternal son are you is that the master from your point of view i think the master exists in that witness but it's not only that witness because the slave also exists in that witness so it's not only the master that is in there the slave is also there and bill is also there everything is in that witness awareness a subject without narratives everything is playing in there and and that there is transpersonal that witness is transpersonal it's identical in me and you and the fish in the paramecium it's the same everywhere and it expresses itself through a multitude of different ways just like the lake ripples in a multitude of different ways so you could see the slave in the master at different has different ripples and bills and yet another ripple these are all ripples in that transpersonal field of pure uh subjectivity um yeah that's what i meant by that and and by by look what i'm always trying to emphasize with this notion that there is no true personal self we are slaves to nature what i'm trying to to do is to give validity to this to all these other things that are trying to express ourselves express themselves through us and which we may have a very egocentric uh preference for not allowing to manifest why because we may be leaving according for instance to a moral code that does not grant validity to some of those things that are trying to express themselves or we may be driven by the executive ego's need for safety which then would close the door on tho those other things that are trying to manifest themselves through us because they would expose us through risk to make it concrete the baby boomer who thinks that once he gets a job a house with a white picked fence and a dog and a wife and three kids that that he arrived and now he has to do everything in his power to protect that particular set of circumstances that have arisen that may lead to a denial of all the rest that nature might be still trying to do through you and then you generate an inner conflict your heart may be screaming i want to do something else in my life i want another job i want to be an artist i want to live in another place and get to know new people or i need a different partner because my relationship has now gone cold and it's no longer self mutually nurturing so all those things the executive ego would say no no i have arrived in a safe place i have arrived i am at a destination and i want safety i want belonging i cannot risk all this so i'm speaking to that i'm speaking to that artificial notion of an individual self who has arrived and wants safety and and to say that nature doesn't limit itself to that it's you who created a narrative saying this this is what i am no no nature might be saying no no i'm not done with you there's a whole lot of other things that need to be expressed through this entity you call you and by the way this entity that you call you is not separate it's me nature who the hell are you to stop me who the hell are you rowing a little boat in the atlantic to stop the storm or to dictate in which direction you're going and if you try to stop it that's when you get hurt i think okay let me see if i can metabolize this um so you're from my point of view you're talking about conflicting motivations that there's our beings are multi-layered there's a side of us that wants safety and what you're referring to what nature wants through us i would call what we want in our hearts of hearts that's exactly it right okay so that's the difference between what jim hollis calls the adaptive self and the natural self yes i see i'm totally with you with that i'm totally with you and yet the i think it can be probably i mean i'm probably repeating myself but i think it can be problematic to to devalue the the desire for safety i think i think it deserves a certain amount of respect so that's sure i i certainly respect mine i have lots of insurances i have an alarm system in my house a very high tech one so the cameras you know i i'm and i choose to live in a safe place in the world so i i don't mean to devalue that i think these are all parts of the spectrum so what i'm trying to say is that for the same reason that i don't want to devalue our need for safety i also don't want our need for safety to devalue the rest of the natural self that wants to express itself through us totally fair totally fair but i'm not i'm not convinced that the site the site of this individual that wants to hang on to the safety of the home that that is necessarily attached to narratives that seems like an instinctive need for safety you're you're marrying that with with sort of being lost or being subscribing to certain narratives that's not obvious to me am i missing something no no it's a matter of balance um i'm what i'm trying to convey is the need for a form of balance not not to delegitimize anything again i i treasure my safety and i and i do lots of things for my safety um but my sense of safety let's make it concrete and let me use my own life as an example because i can speak freely of that without infringing on anybody else's freedom of privacy i have a very strong sense or a very strong need for personal safety may have to do with the fact that i have led an uprooted life i have lived in four countries two different continents uh um the family i have spread around the world so i have had an uprooted life i cannot i mean i'm a dutch citizen it's the only citizenship i had but i didn't watch sesame street in dutch when i was a kid i don't know what i mean so i don't really have i could i'm not danish either although ethnically i'm half danish because i never lived in in denmark and i don't speak really danish i can understand some words but i don't speak it neither my portuguese so i have had an uprooted life which may have been handy for the kind of work i'm doing today but it has as a consequence this this need for safety now it's useful i still grant validity to it i still sort of nod to it a lot but there was a point in my life in which it has not served me it was a point in my life in which i was working for a top 50 europe uh european company a company that you know if that company ceased to exist today it would take five to ten years for you to get more modern electronics than you get today and if you think apple is great intel is great samsung is great and they all depend on that company was working for asml if if the techies i need to hear asml was the company i was working for and everybody knew me at the sml at some point i think i was the youngest director of the company when i was 33. um it was my family a large part of my social life was related to my colleagues the people i knew in that company i traveled the world for that company went around the world multiple times literally i was established i didn't need to keep on proving myself anymore i got to a point where okay we know who bernardo is we know what he's capable of doing you know we respect him for that it was a very very safe comfortable position i was part of something much bigger than me an extremely powerful company certainly in the region where i live but then nature wanted to do something else through me my natural self wanted to do something else we wanted to dedicate this expression of life that i call bernardo entirely to philosophy a point had arrived for philosophy to not only be uh my evening and weekend activity but to be my full-time activity and i resisted it for five years because i i i thought it's like giving up my family giving up my house giving up my safety giving up the entire social and an economical network in which i'm established and respected and valued uh you know what i mean yeah so i've struggled with it for five years it was only thanks to fred matar who's probably my best friend thanks to his relentless ceaseless uh encouragement for me to do this he never stopped never stopped year in year out he never stopped but what do you mean what but he did fred would say bernardo this is where your life is meant to go if you don't see that you're blind can you not see this he mentored you yeah yeah for five years relentlessly not overwhelmingly not taking my space away but he wouldn't miss a chance to confront me with this because he knew i knew i just didn't want to know if you know what i mean he knew that i knew so he was always put in the mirror in front of me and and then it took more than that it took a personal tragedy it took well personal tragedy if i tell what it is most people would think oh what do you mean by tragedy i had an accident with my alarm system and i already had tinnitus which was very high but then it exploded it's like i i today i have two dentist drills like i have one on the right one on the left it's like a dentist drill three meters away from each year and and that happened and two eyes i thought of killing myself because you know doctors just say well there is absolutely nothing we can do about this and that thing is with you day and night and if you close shut your ears you only hear it better because the sound is inside um and it just brought me to the edge of total despair um and it was in that period of weakness after i sort of recovered my footing a little bit i begun to learn how to live with it but i was still very fragilized very very fragilized then fred again came to me his timing was perfect he just came to me an exact day in which i was you know well enough to entertain a conversation and think about the future as opposed to pulling the plug on myself but not well enough that all my defenses would be back in place so he went in through the crack on the wall right there window of opportunity yeah and then he said it is now or never this is your cue this is the time and then i did it so and now that i've done it it happened last year uh over a year ago it is so obvious to me i feel it in every cell of my body that that's what had happened the storm and the winds and the currents were flowing that direction but i was a very very strong rower and i kept on rowing exhausting myself but i kept on rolling against the current and i managed to keep the boat in place but it was draining my energy it was draining the life out of me and i was doing that because my executive ego was attached to that sense of safety i had in the environment where i was and i thought this is the destination what am i doing living after i have worked for 40 odd years to arrive no so all of those narratives of safety and security and success and money and status because when you are in a company you have reports and you feel powerful because you tell people what to do and all of those narratives were precisely what was what was preventing me from just allowing nature to express itself through me the way it wanted to do wow i do i do and i have a number of reactions the first one being that i feel closer to you i'm very honored to to be that you give me a window into this it's very honoring uh but so well let me gather my thoughts here so i think i'm seeing something important and you please weigh in it seems to be a question of vantage point where you're looking from yeah so from the vantage point of what you're calling the executive ego or the the disciplined rower from that vantage point i can grant you that it's about surrender but from the vantage point of your heart of hearts it appears to be more about well let me let me put it this way there appears to be at least a component of willpower or autonomy or taking charge of your life and so it i think it depends on where we localize the vantage point for the for how we were talking about this and look i'm i'm far from a perfect uh communicator johannes i i am like everybody else a product of my life of my history i happen to be an individual that has always had an extremely strong adaptive self a very strong ego i lost my father at 12 and my mother tells me today i was amazed how easily you got over that and she doesn't know how much i suffered i suffered how devastating absolutely devastating the loss of my father was to me because he was the only member of my family i identified with everybody else was alien including my mother my mother is still an alien to me i do not understand her at all at all she and she acknowledged that she says you know from the outside you may look portuguese but from the inside you are your father all the way through so which is her way to sort of offend me but from her point of view what she saw was my adaptive self asserting himself and and i have always had a very strong will what you would call willpower you know i've never backed off from an opportunity because of fear because i figured you know i already faced the worst what else can happen and that will beat that you know what i mean so i went out to the world you know i i left home at basically 17 and i was like a leaf in the wind i was always in a different country not only to live but to travel through so i had a very very hard-headed very strong executive ego very well adapted very very powerful so for me from my perspective i have to speak of surrender because that's the point of view that i have had yes i have had the point of view of a very strong individual who was suffering because he was very strong in his adaptive scheme schemes and i had to surrender to my natural self so that that's from the that's the point of you i speak to but that knowledge yes immediately to you and of course as a therapist you see all kinds of people i don't um so i fail in and emphasize what you are trying to to emphasize today which is there are a lot of people who are coming from the opposite extreme yes see what you're calling um this executive ego and the the rower uh see in my ontology i would call that our the defensive structure their defense mechanisms i'm totally comfortable with that okay okay and do you grant me that the natural self or what i've referred to as what's in our heart of hearts that that part of who we are is not impotent it's the most powerful thing that you can conceive of it's it's sheer power it's like the lava erupting from a volcano try to plug the volcano and see what happens it's pure power it's it's it's the diamond it's not for nothing that the greeks gave it its name it is the diamond it is irresistible uh fight it resist it and all you will succeed in is suffering and getting hurt yes it's the is the amorphous eye the witness that you refer to in the book why material it's an expression of it it's an okay so you would also grant that that witness or that i is also not impotent it's the only thing that is potent yeah there's nothing else that has any agency yeah see this including the executive ego it may seem to have agency but it doesn't it you know another metaphor uh the executive ego is a person with a cork trying to plug an erupting volcano you know if you try it you get burned and we all get burned all the time precisely because we try to plug it yeah this seems to go to i think we're at the feet of ian mcgilchrist when he talks about the master and the emissary uh that the what you call the adaptive self is the uh emissary left yeah yeah exactly um this is so helpful because it's helping me make sense of what you're saying but through my framework in the sense that what you're referring to are is what i think of as as defense mechanisms which when that rules the our lives when that's in charge we're miserable we're we're psychically crippled when the adaptive self rules over the natural self we are miserable so when i say that there is no personal or individual agency from the perspective i'm speaking off which is given by the life i've led and of course i project that life unconsciously onto everybody else although i know rationally that that's not the case the message i'm trying to convey is the following don't try to go to war against the volcano you will just get burned yes accept that that little thing you think can fight a war against a volcano isn't even there it's just a tool it's not an agent and as a tool it is very important look you need to know in which mouth to bring the fork to so you need some kind of individual self-awareness in order to be able to live that's a tool of nature nature is using your self-awareness to go somewhere that is completely transcendent as far as we are concerned we who are we to cognize where nature is going we have no idea but we are tools of it so it's a very important in mind at least for people that come from where i came psychologically i think it's crucial for them to make this distinction between a true agent and a true tool because seeing the executive ego as a tool is critical because it allows nature to unfold and it also keeps nature in check in the following sense we all have shadow size sites personal and collective and we are very fond of projecting it uh elsewhere because we don't recognize that in ourselves i think the ego for instance the conscious metacognitive ego is important for upon recognizing our shadow in the process of individuation and acknowledging the shadow as something that exists within us the ego is an important tool to say i recognize you but i shall not give you free reign no your freedom will lose control yeah yeah exactly but these are the activities of a tool not the activities of a fundamentally separate agent because the moment you see yourself as a fundamentally separate agent now the rest is the opposition but the opposition is huge just all encompassing and overwhelming and we go to war against it thinking that somehow we can win that we can achieve control of life we can't we are not in control we have never been yeah but bernardo that that which utilizes the tool i think it really deserves to be acknowledged as something real and not there's just not simply an impersonal process a result of biochemical processes you know what i mean yeah but that's that's the whole theme of every book i have ever written that uh yes subjectivity is the only thing that really exists in and of itself it's not a derivative phenomena it's not the product of of a biochemistry and and i even go as far as to say that the tool is self-aware but the tool tells itself a narrative of being that is incompatible with the reality of the situation okay that data can get behind that's that kind of that makes good sense and to me johannes it has been such a a relief to understand that what i have the knee-jerk reaction to consider to be what i am in other words my ego to understand that it is but a tool a self-aware tool but but a tool it's here to serve it's not here to dictate and it and it tries to be king but that only hurts it because it's setting itself in opposition against unsurmountably powerful forces of a transpersonal nature from its perspective trans person from its perspective yeah that's it so that's the freedom of the slave i i talk about a self-aware slave but a slave who plays a monitoring role it doesn't give free reign to the shadow side it doesn't let things run amok but it doesn't try to bottle up the volcano either it doesn't try to cork the champagne after it's open because that's like swimming against the storm swimming against the currents you will eventually lose and you just get hurt in the process so i mean insofar as language goes this this this adds up for me but but i think it's also important to underscore that at some level this tool the executive functions and so forth they're they're not actually apart from the experiencing subject it's not you know what i mean nothing is apart from the experiencing subject i think what we really are is what we know we are but just our conceptual narratives contradict that we are pure subjectivity if we tomorrow went completely amnesic you know we would no longer have a personal history we would still be what we are even though nothing in our narratives of self would be applicable anymore because you no longer know your name you no longer know when you were born where where you live what you do all those things that we consider to be what we are would be off the table if you went completely amnesic tomorrow but we would still be that subject we are and my contention is it's the same subject in you you and i without the narratives are exactly the same thing the same primordial formless sense of self and i think everything else happens within that sense of self so there is a sense a very real and the only real sense in which we are the whole thing yeah but yet we that that is the whole thing is not an individual agent that's what i'm trying to get across yeah it's so fascinating so bernardo if we go with this premise of amnesia and you there is no narrative because you forgot everything would it be fair to say that you would still put the food in your mouth and not my mouth at an instinctive level well it depends on what you consider amnesia most people with amnesia can still speak their language so it's not complete amnesia it's amnesia of episodic memory but you still have skill memory um then you still have instinct like you still run away from fire if it's coming towards you um no narrative no narratives no narratives no episodic memory you would still have skill memory and you still have instinct memory so you would still put the fork in their correct mouth yeah but if you would take the amnesia to be absolutely complete in other words not only episodic memory but skill memory and an instinct would also be off the table you wouldn't even know what a mouth is let alone in which mouth to put the fork sure sure and i think the latter is does more justice to the real subject at play you mean would you mean the complete lack of differentiation yeah and and that's why we had to evolve in order to know in which mouth to put the fork yeah yeah yeah maybe maybe this is a hang up on my part but in my mind somehow the the differentiated self natural not narrative but still differentiated and the um the oneness you're describing um they are they're equally real they're equally real i think it's real in the sense that it's clearly something that's happening in nature so it's not it's not an illusion in the sense that it is what it is i think the illusion comes when we place a particular narrative around it and we say it is a irreducibly individual subject that i think is incorrect i think it is individual because of the way it has been configured in that transpersonal field of subjectivity but it's not irreducibly individual yeah i think it can be reduced to the transpersonal but the fact that something is reducible doesn't mean that it has no form of existence it has a form of existence in the same way that water has a form of existence even though it's reducible to hydrogen and oxygen water is not nothing it's reducible it can be explained in terms of two other things that are not water but that combination produces a reducible reality that exists in that it is experienced so i think the individual self exists because we experience it but it only exists in so far as it is experienced it's not irreducible it's not fundamentally individual it is just a particular configuration topological configuration of an underlying transpersonal field of subjectivity that's it's so fascinating and i'll keep thinking about it and maybe you know somehow in my mind i see this dialectic that interweave the pulse of existence and one isn't more real than the other but but look from a psychological perspective i think what i just said is irrelevant because it's only applicable when we are no longer human when we die because i think life is the image of that particular configuration that gives rise to the illusion of an individual self so that's the bottom level as far as psychology is concerned to go beyond that you get into philosophy or spirituality or foundations of physics you get to some other level from from the perspective of our humanity i think it's fair to call our natural selves which are individual to call that the base level of the hierarchy of mind i i don't think you need to dig any deeper to deal with patients because your patients are alive and you don't deal with that patience so there is no need to dig deeper than that if you know so the natural self can be the true bottom level reality uh as far as psychology is concerned if i were a psychologist i would consider that the bottom level yeah yeah and you you even seem to in your book again that i like so much you even seem to acknowledge that there is something egoic that probably survives death there might be i think memories survive death so even if you are no longer even if you don't recognize yourself anymore as an individual agent in the same sense that you don't recognize yourself anymore as a an avatar in your dream the moment you wake up you no longer think oh i am that avatar in the dream no you know i am the dreamer i am the guy who was you know conjuring up the whole dream not only the avatar so you you have this change in in the immediate recognition of what you are but you don't lose the memories of that individual self you thought you were in the same way that you don't lose the memories of the avatar in your dream you may still remember the dream you may still remember who you were in the dream what you were doing in the dream the memories persist but you would no longer say i am the avatar in the dream so i think that when it's when the process is complete we know now it's a it's a process full of shades of grey it's a long drawn-out process we know that now um but when it's complete when you pass the last gate of that process and now you're completely and fully and truly dead um i think it will be impossible to you to say oh i am is kidding you would say to yourself and i thought i was your honey's kidding and you still remember who johannes kidding thought he was and the memories and all that so in that sense everything that was ever truly real about you persists but what you thought you were that thought although it persists as a memory it no longer persists as a mode of self-identification it becomes unsustainable immediately self-defeating in the same way that it's immediately self-defeating for you to tell yourself i am the character in my dream after you wake up yeah see that does make sense to me but you can see how at least how what some of you say can be interpreted as actually taking the psyche out of psychology taking the hum the the individual psyche out of psychology that has absolutely never ever being my intent yeah i know that yeah i appreciate how you clarify all of this i think the individual psyche for as long as we are alive it's the only avenue we have to what is the only true thing that feel the subjectivity we are it it expresses itself through what we call the individual psyche it's really real but the narrative we tell ourselves about what the individual psyche is as an irreducibly individual peace of mind i think that narrative is mistaken well any narrative any narrative that says here's what i am it seems to me would miss the mark yeah even even the narrative this is not what i am i'm not this even yeah even that narrative seems to miss the mark yeah because it would immediately entail that you what you think yourself to be is limited in some sense yeah exactly so if so if the if the position is that any narrative any box any definition of who we are misses the mark including uh positions about what we're not i'm totally behind it a hundred percent i i think i understand you and in the sense i understand you i think you are correct i would just guard against taking this too far for instance um if we try to get rid of a patently false narrative we might have about what we are we can use what you just said as an argument against that because i cannot even tell what i'm not because you see in in the important sense all ripples are the lake so the lake cannot look at any ripple and say i am not that ripple of course you are that report too you're not only that ripple but you are all ripples because there is nothing to the ripples but the lake and you are the lake so there is nothing you can say is not you in a true level but if a little ripple has this individual thought i am separate from the lake then i think it is valid for the ripple to tell itself i'm full of that narrative i'm telling about myself is wrong i am not just the ripple let's see what i mean i do from the point of the ripple it's fair for the ripple to have an insight and say i was wrong about what i thought i was i was never a fundamentally independent ripple i have always been the lake so this negation is valid but from the point of view of the lake the lake cannot say i am not that ripple no sorry you are that ripple too because you are the only thing that exists right back to the vantage point question yeah yeah and i like i really like that you brought this up that you said what you just said because it goes to a question of methodology i'm behind everything you said and yet when you say um you know the effort to get rid of a false narrative people can get really entangled and neurotic about that you know oh this is a false thought or this isn't in line with ultimate truth and they're just so in terms of methodology personally i've actually found it more helpful to just forget about it all and just live and fully in the present directly experiencing things that's the best way to get rid of the false narratives right because if you get rid of the narratives you're guaranteed to get rid of the false ones right i love that that's so true bernardo you you grew up in brazil and in a recent interview you you said that there's a rare kind of wisdom that was embodied by a man i think he was a village man and you didn't elaborate on it and um i would love to know more about why he made such an impression on you having said that i need to use the washroom can i just do okay great right there right back okay okay i'm back okay yeah so we we left off with my question around um that you had you had mentioned this man in the village that he embodied a rare kind of wisdom you didn't say much more what what about him made an impression on you he it was not in a village my family by mother's side they when i was born that was no longer the case but they had a history of um being portuguese uh aristocrats that had come to brazil you know over a century ago uh to manage lands to landowners um and i don't know whether it's because of a product of that past that um my grandfather my mother said he had i don't know how you say this in english he had a lot of land but it was not farmland he had the the the entire side of of of a hill plus a big big area at the bottom of the hill and it was his private land but most of it was forest virgin atlantic forest just outside rio rio de janeiro in brazil and i i grew up as a kid having a lot of freedom to sort of explore that land because my family had this this completely irrational idea that because it was land that belonged to the family it was safe but there was nothing safe about it so it's virgin forest um but i had a lot of freedom to just go explore and the family paid a man and his whole family so there were two or three uh smaller houses within that complex there was the main house which was sort of the weekend place for my family and and this man and his family lived in i don't know 500 meters away there was this this other complex of two or three smaller houses where this guy lived with his family and he was paid to take care of the entire land and he was allowed to grow vegetables for himself if he wanted uh to raise chickens and pigs so he had any he had a mini farm but it was his own thing because the area was not explored as farmland so he had his own little farm operation and every every time i was there in the weekend i used because i was free i used to go to his house because the way they lived fascinated me it was so different from you know from you know an urbanite kid in the weekend being able to see a man know growing vegetables and throwing corn to the chickens and you know for me it was like wow it is a totally different way of relating to to life in the world so i loved to go there and i was completely allowed to go there so i interacted with this man a lot now this man was literally illiterate he couldn't read and write and even as a kid you know eight nine year old kid i already knew in a very spontaneous way not in a critical you know judgment based way but i knew very spontaneously spontaneously that he was quote stupid in the way we define intelligence uh he was a man with very low iq i mean even to an eight nine year old kid that that i i could see it it was not judgment being passed it was just an observation you know the way he spoke the broken language he spoke uh very simple sentences he never articulated the thought everything was very immediate you know trump-like you know very short phrases um you know sorry about that i didn't mean to pass any political judge if you think you know my political visions because of what i just said you don't um fair enough and uh i i was speaking towards your audience by the way not only towards you um but he always struck me as a wise man and now i don't know how to put that in words um certainly not as a kid but there was something that attracted me to that guy i wanted to see him work the land i wanted to hear him speak to the chickens you know there was something that attracted me in in him in witnessing how he related to the world and as an adult i think i can try to word it by saying that he was plugged into a much broader system than i am plugged in he had a spontaneous way of dealing with his environment that i don't my my relationship with the world is mediated by thought his was not he's was unconverted by thought so he had a sort of kind of immediate wisdom he just knew certain things and if you asked him why he would draw blank and he wouldn't even find it strange why are you asking me why it's just like that you know what i mean so heavy on the instinctive flow less heavy on the metacognition very heavy on the instinct and almost zero metal recognition would have called him a profoundly unconscious wise man which but he could speak a language broken as he did so to me that was a rare window into a way of being that i was completely insulated from even as a nine-year-old kid if you know what i mean the way the guy talked to the weather he talked to the birds it's like what is happening here and there was something in me that recognized it as real and not nonsense and so yeah that that's the first he is already dead i was told i haven't been in brazil for decades um but i was stowed by acquaintances that he had died a few years ago wow that's a beautiful picture it's a beautiful picture this is probably a professional hazard but part of where my mind went was thinking about the fine line between giving a child freedom and neglecting them yeah no i was never neglected no i certainly was not neglected but my parents sense of potential danger was naive compared to the sense we have today about what could be dangerous for a child i climbed rocks that one slip and i would be dead and my mother to this day has no idea what i did as a kid lose in the wild around rio de janeiro i mean i had an idyllic childhood uh i i really miss in those times yeah yes you also alluded to the idea of a sense of not having deep roots sort of culturally homeless yeah i mean when you're a kid you are much more exposed to your family than to your country uh exposing exposure to the country begins with school and later on high school university then you're really exposed more to the country um but as a kid you know i i was not educated as most brazilian kids would be educated i think my father my my father loved brazil but there wasn't a cell of brazilian in him and he loved the heat he liked the heat he liked the weather but he my notion of what it means to be a male adult was in conflict with what i began to see around in the country once i got older so if you ask me do i feel brazilian and i i'll tell you wonderful things about brazil because i had a great time there but i don't feel brazilian at all um i i i went last time i went to brazil it was for one week in 1998 i think or 1999 it was just one week and i felt so alien so alien that it it made it difficult because everybody has the expectation that you are one of them because you're born there and brazilians like americans they have the law of the land you are where you're born for europeans where you're born is irrelevant what matters is where your family is and the ethnicity of your family so you are dutch if you're born from a dutch family even if you're born in thailand if you know what i mean brazilians don't have that because like the us it's a country of immigrants so you cannot use that to define brazilians because brazilians are japanese or africans are europeans and brazilians are from everywhere so there was that cultural expectation hannah was there in the late 90s for one week that that was one of them uh and to live up to that expectation was very difficult um but what counted what accounted for the for the sense of feeling alien there what what accounts for that uh brazilian society uh is a uh we use a certain word but i don't mean it pejoratively at all brazilian society is tribalist in the sense that it's your tribe that counts and your tribe is your family and friends screw the society at large and screw the individualist the individualist will suffer because he doesn't have a tribe to protect him and he will be shunned yeah and society at large that's why there is so much corruption screw that because those other tribes are not the tribes i care about dutch society is the mirror image of that in dutch society it's the tribalism that is wrong you are respected as an individual and as individuals we make sure that we contribute to society as a whole so the whole of society is our tribe so we make sure that people that we don't know personally have all the support they need that old people get assistance from nurses that there are enough clubs for people to socially integrate even if the if even if they don't have immediate friends so there is this dichotomy people say that northern europeans are very individualist on the contrary they are the ultimate collectivists but it's a collectivism that starts from your individual self it it starts from what nature is manifesting is through you respect to that and then we go collectivist to make sure that everybody is enabled to have a minimally decent life brazilians in that sense are not collectivists because they focus on the tribe and the collective of the tribe which is a small collective they don't focus on the bigger collective of the country and they shun the individuals so you have to surrender your own dispositions in order to fit into your immediate tribe your group of friends and family and i could never do that i could never be a member of a tribe a member of a gang a member of a group of friends and i remember when i was getting a little older that people would show up in my building and they would say it's sunday sunny and they say come on let's go to the beach we are all going to the beach and i said i don't feel like going to the beach today and people go like what do you mean but everybody is going to the beach and i was like but i am not everybody why should i want to go to the beach because everybody was going to the beach but in that psychology that made total sense if everybody in the tribe wanted to go to the beach that meant everybody so you had to go to the beach too because it's tribal thinking it's group mind and i didn't understand that as a kid i suffered from that as a kid i understand it as an adult so this is only one instance of of a cultural difference that makes it very hard for me i have always been as my mother says i have always been my father so the northern european side of my family as opposed to the portuguese and brazilian side because i grew up there so look i'm not criticizing anybody that that's what's very important brazil my time there was fantastic i would never have had the opportunity to have the childhood i had if my family was in northern europe from the get-go the freedom i had the contact with the nature that i had as a child was priceless but as i began to grow up into my teens then it began to hurt because now you're exposed to society at large and that society contradicts who you are and the way you want to live and and started becoming painful so you know being the the second generation that returns home uh in the sense because after my father died you know europe became invested with the magic of going back to the roots sort of um finding my father again you know what i mean oh yes so that started playing my mind when i was 12 when my father died so europe became sort of the return of the prodigal son you know that that was what had to happen it happened very quickly yeah i finished my education in switzerland which is not quite northern europe but close enough and and now now i've been for decades where my heart really is here i feel normal yes i do i love that you're wading into a little bit of sociology i think it's just so much fun to hear this you're also describing some of my conflicts i mean i grew up in sweden but at 15 moved to the united states and then back to sweden for a while and so i i can share i can identify with what you're describing the sense of being culturally homeless so it's very meaningful to me to hear you describe this and uh and my fiancee she's she's latina so i'm quite familiar with uh with latin culture and some of the things you're describing so you recognize what i said i do although it blew my mind the way you there was a nuance there that blew my mind which was um when you said that they're actually actually not collectivist and the true sen that's wild whoever i mean wild the dutch are much more collective collectivists than brazilians is swedes i mean i'm assuming there's swedes of course certainly the whole of scandinavian is highly collectivist that's right that's right but but hang on here hang on there's so much to look at i mean because the other thing you're saying is that you're not a conformist you're not going to go to the beach if you don't feel like it i couldn't yeah which i which i respect a great deal by the way i'm sure you can imagine that to this thing about autonomy and staying true to yourself and all of that um and i paid the price for it your honest i mean at the same time not at the same time i a lot of certain aspects of my personality that are very handy formed precisely because of that but as a as a young teenager teenagers had groups of friends for protection against other groups you know i mean physically even if you get into a fight and uh because i wouldn't be a member of any gang i mean i would i would uh traffic through all the gangs if you know what i mean i was friends with all of them friends i was acquainted with all of them i don't speak to all of them but there was none that i was a member of so i was on my own so very early on you know i had to go to karate and jiu-jitsu school and you know had that tough mentality uh to prevent bullying from even beginning because that's one of the things my father taught me very early on was the only way to stop bullying is to cut it from the root you don't let it even begin and and this was the 80s so i got advice that i would never give a kid today my father would say get into a fight the worst that will happen is that you have a broken arm and i will go pick you up at the hospital it doesn't get any worse than that and then i thought this is this isn't that bad at all so it's okay so his point was if you start being bullied immediately get into the fight and it doesn't matter if you win or lose because they will leave you alone when the bully always wants a free pass he doesn't want to get into conflict so did he die yeah so my my natural way of being which made me sort of alien based on the expectations and values of the society around me it toughened me up and it allowed me to to feel relatively comfortable uh playing my adaptive self out through life without being overwhelmed by anxiety which i think is the problem you see in one of the problems you see in the therapy room is people who couldn't just form a strong enough adaptive self yes um so i didn't have that problem because it was forced on me very very very early you have to build that because i was statistically different and i say statistically it's important brazilian society is a very very heterogeneous society there is everything there there are towns where you speak german towns where you speak dutch towns where you speak japanese so there is everything but there is a statistical average that is very present present and it's the true brazilians is that mix that statistical average and i was no i don't know six sigma deviated from that from that mean value so it was very off the average and it was very confrontational but it helped me build an adaptive self very very early on so even after my father died i still had that boom mentality like not even this is going to stop me wow wow did you end up scrapping and having some fights when i was a kid yeah oh yeah yeah [Laughter] sure thing i was uh from the karate kid generation you know and and i was never bullied my father was spot-on nice does it matter it doesn't matter if you win or lose you are not bullied anymore yes yeah i totally appreciate that um but you're you know you're underscoring the pain as well of the alienation does that mean bernardo that when you said i don't want to go to the beach today i don't feel like it it really did diminish or weaken some of those friendships with those people that went to the beach totally wow totally because bernardo was not prepared to sacrifice himself in the name of the group yeah so i was not reliable wow see i i differentiated myself see that to me makes you so reliable i can i can count on you to be honest about your feelings netherlands too in the netherlands that's what you're expected to do yeah so people are at ease with you for instance people are at ease to invite you for things because they know that if you're not comfortable you just say no and it will be okay uh but in other places people may be on ease to invite your things because they might think he will accept because he will feel forced for social reasons yes we don't have this here so americans when they come to the netherlands uh although they are closer to the netherlands than brazilian are brazilians are but even americans they think we are rude because uh we say things straight on we don't dance around to say something if you don't like something or if you don't want something you just say it head on no polishing whatsoever and for some americans that's very confrontational and for the british it's extremely confrontational it makes you think we are a bunch of bastards but it makes you so ultimately reliable and trustworthy me personally yes you and i the people in in the netherlands i suppose if you're we speak our minds yes that's that's what that's what we associated with trust yes but uh brazilians wouldn't associate this with trust trust for them is conformance to the group you can be counted on to conform with the group that's reliable you see there is a sense in which this is a proper application of the word there is a sense in which this is actually reliable you can be relied to conform to the values and dispositions of the group you can be relied on as a member of the group in the netherlands you can be relied on as somebody who gives expression to your personal dispositions once and and and known once so the word is properly applicable in both cases but the meaning is completely different in either case yes again it goes back to the vantage point are we looking at this from um can i get bernardo to do what i want him to do or can i count on him to be true to himself and we can connect through that authenticity yeah because we value this individuality of expression so what you what you say is important as far as the individual self i agree with you in the sense that that you mean it uh we have to honor this particular expression of nature that we are we are a certain kind of flower and not another i mean but uh and but this doesn't contradict the statement i made that uh the individual self ontologically speaking is reducible and therefore an illusion uh so in that sense it's an illusion but i think as an expression of nature we need to be respected and in in countries that have this innate respect for the particular manifestation of nature that each one of us are they project that need for respect onto others and therefore they rely on others insofar as the other also respects his individuality because i respect my own i rely on others respecting their own so we can have social commerce in a clear way that doesn't lead to discomfort but the expectations are different in other places and for me that was very clear because of my childhood i know from very early on that expectations can be different from my natural expectations because i was confronted with that very early on yeah and and and i even started as an adult thinking about how my father lived how was he happy there and um and and my mother helped me put it all together my father was a loner in brazilian society he didn't have close friends that came to visit i hardly remember anyone coming to visit from from his side we would visit his family now the danes we would visit them my weekends but he there was never a friend of his coming by so he was happy because he liked the weather he liked the heat which i hate so bernardo oh you finish it finish yeah so he found he carved his own space for himself he had a whole lot of hobbies electronics was a hobby of his became my profession uh flying mother airplanes became a hobby of his so he his social engagements were through hobbies through clubs exactly like we do in northern europe so my intuition as a kid was right he was never a brazilian yeah and his love for brazil was something else it was a different type of love if you know what i mean yes so bernardo that which is seen through your eyes right now that which is detecting what i'm saying and comprehending it and deliberating it responding from your point of view it's mind at large it's this cosmic consciousness one field of subjectivity taking a point of view in you another point of viewing me but ultimately one field of subjectivity expressing itself through a variety of ways like the variety of ripples that you can have on a lake and you can point at each ripple and say that's the ripple you can locate its spatial boundaries you can give it physical characteristics this ripple is this high this it has this breath it moves in that direction with that speed uh but that doesn't mean that there is anything to the ripple other than the lake in which it ripples so we can locate each other in space we can attribute physical and psychological characteristics to each of us we can say you know you are there and i am here you are this old i am this old but that doesn't mean that there is anything else going on in us other than that underlying field of subjectivity the lake in which we ripple fascinating you said something once that jumped out at me which was i can't remember word for word but it was something like life is as bizarre if you think about it strange it's just bizarre thing and and and i agree with that but what jumps out at me bernardo is that the very statement the very opinion uh seems to include some reference point in order to determine that it is bizarre and and what is that what is that reference i was always afraid i would get this question one day [Laughter] no it has happened what happened oh gosh and despite years of trying to prepare for this question and not to sound like a nut in answering it honestly i'm not sure i am prepared to answer it in an honest way that safeguards my image it may be unbelievable what i'm about to say yeah okay no just but i know you do shadow work where you challenge yourself to go against your image when you wrote about cosmic consciousness as a way of challenging your image so i know this is in line with your priorities so that's why i'm going to answer because to hell with my image um i mean i already confessed to so many things online in different interviews i mean there is nothing to safeguard anymore but it despite all that it will still sound strange um i i know that it's a current view that what the memories i'm about to relate are impossible um and and maybe i am not maybe i have confabulated these memories i don't know maybe that's the case but whatever the case it it's the most honest answer i can give um i remember being a baby i remember looking around my room at things looking at toys and i remember thinking as a baby this is so bizarre this is so weird what the hell is this now it may be unbelievable to most psychologists especially developmental psychologists maybe not clinical psychologists because they are used to weirdness every day but uh you know research psychologists may consider this nearly impossible like he can't possibly even have had the thought as a baby let alone remember it and articulate it in words of course back then i didn't articulate the thought in words i only remember the smell of it the smell of weirdness i remember sitting on a on a living room rug a thick living room rug with a tv much taller than me in front of me and tall sofas further away and i remember this this feeling this is so weird this whole thing what is this this is so weird and um i think on the outside people looking at me what they would have seen would be a baby a kid who couldn't even walk yet like this and there are photos of me like this so it comes from that time this memory of that sheer sense of weirdness and now if you ask me but you didn't answer my question because i asked for the reference i don't know the reference presumably where you came from prior whatever that was yeah but i remember this very present all-encompassing feeling of uncanniness and weirdness not not of threats it wasn't threatening i didn't feel threatened at all i just remembered the weirdness yeah and and today if i have two days of quietness in which i'm not giving any interview i'm not working i'm just quiet going for a walk in the forest and then i meditate after those two days i can still put myself back in that place i can still go out in that place and looking around and think this is mighty weird it's very pleasant yeah and i think it's precious i think it's precious my my version of that i was i think i was seven years old i remember a period where i was seven years old and i would go into the bathroom and lock the door and just just stand and look out the window and i was just filled with this like awe or puzzlement like wonder like i'm alive like it was just the strangest thing to me like i'm alive yeah i just had one pardon me i had a similar one but it was later than you you were precocious i think i had one maybe not that older maybe 10 years older 10 years old or 11 at most having the feeling for six months i had this thought usually in the morning after waking up i would have the thought i am not the world i have never been the world i'm just a person within the world and i would feel a cold shiver go down my spine literally the cold cold shiver like running slowly down my spine all the way to the bottom of my spine and i remember the uncanniness of that thought of that realization it happened for six months and then then it was normal yeah of course i am me i'm not the world but at that point this that difference was also very weird and one more thing i just thought of johannes when i was this baby finding the world weird i remember the most weird thing about it i remember the feeling and i can put words to it only now not not then but depth spatial depth was very weird that i could see something that i couldn't reach that that there was this depth that that there was space that there was dimensionality it was very weird that not everything was here that things were there yeah that was very uncanny yeah very very yeah i think it's completely plausible i mean i have no comps about that at all um i mean and there's to ontological implications here which are fascinating um but in terms of what you just shared right which uh which is the um that was sort of your fault from grace huh the the being separated yeah yeah now i know it to have been that back then i thought i'm just becoming an adult and i'm realizing what is real yeah yeah now i know that reality was before but we're not you know what strikes me as as you as you mentioned the being a baby and having these experiences it strikes me that one of the ontological implications is that conceptual structure knowing certain concepts is actually not a prerequisite for perceiving the world you know some people take that position that you can't recognize the chair without the knowing the concept of a chair for example i to some extent i'm sympathetic to that position but not in not in a way that contradicts where you're coming from i think um we certainly perceive what we now call a chair before we have the concepts for it yeah but what we call a chair is concept laden sure if today i look at a chair what i see is not really what is there what i see is a tiling of what's there with a conceptual club work a cobweb of of concepts so i i think today in most adults we lose contact with reality as it is before we tile it up with the web of concepts yeah but there is something perceived before there is this web of concept it just becomes invisible to us now because we have the web of concepts in between uh but there is this something there that uh the name chair doesn't does doesn't do justice uh too yes i mean the content that was the unkind uncanny aspect of the world when i was a baby because i i didn't have this conceptual tiling to render it familiar through narratives because giving a name makes everything familiar it creates an illusion of understanding and familiarity for instance we have no idea where the the effect of the acceleration of the universe's expansion we have no idea where that comes from but we give it a name we call it dark energy and suddenly we feel all warm and fuzzy inside that we have some grip because we gave it a name so giving names and applying concepts to things i think that's my personal intuition i'm not a psychologist it contributes to our feeling safe and secure and contributes to building the familiarity of the world and when i was a baby i didn't have that so the world was uncanny i don't know i'm trying to explain something that i can't so i love it we're thinking out loud i mean the concept helps me know how to relate to that thing and and it gives me a sense of the function of that thing aha this is associated with sitting but prior to that there's an experience and there i believe there's also discernment not necessarily around what the function is of that chair um but i think we're not we're not um differences are not necessarily lost to us i suppose you could argue that man while that just means you have the concept of this versus that difference maybe that's a core concept and that's why you can differentiate things i don't know what do you think i think there is a way to differentiate things without a conceptual armor although the differentiations probably would go along different boundaries and different lines than the lines imposed by our conceptual dictionary but i i i i'm remembering i'm remembering myself as a baby and i certainly differentiated things i i could differentiate how do you call it when you hang something on top of a baby's uh um crib like a dream character it rotates has things hanging from it uh yeah sure huh dream catcher yeah yeah it's like this native thing that supposedly no no no it's not that it's uh it it has figures hanging from it like bombs or horses and yes and it has mirrors and it's the lights flashing it rotates a little bit oh okay okay and it's to keep the baby entertained when the baby is looking up yeah i remember seeing that yeah and i didn't have a concept for that but it was clearly differentiated in my perceptual awareness yes i saw that that thing had an existence yes fascinating you know and some would argue that well you probably had a concept of thing object and that's why you could differentiate it so it was pre-language so whatever concepts i had were not language oriented yeah that's i agree i think i agree with you i agree with you but yeah the most uncanny thing for me was spatiality was the idea that things are there and not here that was just mind-blowing for my baby self anyway i'm sure developmental psychology can explain that in some way but yeah well i imagine that this this had a role in how you gravitated towards idealism not an explicit role that i would be able to report on but probably in the underlying streams of my uh psychic development probably this had uh displayed their role yes today i tend to see some reality in in those early days i think the tendency in our society is to see life as a constant evolution forward in cognition and knowledge so whatever you thought or felt before uh if it's different from what you think and feel today then the past is wrong and today is right because we are always going forward it's a monotonic progression towards truer cognition from our baby time and to our adult time i don't think things are that simple today i look back to my way of relating to the world when i was much younger which are all associated with brazil that's why i have these wonderful memories and i think i have duped myself in the meantime about a number of my ordinary intuitions today that i my the glasses through which i contemplated the world back then in some respects they were cleaner more transparent less distorting and the conceptual glasses are where today they are more distorting some senses they are more clarifying in some senses but more distorting in others they they hide certain aspects of reality that that were directly accessible to me then and now i lost access to that here's here's something that's coming to my mind the the view of idealism this this one mind at large um if i have understood things properly it's not combat it's not compatible with a buddhist view which i actually think is a good thing i'm not a fan of buddhism um my understanding of buddhism is that it's akin to annihilation and they're going to say i misunderstood it and so on but i don't think so if you pull back the curtains and actually look at it their view is that there really is only these impersonal processes and whatever we think of as an observer or witness or experiencer it's simply a function just the way a chair has a function of sitting but if i've i could be wrong but is it fair to say that you don't square with that buddhist notion the way you put it i don't square with that that is correct okay of course you know buddhist literature is ginormous um it's not a restricted canon like in christianity where there has been a selection already made we group all of those scriptures in one book called the bible and that's it that's the canon in buddhism the canon is ginormous there's no single human being can read the entire buddhist canon and it was written by an enormous variety of people over 25 centuries so when we say buddhism you know what do we mean and whose version of buddhism is that is that nagarjuna's is that a a more modern sage like that that was hinduism sorry uh take another anyway uh is it the zen view of buddhism is it the mahayana school uh you know is it the the sun i forgot there's another school in japan that's completely different from from zen but it's also buddhism so my own prejudiced biased personal interpretation of what buddhism means when they talk about the void when they talk about there being no self my own interpretation of that which is then of course compatible with my own narrative i'm trying to fit it to my own narrative to some extent so i'm i'm perfectly happy to acknowledge my bias here but my own interpretation is what they mean by no self is no individual self no differentiated self differentiated selves are epiphenomenon they exist as a phenomenon but they are reducible and what they mean by the void is a transpersonal mind at rest a non-excited field of mentation and then it's a void because there are no objects because objects our experiences and experiences are excitations of the field if the field is at rest or if the field has only one carrier wave which hinduists and buddhists called the drone the like the base frequency of vibration which is always there and everything is modulated on top of it so if it's if it's mind at rest or only the drone has a pattern of excitation then they call it the void because there are no objects there are no explicit experiences there is only the potential for experiencing but of course that void is a no thing but not nothing potentials are not nothing but potential there's a sense in which the potentials are everything the potential for something to happen is not nothing it is just a no thing it's not a thing but it's not nothing so the void is not nothing the void is mind trans personal mind at rest no personal self exhibiting only the potential for everything but no expression of the potential so that's my interpretation of the no self no personal self and the void which is mine at rest well i can hear my buddhist friends in my mind going yeah he that's it he got it you know that's that's accurate you know but they would also say that this transpersonal mind is not to be reified it's actually empty even that is empty there is nothing you can point to and say that's that's what it is it doesn't exist which translates to a psychology without a psyche in other words there's no one really home like you once said in one of your interviews there's no there's no castro there's just castro bing which is that is at odds with the witness the the changeless witness okay so now i will go beyond my own philosophy there is only one place where i touched upon this and that was a book called martin allegory a book that goes beyond the official story i am prepared to defend on rational and empirical grounds so i'm going to go in a direction now that i do not know how to defend on rational and empirical grounds it's an extension of my normal shtick if you know what i mean um so please audience don't hold me to that because uh it's it's quicksand territory now there is a sense uh how to there are things that are ineffable that cannot be put in words that cannot be put in rational spatial temporal terms and yet they are so present present and so self-evident in certain states of mind that it is impossible to dismiss them as non-real there is a part of your mind that actually cognizes it but in a non-verbal way in a non-explicit way and you cannot make an argument for it and that's why many schools including of buddhism have completely given up on describing reality how they do is point to it in the hope that you will look in the right direction and you see it for yourself and and the description then ceases being a description and it becomes a sort of enchantment which is what um peter kingsley called it he called it a form of metis a form of in a good sense a form of trickery and you think you are reading a description but it's actually meant to trick you into seeing the thing that you that you think is being described so it becomes a form of incantation and and they will use lies deception contradiction they will use whatever they can whatever tools they can to sort of trick yourself into seeing what's actually going on and sort of seeing through your logical narratives because the ground level of reality does not comply to aristotelian logic we are just monkeys on planet earth what makes us think that our axiomatic thinking uh reflects and captures all the salient aspects of nature i mean they do capture physics until now physics is now going in the direction where not even aristotelian logic can follow there was a big discussion about this in the 1970s in philosophy you know to what extent does quantum physics completely break aristotle and logic and we have to come up with a different logic but uh i think the bottom the true bottom level of reality the actual pristine truth not our approximation of it because the pathway fight is for a better approximation and i'm very cognizant of it we talked about it in the beginning there is we cannot articulate the absolute truth with the human intellect our only game is to be honest about what we already have reasons to discard and adopting a better hypothesis that is closer to truth that's the game i fight but i think it is possible under certain states of mind to have a quick glimpse into the pristine bottom level of reality and i think that's possible because we are real beings i mean we we are part of nature we are rooted in it whatever reality is we are immersed in it so it's possible to sort of see through our narratives trick our own logic and suddenly have an ineffable unwardable glimpse into the sheer naked bottom level of what's going on and that cannot be articulated in logic and in language so people we use forms of trickery to try to seek that including saying you know what there is actually really nothing going on and this particular statement is one i happen to understand and i let me try to do what i didn't i tried to do in the book a more than allegory let me try to do it verbally it's the best way i know to try to even remotely hint at why there is actually nothing going on and why nothing ever has actually gone on nothing it's not that it's not that nothing doesn't exist sorry i'm not saying that existence is nothing i'm saying that nothing is going on not even as a verb the way to approximate it in rational terms you can follow your rationality until a point where it breaks and then hopefully at the edge of that precipice before your vertigo pulls you back into rationality and you say this is nonsense there is a fraction of a second in which you actually see what's down there before your vertical makes you pull back so i'll try to use that you get one shot at this and let's look at time we think time it is extended from the past to the future and the past is an ever-growing monster that eats into the future and the present is a thin boundary between the two that moves along as the past grows and the future shortens but we do you ever experience the past you may say of course bernard you just told me about your experiences when you were a baby of course you experienced the past is that really true because what i am experiencing is a memory of the past and that memory experience is of experience now i only experience my memories now the past no longer exists i cannot point at it and say there it is it doesn't exist my memories are experienced now and even if i remember remembering that experience happens now and the future is an expectation it's not there you cannot point at it and say there it is the future is an expectation i mean since since aquinas i think we can why is it aquinas i don't remember who who said that first maybe it was john scott again i don't remember my history of philosophy anymore but it's true now as it was true then if then never existed the future is just an expectation if you experience it it's present already it's no longer the future this this is not really controversial is it it's not that's why i'm still in rational territory right but now let's explore the implications of this how long is the present i mean if i say present the moment my mouth begun to move to say present that was already passed present is now no no that's past present is now know what i mean tracking how long is this in any period of time you can always cut it up in three pieces and say past present and future and you can keep doing that infinitesimally to an infinitesimally small present in other words the present has no dimension uh it's the only thing that exists but it is nothing everything that happens happens in that infinitesimally small slit in between memory and expectation all of existence isn't that slit but doesn't matter how small you make that slit it's smaller in other words nothing ever happens it's yes i mean it's it's nothing that can be pinpointed as soon as you think you can pinpoint it it's already gone i'm totally with you there right but but i would caution against jumping to the conclusion that because of that it's nothing we have to be very careful about translating any ineffable but true insight into a narrative because that translation distorts the true insight and we begin living something that is actually false this this happens a lot with religion people who have a true insight that if they translate they cannot translate in any other way by saying i am god but then the moment they say that it's no longer true do you see what i'm trying to hint at so so yeah when the buddhists say nothing is going on there is nothing i know why they are saying that but the moment it's sad it's wrong the moment it's worded it's false but i i think to know where that is coming from and i would even say there is no other way to word it there's no other way toward it it's the best you can do in words is to say nothing is going on existence comes out of nothing at every moment and it's made of nothing but the moment i say it it's wrong yeah i mean you're using a you're beginning with a temporal thought structure right past present future and it's quite a leap then to go from a temporal conceptualization to talk about everything as in existence itself you seem to be conflating this uh view of time with existence itself like they're one and the same is that am i is that accurate logically you are accurate um and that's the whole difficulty you say you see you can immediately point out where i'm committing a fallacy yeah and you are correct and that's why i never defend this point of view actually i just went on a rampage against colorado valley because he said as a scientist there is nothing so i went on i went nuts against him because he was saying this he was wording it and presenting it as a logical conclusion out of nagarjuna's logical writings and and i thought no no this is not a valid move in the game yeah you know this is not a valid move in the game this is cheating and i wrote an enormous essay criticizing him and was having a discussion the other day with him in private until three in the morning via email at the same time and this will sound completely contradictory and it will be in the space of logic and and time at the same time i know he's right the problem is he's not allowed to say it neither i neither am i allowed to say it because the moment we say it it's wrong we are trying to transport something that is outside the logic space and time we are trying to fish that from out there move it within logic space and time and pretending that it still works it doesn't you cannot take that fish out of the lake and serve it for dinner the fish disappears the moment you pull it out of the water you know what i mean and i appreciate it i stand by my criticism of ravelli because i think he made an invalid move in this chess game it's not a valid move it's cheating don't do that but reality is not the chess game what we think is real according to our logical axioms and our ideas of space and time is an intellectual game and i'm willing to play it because i think we can play it better than we have been playing so far so if i grant the rules of the game as valid i think we are not playing the best way we can that's why materialism is false according to the rules of the game you don't need to transcend the game into mystical territory to prove that materialism whatever the truth is materialism is not it that's that done deal it's the worst move on the table it's it it's a valid move but it's it loses the game immediately and we can already see checkmate five moves actually checkmate is already on the board so everything almost everything you hear from me except parts of my book more than allegory everything else you hear from me is a concession to the rules of the game and my point is we can play it better but in my heart of hearts i do know that there is more to reality than the game and it operates according to other rules the rules of the game are a convention of human cognition you can glimpse at what's happening behind the game what goes wrong is when you try to pull that into the board of the game because then it's an invalid move and i will forever criticize invalid moves even though i know where they're coming from even if i know where that intuition that ravel is appealing to i know where that's coming from yes i i've seen what he's seen but you cannot play that move on the board yeah yeah if you play i would jump and say invalid move you're cheating take it back which is exactly what i did so more dangerous than a bad move is an invalid move that gets invested with the belief of people because of the authority of the player yeah and that's why i came out against ravalli so strongly people trust that he is a level-headed objective person when he makes an invalid move he can destroy the game because people will think oh it's a valid move and now the whole game will change and it will be chaos because we are infringing the rules and we don't even know that we are doing that so i would jump on his throat and say don't play this move because it will be wrongly mis interpreted people will make of it something it's not because you cannot pull this fish out of the water and expect it to still exist it doesn't when you it only exists in the water so you play the wrong move and it's a dangerous move because people expect that you play world level chess you expect you you know there is no italian there is an italian very good player now um forgot his name eduardo no caruana eduardo caruana anyway people would think that rovell is caruana playing chess and they will they they will never even question that he played an illegal move of course he played the legal move and that would destroy the game to destroy everything we've built since the enlightenment but again and i'm sorry i'm repeating myself it's so difficult to talk about these things i have seen the fish he saw i just am against pulling that fish out of the water and expecting it to exist after you do it it doesn't yeah i appreciate your passion and your point of view and i think you're also acknowledging that you appreciated my rebuttal within the rules of the game you're completely right yeah there is no defeating what you just said yeah and unfortunately that's the game that we call life yeah okay so unless you see the fish for yourself saying what i said is wrong yeah why did i say that in order to illustrate the difficulty of the problem yeah so nobody should take what i said to be the truth it's not yeah because i took a fish out of the water and i'm presenting it to you as if it were still the same fish it's not it has undergone magical chemical transformation and now it's false the moment i say it it's false totally fair totally fair totally fair so bernardo the reason that that we cannot say that you're flirting with the night with um nihilism nihilism the reason we say that you're not flirting with nihilism right now is that the the field of potentiality is real absolutely that's nothingness i'm talking about is pregnant with everything it's not a nothing really but it but there isn't a word that makes a difference between these two types of nothing yeah and we can't even invent because to invent a word we are appealing to a common intuition that we label with a certain sound in other words a word but that common intuition is not part of culture so it is impossible to even create a word for that pregnant nothing i'm talking about the moment i say it's really nothing it's wrong yet it's the closest word that can be used yes but but the caveat of calling it a pregnant nothing is helpful it moves us in the right direction it's equally valid to call it everything as it is to call it nothing right so that realization comes from a space in which there is no difference between nothing and everything right now you cannot wrap any logic around it to make it make sense it just doesn't now you you can wrap a banal logic to make sense of this but but that's by now and that's not what i mean like you can say if this house belongs to everybody then it belongs to no one because if you eliminate differentiation then everything is nothing yeah but that's a banal right insight in philosophy i mean it in a much deeper much more optically rich way than just a game of conceptual definitions um but again if i word it i'm wrong yeah yeah and i am deserving of being criticized because this is very important people will say oh he's saying he's wrong but he knows he's not actually being wrong there is some subtle truth in the word used no there isn't there isn't it's just wrong the moment i say it it's just wrong whatever you try to make of it in thought is wrong the statement is wrong it is not true that there is nothing going on it's not true so there is no subtle truth behind it no the only validity of saying these words in the context i said it is in the context of metis in the context of trickery in the context of an enchantation back to methodology yeah yeah yeah but then it's no longer philosophy because philosophy is about saying what's true yes not tricking you into seeing an ineffable truth that is not certainly not the game of an analytic 21st century philosophy so if you hear this from my words and you think about it and you try to figure out in what way it's true no you're just wrong you will either be brought to the edge of the precipice and take a glimpse at it before your vertical brings you back to the safe ground of logic and understanding or you will not see it if you don't see it there is no logic and understanding that you can wrestle out of this it's just plain wrong it's false nothing more than that its only value is to trick if it fails to trick there is no value see i failed to trick you i could think in your eyes that i failed to trick you you never left that solid ground of no no wait a moment let me understand what he's saying you never left that you didn't even get to the vertical you can see it in people's eyes when they suddenly go like and then no no but this cannot be right yeah you're correct this cannot be right the question is have you seen it well here's here's the thing i lived for a couple years so the zen buddhist monastery i've been very very deep in the spiritual path we meditated you know week for weeks on you know for weeks you know 15 hours a day so i've had very powerful meditative experiences i've been around the spiritual block if you will and and i'm down with what you're saying but i would what i want to underscore is that the way we and i think you're saying the same thing the way we conceptualize that glimpse of the fish is not only does it matter a great deal it poses a lot of risk yes and i think we're gonna try to make a narrative out of it and tell people this is what it is yes it's not only false and wrong it's dangerous yes because it it makes a invalid moves yeah it undermines the very foundation of the game we are playing yeah i yeah the way to undermine the game is to see beyond it not to play it according to wrong rules you see it you may say well that's precisely what we want to do we want to undermine the game to see the truth yeah but that kind of undermining is not the undermine you get when you continue to play the game just cheating that's worse than the game playing the game wrongly and still playing it and pretending that you're playing it is worse than to play it right so through the game that that's what we all want but and i was not referring to the insights after long meditation to me personally uh johannes i i had some deep insights in meditative practice sometimes aided by by psychedelics but what i was trying to hint at to you happened suddenly in a restaurant one day in a discussion with two friends while i was drinking wine one glass of wine in a crowded place it it's the kind of thing that it just happens to you and it's like a a moment it's like a flash and for a moment you see it and then it's gone and you're lucky if you retained a memory of the feeling um and so it's that tiny memory of a feeling that i'm holding on to to to say everything i've said in the past five or ten minutes um it was not out of meditative discipline i want to i want to underscore for the viewer right now what a big deal it is what you're doing what you're saying right now because what you're doing is you are anchoring all of your thoughts and your abstractions into inductive first-person experiences there that deserves tremendous respect in other words i want the viewer to see that bernardo is not just playing around with abstractions he's anchor you're anchoring everything you're saying into first person direct experience that deserves a lot of credit you're inductive not deductive but notice that everything i said in the last 10 minutes or so about you know the nothingness um is an aspect of my philosophy that is um it's not even part of the main storyline of my philosophy it's an it's a sideshow in one book out of 10 and a whole lot of papers and essays it's a part of my philosophy that i never tried to substantiate with reason and evidence because i know it's impossible and the moment you try to do that you are already wrong what you'll be saying will already be wrong from the get-go the rest of my philosophy is largely deductive but you are correct that it's anchored on personal experience as well but not the particular personal experience i was talking about in the restaurant when i when i understood why some people say nothing is going on there is nothing when i understood why they are saying that i know that saying that is wrong it's literally wrong to say that there is nothing and nothing is going on but i understand why these were the words they chose i understand that particular experience in the restaurant does not inform the rest of my philosophy because it is impossible to construct the philosophy around it because that would be trying to serve the fish for dinner the fish that disappears once you pull it out of the water you know what i mean yeah so my philosophy is partly out of a first person experience but not that particular one it's just an experiential relation with the world as experiential in nature so i live my philosophy and in that sense it's not only conceptual for me i live i live in a world that is experiential in nature that's my life yes yes but it is still a philosophy play playing a chord according played according to the rules of the chess game i just hope to win the chess game to play better moves but i'm obeying the rules of the game and the rules of the game are the post enlightenment rules internal logical consistency coherency empirical adequacy conceptual parsimony and explanatory power so i used to play by those rules but i don't think those rules are absolute yeah i just love you for your passion um is it really true that your philosophy is deductive it seems to me that it's actually more inferential that if you really really get to the core of it it's based off of first person perspective experience and you have inferred certain positions based off of that so it seems more inferential than deductive am i wrong what am i missing every theory of nature every ontology every metaphysics is inferential unless you are a solipsist a solipsist is the one who believes that only his own life exists that life is his own private dream and nobody else is conscious the other people exist only as images in his own dream that's solipsism so that's the ultimate skeptical philosophy in the sense that you infer nothing but your own experiences which are not inferential because you have them anything that is not solipsism so materialism dualism pen psychism idealism in all their myriad variations they are all pair force inferential because we are inferring something that exists beyond our private experiences of the world because we are not solipsists so in that sense you're correct but in the argument for our respective positions we take deductive steps for instance a step of saying if i can explain everything without postulating the ontological category we call matter then based on the principle of parsimony i should not make that postulate because it's conceptually inflationary therefore are deduced from this that matter does not exist so the argument is involves deduction although the theory is eminently inferential that's so interesting you're talking about a priori a priori an approach of a priori right is that what it's called deduction operates according to a priori rules yeah that are not themselves uh provable they're just taken for granted as being self-evident for instance if a is identical to b and b is identical to c then a of course is identical to c that's the distributive principle and and it's considered to be self-evident or if a is false then it cannot be true and if a is true then it's not false moreover if i know that a is not false then it must be true or if i know that a is certainly not true then it has to be false that's the law of excluded middle in aristotelian logic another axiom none of these axioms can be proven they are they sound self-evident to us they require no substantiation no proof no explanation we just immediately think this is self-evidence it cannot be any different so aristotelian logic is based on like five of these axioms and we know that if you look deeper you can undermine each and every one of them because you cannot use logic to prove the validity of logic without begging the question without arguing in circularity so for instance there are alternative logics like intuitionism that reject the law of excluded middle to prove that something cannot be false does not mean that it's necessarily true under intuitionism and you may think i agree with that but most people would say this is absurd if it's not false then it can only be true well according to intuitionism not so every step of deduction is based on one of a set of x axiomatic rules of derivation in other words it's based on certain things that you take for granted without criticism yes and i call them the rules of the game we are playing so you see now now it all comes together yeah we are playing a game based on certain rules those rules are arbitrary we just think they are self-evident but that's what monkeys on planet earth think it doesn't mean that it's true it's what monkeys think you know it's the way monkeys put together their cognition so i accept those as a given because those are the rules of the post-enlightenment culture in which i live and my point is even if i accept those rules i can play the game better and if i play the game better it leads me to better conclusions than materialism far better but i am still very cognizant that the rules of the game are arbitrary yeah there is something that underlies the rules of the game see to me that is that that just seems so obvious that the intellectual way that we approach life is simply one set of spectacles or one or one it's a dashboard as you like to say it just seems abundantly obvious to me uh if if you had go ahead no if you have any sense at all of awe and mystery that there's something mysterious about life and consciousness it appears natural to conclude that these loss of logic and so on they're just one dimension this is what you know because of the life you live you're a therapist you're dealing every day with the scary mystery of the human psyche which is a window into a transpersonal psyche so you deal with this nuances subtleties these mysteries and uncertainties every day this this lack of absolute references this lack of absolute rules the psyche doesn't really unfold according to absolute rules it's it's always it's always fluidic um it is always reconfiguring itself it's always deceiving itself uh even when this is your daily experience and it's the daily experience of a whole lot of other people but the people who set the tone of the mainstream narrative do not have this life these are people who who there are largely nerds uh in the sense that they overvalue one psychic function to the expense of all other psychic functions and they say oh only the rational intellect is reliable intuition is not feeling is not perceptual awareness is not you know so it's the rules of the game they play because of their particular psychic configuration the problem is they are dominant and these are the people we listen to they are the spokespeople of science they are even modern analytic philosophers who almost 100 percent adopt this limited perspective they have set the rules of the game and the rules of the game are the rules that they are most comfortable with because of their particular psychic dispositions strengths and weaknesses they have become influential in the sense that they have because of the success of technology the people who produce science science who are the people who are focused on this particular psychic function this particular mental function they have they have been elevated to the people who tell us what's true and what's not because of the overwhelming success of technology and by the way technology is developed by engineers who are a little bit more flexible engineers are kind that doesn't care what's true or what's not they only care about what what works and what doesn't work if it works the underlying theory about it whether it's true or not they don't hear darn i know they don't even them about it but they are still nerdish in the sense that they feel most comfortable most safe against their own shadow and their own primitive impulses as freud put it if they framed the whole game according to the rules of logic and the rational intellect and they have set the tone of the culture so now because the game is so biased because these are the kinds of people who set the narrative and define the rules it's so biased by them that if you want to change the outcome if you want to change the conclusion you have to play by their rules of the game because they have succeeded in delegitimizing everything else they have succeeded in convincing everybody that intuition is totally unreliable it's flaky it's hand waving woo woo it's no how do you trust your intuition you know how can you do that um spiritual insight is completely unreliable because if you translate into logic it makes no sense so it's nonsense forget about all that so because consensual romanticism is seen as romanticism that's right exactly exactly so all that nuance all of those other mental faculties that nature has imbued us with are now neglected because the game is biased so what i do and i've been very open about it to anyone who cares to ask like you did i just bite a bullet and i i realize okay that's the rule of the game i can either fight the battle according to the rules of the game or i can try to fight to change the rules of the game now people have been doing the latter trying to fight to change the rules of the game for a couple of centuries to no avail the hippies tried it they failed the new thought movement tried it failed a new advice is trying and is failing anybody who has tried in the west to fight the rules of the game as opposed to winning the game has failed so i figured i'll give it a try to fight in the game according to the rules of the game and i'll use the weapons of the opposition and let's see who plays the game better that that's basically what i'm doing i love it change the system from within the system not because i think it's great but because i think it's it's the only alternative that hasn't been explored yet i mean the whole of essentia foundation which i'm leading the whole game of essentia foundation is exactly this is to say you know what we are not going to even dispute the rules of the game we would we take it for granted we are not endorsing it but we are accepting to play according to it regularly rigorously and strictly with no concession to anything beyond the rules yeah and let's see if if we play ourselves according to the rules of the game let's see who checkmates the other so that's what that's what we are trying to do because it i don't think it has been tried in a consequent way before people have tried before to use logic reason and evidence as well but always mixed in with spiritual insight so you always get something that's neither rational nor spiritual because you know true spirituality transcends logic so much that it's incompatible with rationality and peter kingsley has wrote boo has written book after book making this this case very compellingly that you cannot reconcile spiritual truth with reason or it's impossible to do that and the other way around doesn't work either you cannot hope to close a rational argument if in one of the crucial steps you insert spiritual insight yeah it violates the entire derivation if you know the entire argument is broken by doing that because you're mixing the rules of different games so that's what we are doing but in doing this in accepting the rules in accepting to play according to the rules it doesn't mean that we are endorsing the rules i don't endorse the rules i don't i think these are rules that have been invented by nerds who happen to have become successful on the back of technology that success is based on an illegitimate logical bridge the idea that what works reveals profound insight about what is it does no such a thing what works is totally unrelated to what is you know there are many easiness that are compatible with how things work uh but because of this fallacious logical bridge these nerds now set the tone to our culture and i thought i'll play like a nerd let's see if i can be a better nerd i love it i don't endorse the rules i love it i love it so i'll presume some common ground around the idea that it's possible when we philosophize and and think about all these matters that we can become more and more divorced from our instinctual life our carnal life our our heart of hearts that that is a risk inherent in the act of philosophizing and thinking about the truth right can you say something about your views on how to best mitigate that danger in other words how do we engage in philosophy or philosophizing how do we reflect on the truth and try to get at the truth in a way that doesn't it isn't harmful to our mental health um the philosophy you are alluding to which has this risk fulon is what we call analytic philosophy which is a philosophy that has existed for a little over a century it's begun with whitehead hat with bertrand russell in the early 20th century arguably with the early wittgenstein and what they realized was that philosophy as it had been done up until that moment which today we call continental philosophy that philosophy suffered from conceptual ambiguity so when nietzsche talked about the ubermensch there is nowhere in nature where you can read the precise definition of what he means by that word he's basically appealing to one's intuition the problem is that it becomes vague and people can interpret it in completely different way as it actually happened nietzsche has been interpreted in myriad different ways including by the nazis in ways that were completely unfair but he left that door open because of his conceptual ambiguity and analytic philosophy was created in the anglo-saxon schools so england united states in order to combat conceptual ambiguity so they figured that they would do philosophy in a different way by being very precise about what they meant with each word the pro so an honorable goal the problem is that it became very quickly translated into uh detached conceptual narratives philosophy lost its connection connection with our true being with our heart of hearts with our felt relationship to ourselves and the world it became a game of thoughts conceptual thoughts in our heads which which is in indirect at best it became disconnected from direct experience it became purely conceptual it became spiritual in a psychological sense and it sublimated our our being the the integrity and and the holistic nature of our being in the name of abstraction and that happened not only to philosophy it happened to science science today is a game of pure abstraction foundations of physics there are a few people combating that sabine hosenfelder is one that is playing is fighting and very honorable but probably losing fights trying to bring philips physics back to reality as opposed to a game of pure abstraction as cosmology and foundations of physics are are becoming today so this isn't a psychological affliction that humanity is undergoing as a whole um throughout the 20th and now into the 21st century it's fairly recent in historical terms but it affects philosophy and affects science as well we are losing our connection to the ground of reality and we are going all the way into pure abstraction so in that sense philosophy is dangerous science too is dangerous for exactly saying exactly the same reason but the philosophy you are talking about here is that analytic philosophy because before that philosophy was a thing of the heart nietzsche wrote he poured his heart out there is a quote from nietzsche in which he says exactly that that philosophizing is is taking everything we have of passion of will of suffering of hope all of that and burning it in the fire of our philosophy so he is linking philosophy directly to to to to our whole being kikigaar kikigar closer to us right kikigor um or tierkegaard as the english say or the dutch kierke heart that guy wrote from his heart even though he wrote conceptually i mean he has a famous paragraph in which it tries to describe what the self is and he goes for sentence after sentence saying the self is a relation between the self and itself but it's not just a relation it's a relation of the relations of this and it's ludicrous what he's doing um um but behind that conceptual ludicrous ludicrousness which he did on purpose because of his indirect communication he was basically criticizing somebody else indirectly by writing that torturous way he was probably criticizing hegel by writing in that way the kicker guard he had multiple layers of meaning he was a genius in that sense he he always wrote from his heart here's a guy who did not marry the love of his heart who wanted to marry him was in love with him and he didn't marry her because he thought it would prevent prevent him from doing true philosophy out of his heart oh my god because he thought it would shut the valve of his heart he thought it would bring contentment to his life he thought he would retire and become a priest in some chapel in in in newton uh in juteland depending on whose pronunciation you get you know from the other side of denmark denmark from you guys the sandy side where there are only dunes and sheep he thought that's where he would end up with his beloved wife and he would preach the sunday sermon and live a life of contentment and he thought he wouldn't be able to do philosophy because philosophy poured out from the heart therefore he could not be content so he he he was crucified by danish society because he basically forced the girl to accept to break the engagement by acting like an ass he started acting like an ass in order for her to not regret breaking engagement with him and we know that because in his diaries he he wrote how much he was suffering from from doing that he was doing that for her because he thought if he would just break the engagement it would break her heart so what he did was he painted himself as a complete ass such that she would want to break the engagement with him so she wouldn't suffer but he did and we know that because of his diaries he was a prolific writer in his diaries so that was philosophy that is anything but conceptual and abstract plato no no let's go beyond plato let's go to parmenides and pedocles that's philosophy pouring out of the heart that was this guy's way of relating to the world the legend says that parmenides jumped inside mount aetna the volcano to prove that he was an eternal being so that was not abstraction you know what i mean where his mouth is yeah yeah so if you want to know how to do philosophy in such a way that we don't go into spiritual realms of pure abstraction we just have to do philosophy as it was done originally we have to go back to true philosophy and the creek the key criteria the the key defining characteristic of that is what again that it's not an abstract thing philosophy is a wording of the way you relate to yourself and the world nothing could be more present nothing could do more justice to to our heart of hearts nietzsche wrote only from his heart of hearts conceptually he contradicted himself all over the place even schopenhauer who was a very rational philosopher he is writing from his heart that's why he he he writes badly against women because his mother abused him his mother mistreated him so he you know even when he didn't want to he was writing from his heart and that's how philosophy was always done the the most level-headed philosopher of the through classical times i think was the spinoza who suffered a whole lot as well but he managed to despite all that remain level-headed and right philosophy like euclides wrote his book on geometry in terms of theorems and proofs and axioms and all that uh and and corollaries uh but even him even him despite all that formalism that sounds so it looks so abstract if you dig one level deeper the man is writing from his heart he's pouring his heart out he was a lonely man who was excommunicated by his faith the jewish faith and had to live a life of solitude grinding lenses in the attic of someone else's house where he rented a room and he died there in his forties because of inhaling particles of glass that gave him consumption which was a catch-all term in those times for anything that affects your lungs including tuberculosis so these guys they lived their philosophy they embodied their philosophy philosophy that's not embodied is a 100 year old abnormality a an aberration in the history of philosophy yeah but because we live in this time in our reference are these 100 years we think that that's how philosophy is no it's an aberrat analytic philosophy started with very good motivations very good goals but it became an aberration today it's an aberration it's a hardly philosophy because it's so completely abstract i tell you this uh johannes and and i will say that to anyone who wants to hear this in public or otherwise most analytic philosophers of mind today have not a clue what mind is they don't have a clue what it is they have zero introspective power well not all of them but many of them have hardly any power of introspection to have a clue of the subject of their study yet they are writing theses and books on mind when they don't have the faintest idea what mind actually is that's why you have whole schools of analytic philosophy saying today with a straight face that mind doesn't exist that it's an illusion an illusion of what of mind well then it does exist right no no no they say it doesn't exist so people with phds with tenure in top universities telling the world with a straight face that mind does not exist this is how distorted how an aberration philosophy has become because of abstraction but again that's not true philosophy that's not the philosophy of the 2400 years before the past century wow that is a helpful perspective and i it drives me bananas too people denying mine and talking about it but they're not actually there's no experiential component and they're absolutely dissociated uh it's pathological they should be talking to you but because of the nature of their pathology they will not even recognize that it exists and therefore they will not come to you until life hits them in the face with a train agree then their defenses will be brought down then they will become fragilized and then they may give you a call yeah and in a certain way i hope it happens to them in a way that is not doesn't cause permanent damage yeah yeah i agree when you spoke about kierkegaard i i i had the thought that what he did there was either incredibly admirable or and or some something also self-punitive of a self-punitive nature huh i was not uh it was not my intent to pass judgment on uh kierkegaard's philosophy so i didn't mean to say that it was good or bad proper or improper i know wrong yeah my intent was to say it came from it poured out of his heart yes yes obviously obviously but think about giving up the love of your life i mean either that's incredibly admirable or there's something self-flagellating about it as well huh and it's he's not alone nietzsche did the same yeah for the same reasons well more or less because in the case of nietzsche he was ready to marry his sweetheart but she rejected him and arguably we would have today no eternal return no uber mensch if salome hadn't rejected nietzsche wow none of that would have come to to pass because all of that came out of his broken heart wow wow bernard what do you say to my fiancee who who would say you guys you're just so why why not just you know enjoy the music and eat your sandwich and enjoy it and just have a good time and why why bother thinking so deeply about these things you too what would you say to her my fiance my latin fiance this is how nature wants to express itself through her and that's valid the error is the induction to say that everybody should live like they feel they have to live so for them nature wants to experience immediacy relationships warmth and beauty that's a very southern european tone you know the southern european love for beauty is notorious as notorious as the northern european love for truth and and and and plato said they are the same right it is truth that's plato right there now and people say and the rest of philosophy is a footnote to plato so at least this is indeed right there beauty and truth and and those have different forms of expression i certainly have an appreciation for beauty but my my spirit if i use the word metaphorically is definitely a northern european spirit uh and i'm much more oriented towards truth yeah beauty for me is is my off time yeah but for people with a different disposition which i think is equally valid to ours uh truth is the off time you know beauty is life life is guilty and i don't think that's wrong no it's just another facet yes yes it's i'm so fascinated by this bernardo we've touched on a little bit of sociology which really lit me up it was it tickled me um and if my following question is too personal i completely understand that you can just reject it but but i i find myself curious about your politics um you mentioned you know you mentioned you made a reference to trump and you were like don't make any assumptions about me and so yeah this is my curiosity but if it's too personal i completely understand no look i i don't if i acknowledge a label of libero then i would immediately acknowledge the label of conservatism or i would reject both but i my politics is and that's what that's my beef against the political wisdom of these days everything has to be classified according to some labor everything has to go into one drawer as if our problems were so simple that we could categorize the solutions into two sides i am afraid that that's not even remotely plausible or realistic our problems are way too complex for us to classify approaches to the solution in terms of this or that these verses that i think if one is thoughtful one is either both liberal and conservative or neither i prefer neither but a lot of people would see me issuing certain opinions or reasoning in a certain way if they are close to me my personal life and they would say bernard is a conservatist and a whole lot of people would see me acting in a different context or speaking about other things and they would say bernardo is a complete liberal he's out there sticking his neck out for the rights of the lgbt community how do you call somebody like that he's a liberal yeah but bernardo is also a union and a union honors those archetypal templates that have governed human life since time immemorial so bernardo is a conservative i i like that you're not a post-modernist i find that so refreshing i certainly am not a post-modern relativist no i think our lives are grounded in nature and i don't think nature has changed appreciably in the few thousands of years of human history and i think we have solid grounds to stand on yes so my politics is one that would be unrecognizable if described in only a few words you could only have an idea of my politics if you would have a whole set of examples of what my positions are on different issues only then you could begin to have a smell of my politics it's not something i can convey like in a chorale into a simple statement based on labels and i think and maybe even arrogant i think it's a great error to try to classify things into well-known categories in politics because it makes us thoughtless it hides all the nuance subtlety and complexities of the problems we face from us and we literally become innocent and stupid and then jim hillman james hillman the great psychologist you know who died 10 years ago he used to talk of the american love for innocence and he used america an example because he was american so he would only talk about his country but that's love for innocence is more widespread than than we admit to ourselves it does not restrict itself to america and it's the idea that it's good to think simplistically it's good to think in absolute categories like there are good people and there are bad people and the good people are only good and the bad people are only bad but that's how a child thinks once you mature and you have experience you realize that there are many more nuances to this things are not always that clear there is a lot more complexity but we have elevated this love of innocence to the level of a social value it's good to be an innocent adult to be an adult with two things in terms of good people only good and bad people only bad and it's the good versus the bad so there's 65 year old thinking like that would hey to you you're on the right path i mean this is ridiculous this is like a total denial of maturity it's not okay to be immature it's not okay it's inevitable as a phase of life but it's not okay to fall in love with immaturity and elevate that to a value and that's what we're doing so i completely agree with what everything you just said there and but i see another impulse in europe that i see as not maybe not equally dangerous but also problematic and that is the inability to take a stand for something that you always see both sides of everything that you can't just slam your fist in the table sometimes and say god damn it i'm not okay with this and that that's a huge problem yeah it's a lack of spine yeah and then you know this there is there's the scent of what you just said is in um post-modernism uh um in relativism the idea that uh you know nothing nothing is absolute that's the other side of the coin to think only in terms of absolutes is as bad as to say nothing is absolute we stand on no ground everything is relative so and then you quickly go into total moral relativism yeah you quickly go into having no ontology nothing's true and from there it's a very quick slippery slippery slope towards uh nihilism towards meaninglessness because if nothing's absolute if everything is relative if everything is made up by ourselves like post-structuralism everything is made up by ourselves and you're correct in associating this with streams of european thought particularly french and not to discriminate the french it was just louder on that part of european culture i think it's an equal danger it's the other side of the coin yes not to mention that to say that everything is relative is an absolute claim there's no consistency at all there um okay this makes sense so you're right that the only way to have any more clarity is to be issue specific do you have any concerns at all about the about the authoritarian impulse that we're seeing more and more in the world uh in terms of um a corrosive force when it comes to democracy look most philosophers throughout history will tell you that democracy is a very problematic way of government it has fatal weaknesses but most of them will immediately russians say but we do not know anyone that's better we do not know a better way of government because the alternatives have been tested and although some have worked for quite a while ultimately they have all proven catastrophic and the the democracy experiment is an ongoing experiment it has been tried in greece in at well in greece in athens in attica one province of greece and it had a disastrous end athens was governed by a democracy during the 30-year long war against sparta which the athenians lost and and that was probably because of their form of government which was a democracy well democracy between quotes because more than half the population of attica was made of slaves and those didn't vote and women didn't vote either so democracy democracy between quotes but the inefficiencies of democracy arguably led to the loss of athens in the war against sparta which was not a democracy it was an aristocratic uh society a war a warrior society so the ex we had that experiment very early on two and a half thousand years ago it failed now we are trying that experiment again uh it's as owed as a french resolution in the american independence so it's as old as the late 18th century and that means it's a little more than 200 years old now 240 maybe 50 years old it's it's a kid it didn't doesn't even the mark yet it's it's trying its first steps it has been very iffy and shaky so far but so far the experiment is still promising there is no utter failure of the democratic experiment the final result the jury is still out we will see china is posing uh a serious threat to it which may be a legitimate threat uh in the sense that you know history will tell what what will have worked uh best um now what's happening recently with populist movements and the re-emergent re-emergence of the confident authoritarian leader um it's happening in russia i think if you ask most russians they will say well let it continue because our lives are much better than they were during uh the pseudo-democracy of of um his name escapes me now the previous president the boris yeltsin gorbachev oh oh okay yeltsin yeah um and then it was a drama and that was complete catastrophe for russians at the time of yeltsin and their lives went to hell very quickly um why is this happening again now i think it's because you know it's part of our collective shadow that has always been there it has never gone away it's it's it rears its ugly head up from time to time it has done that with the nazis with the fascists of italy the nazis in germany um even in places you wouldn't expect this has happened you know i'm dutch just the other day i watched the dutch movie about how the dutch reacted to the independence movement of indonesia just after the second world war and uh and it was a bloodbath uh you know what the dutch did in indonesia it's something to be ashamed of as much as the germans have something to feel ashamed of um singling out the germans i think is a profound historical injustice you know you don't even need to look at history just look at that time the early 20th century i mean stalin killed more russians in russia than hitler killed jews in the entirety of europe wow but nobody speaks of that people talk about the nazis not stalinism um 20 million russians probably were killed in the gulags and you know sent to siberia to never been seen by family and friends again wow so this this is a perennial thing in in the collective human psyche jung spoke at length of this the danger of the mass mind because when you think in terms of the mass mind you lose that policing role that the ego can play your consciousness can play uh you become purely instinctive again and then you are vulnerable to those dark instincts that manifest themselves through collective thinking mob mob mentality so these people today they are just playing on those forces i think that are part of who we who we are and they are always there and they can be tapped on when convenient or when the circumstances allow and right now the circumstances allow because we have realized how much duped we used to be before social media before the internet the way entire peoples would think the tone of that thinking would be set by the editorial rooms of the major news organizations and the eight o'clock news would tell you how to think about the world who the bad guy was what the good political move would be what was fair what was unfair what had to be done what couldn't be done we were told that by the by mainstream media and we accepted that just as you know a fact of reality they are telling us the truth about it um and everything was harmonious because there was no conflict the tone was being set by those organizations and only rebel movements niche rebel movements would define that like the hippies uh try to defy that like uh punk and new waves uh tried to defy that later on in the early 80s but they were considered niche and in only periphery of society but now we realize that the issues back then were much more nuanced than they seemed to be based on what the media communicated to us and we realized that we were maneuvered in certain directions and this realization is true that's the part that hurts the most it is true we have been manipulated all the way along and now because we are angry about that and we don't want to be manipulated anymore now we swing all the way to the other side and we become vulnerable as praise to the populist people who will be doing more manipulation yet they are doing worse than the mainstream media did but they present themselves as the alternative to that so they are preying on a valid insight that we have had collectively as a culture it's a valid insight that we have been manipulated left and right it is true we were the issues were much more complex much more nuanced than they were portrayed to us and we bought into that lie we bought into that perspective we thought soviets ate little babies i heard that as a kid i heard that as a kid the soviets are bad people because they eat little children well i happen to have been married to a russian for over 15 years and i know they have a lot more in common to us than we would ever there think back in the 80s so we had a valid insight that i think unscrupulous characters who are driven by a narcissistic search for power are now preying on to do the same ten times worse to us because we are in a moment of vulnerability i agree i agree with you and part of what makes us so vulnerable isn't it it's this innocent project to seeing the world in black and white terms like i'm good innocent that makes us so vulnerable to manipulation because it kills thoughtfulness yes it does it kills thoughtfulness if you kill thoughtfulness in yourself you are a prime target for manipulation for somebody who would say you have been deceived so far let me tell you the real truth actually that real truth is ten times the deception but we are vulnerable that's right and the bad is out there it's the immigrants or whatever it's not inside of me it's up here the other guys yeah it's the other guys would you would you rather live in a society where everyone pitches into the common good through taxation or or do you prefer do you prefer more of a um uh libertarian type society where everyone tries to pull their own weight i live in a country where i am taxed for more than half my salary at the source so i don't even get to see more than half my salary in my bank account and then i am taxed left and right 20 on everything i buy i'm taxed 1.25 a year on my savings even if i don't make a penny on them i am taxed for the right to rent my house and make a profit out of it even though i live in my house and therefore i don't rent it and i don't make a profit out of it i'm still taxed on the profits i could have made if i rented my house that's the country where i live in and i will tell you i think taxation is unavoidable if we are to live in a decent compassionate society well yes but it sounds like it's a little overboard in your country overkill no i will go out there and say in my country it's not because i see that money coming back in how my street is maintained the facilities that are available to me the conveniences i have the health care system that that secures my safety i pay health insurance many times more than a very poor person would pay although the poor person pays to but i land in the same hospital the poor person would lend because there is no differentiation in the netherlands we've made a decision in the netherlands prior to my birth that when it comes to health care making any differentiation is opening the door for allowing a certain type of person to die and we figured that is completely unacceptable and the only way to preclude this from ever happening is to make sure that there is never differentiation because then the people with power and money will make sure that the health system that they are depending on never mind the poor guys depend on the same health system but the powerful and rich people who make sure that that health system is good enough for them therefore it will be good enough for everybody or if it's not good enough for everybody then it's not good enough for anyone because it's the same for everyone and and that is done also on the basis of indirect taxation i pay a lot more for private health insurance than a poor people pays for private health insurance we are obliged by law to have health insurance if you don't have money to have private health insurance the government will give you the money for you to pay for your private health insurance and then you have to pay taxes on the money you got from the government to the government in other words everything works as if you made your own money even if the government is giving you money and that the idea is you're responsible for it so although we are giving you money you have to pay taxes to us on the money we are giving you as if it were a salary paid by a company i think that adds up that adds up it works for us uh now the netherlands is a country of 17 million people uh a country with basically five cities three of which are merging together and becoming one yeah so yeah three cities then yeah and it's completely flat um and it has a long history in which dutch people had to unite to save their lives from the sea to save their lives from the germans uh you know we have a long history of having to cooperate at the broadest collective level in order to not die because you know half the country is two or three meters below sea level if tomorrow everybody stops maintaining the pumps that keep the land dry half the country is underwater and more than half the people so it works for us given these sets of circumstances but in a continental country like the us with so much variability in values in culture in origin in history very little history compared to europe it may be a difficult thing to do i recognize that so i'm not going to sit here and say the whole world should be like the dutch because i know it's not realistic the whole world has to find their own solutions which fit for their own local circumstances but i'm happy with the dutch solution i pay taxes well i'm not saying that i am never unhappy there are moments that i think i think like darn it's too much you know you know i get knifed left and right you know um but in general i'm happy for it i would go as far as to say that a universal income is a good thing to do and i think the netherlands should do that because it would pay back to us people who are working it would pay back it would stimulate creativity it would stimulate the blossoming of society to a level that is unthinkable under strict capitalist terms because we all have to earn and leaving even for the basics if some of us would say you know i don't want to sacrifice my diamond my my own natural feeling about how i want to contribute to the world what what what nature wants to express through me which may not earn me a living but that's what nature wants to do if i can accept the basic level of living now in the most basic flat one room apartment and healthy food but nothing luxurious and good hospitals if i can accept that then i will want to express the creativity that wants to come through me into the world i think that would be a valid thing to do i think we would see a blossoming of creativity of entrepreneurial spirit and i personally would be willing to pay for that so if i've understood you bernardo you you seem to say that you want to be in a society where people pitch in for the common good or i mean depending on the the country itself uh it varies if it's a bigger country but generally that as you're good with that and at the same time you see room for for rewarding hard work and and absolutely of course i think that's one of the good things of capitalism i think we may have overdone that i think it's immoral for any one human being to have over a billion dollars i mean it doesn't matter how much value you think you have created it cannot justify such an amount of concentration i don't think that is justifiable so we've gone too far with the mega billionaires i think so something in the system would benefit from a correction that's my own personal opinion because you cannot possibly spend a billion dollars let alone 100 billion dollars on yourself so uh this is no longer rewarding to you it's beyond the the pale of personal rewarding for for the value you created what this now means is a concentration of power so we are no longer talking about rewarding hard work or creativity we are talking now about concentrating power and that i think is was not the spirit of the thing the spirit of the thing was to reward you personally for the value you helped create yeah but you know no human being can spend the building don't tell me that a human being can actually spend and benefit from 100 billion dollars i mean you have to live in many many houses at the same time and ride many many yachts at the same time i mean and and i don't know have many many wives at the same time there are many things that have to happen have to happen at the same time for you to be able to interpret that as personal reward for the value you created so now we get into the realm of concentration of power and i think that defies the spirit of this point of capitalism so i think a correction a correction would be would be appropriate at this point i'm struggling to see your conservatism i don't i can't see it everything that you would call conservative in jung you could say the same about me i think we are driven by archetypal patterns of behavior i think religion is not insanity i think it's an expression of something that we are rooted into i think we need a religious life i think worship is a fantastic thing i think liturgy is important i think um institutional support for religion is important um i don't think that i am spiritual but not religious is a sustainable attitude um it it's too lonesome it religion comes from the latin really to reconnect and you cannot reconnect if you're alone some spiritual but non-religious person where is your sense of community i think religion is a valid binding mechanism for a community i mean it doesn't get much more conservative yeah you're right yeah right now this is what i'm saying yeah i think there is something to say about traditional values yes there's something to say about hard work there is something to say about building a legacy in life there is something to say about family there is something to say about community yeah uh if you go to big cities today and i'm i'm an urbanite because of my history but uh and i still live in a more or less urban region uh in the netherlands i mean actually i live in a very urban region if you look at the photograph of europe at night the most lit up part i'm being in the middle of that triangle but there are still people who live according to the old ways only like five kilometers from from where i am you have this in europe now these old villages that have people have been living there in that way for hundreds of years and although they have a new vocabulary today and they they ride tractors instead of instead of horses they're they're the glasses through which they see the world is are still the old glasses if you know what i mean uh i i i i like to go to a to a place uh in a village i think eight kilometers from where i am where they brew beer and they have been brewing beer there for 800 years that beer and the vats are new because you know metal corrodes but the room is not it's the same place you know it's the same bricks on the wall and it's the same recipe and and that sense of community according which lives according to the old values i think we miss that terribly we do not have that in urban regions we have completely lost our sense of sense of community and we are trying to replace that with social media which isn't a replacement it isn't human it has its value but it it's not fully human um and i love to spend time in these villages where people speak you know oh the dutch still that sometimes even have a hard time understanding what they're trying to say they're just a couple of kilometers here down the road and they read speak differently and the way they relate to nature um the way they uh is the dutch word i think in english the translation would be the way they put things in perspective they put everything in a broader perspective if if the farmer if the corn is halfway grown and then there is a hail storm and destroys his corn crop he if he were an urbanite he would go in despair and and start taking uh antidepressants but they don't they relativize they put it in perspective you know they realize that they are parts of a much bigger thing going on and there there is a sort of mute wisdom to that a a calm way of relating and and that calmness i think arises from the fact that these people are not uprooted they they are living they they are in some way aware that they are the continuity of a way of life and a philosophy of life that has been going on for hundreds of years they are the tip of the spear formed by all their ancestors and the ancestors of their ancestors and in that sense they are small but very important because they are one in a long chain in which something has been conserved something of deep meaning has been conserved a certain attitude towards the word the world this is conservatism yeah yes really the real the real essence of it yeah not the joke i think we miss that i think pure liberals are blind to this they don't see this yes i i agree with you i went i went to college at a place where to mention uh femininity and masculinity as different things uh you would be crucified for that seriously so that's a liberal school yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that that goes way too far i mean nature has masculinity and femininity these aspects exist now it's fair to say that a male doesn't necessarily have to express only masculine traits and no feminine traits no nobody said that it's not etched in stone the whole of nature is telling us that every individual has a bit of both yes one is more dominant but every individual has a bit of both but to deny that there is a difference between the two is it's insane it is just to say it's a pure social construct i mean it's ridiculous ridiculous yeah so i'm with you that a certain brand of uh liberalism just goes far too far here they call it woke wokeness it's this because you awoke yeah you're you're you see the social injustices and oh there are plenty of dogs indeed there are but the question is what's most helpful in addressing them do we want to demonize white people for being white and males for being males is that that's awesome is that going to rectify the social injustices or is that going to bring us together yeah yeah that's uh okay you see that's why i would never accept the label liberal or the labor conservative because then i know what i will be associated with on the other end of the scale as well far from that i'm not i don't want to touch that with a 10-foot pole either i'm with you

Channel: Johannes Kieding

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Length: 218min 38sec (13118 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021