Daniel Schmachtenberger – Developing a Deeper Understanding of Life

When someone shows disinterested care for people they will never meet and will never give them credit, it requires developmental work—a sense of expanded identity where one sees through others' eyes and recognizes their equal reality and importance, which doesn't emerge naturally but must be cultivated.

“people being motivated to care about people and animals and life forms that they will never meet and will never give them credit I could take some work it takes some developmental work to get there enough that you'll make real sacrifices to care where you don't get any obvious credit for that”

An average teacher of any subject (math, history, etc.) is themselves not an excellent practitioner of that subject, and therefore cannot convey the passion, insight, and depth of thinking that comes from engaging with the subject at the highest level, limiting the quality of learning that is possible.

“your average first grade or 12th grade math teacher at a high school is not a first-rate mathematician they're not even a second or third rate mathematician the the Brilliance of mathematical thinking the love of it the Insight the passion they don't have it they have something else right they study to be an educator they studied in a country that couldn't pay you all that much to be an educator so they aren't even a first-rate educator so can you learn how to think like a first-rate mathematician from a normal math teacher who is themselves someone who has never even had salt like that probably not”

Technology is not values-neutral; technologies change the nature of mind and psychology individually and collectively, the nature of culture, and what social systems emerge, in ways that are subtle and not obvious, as shown in the work of theorists like Marvin Harris and Marshall McLuhan.

“we wrote a paper um in the consilience project called why technology is not values neutral...showing just a brief overview of the work of Marvin Harris and um and Marshall mcluhan and uh so many people and theory of Technology of how Technologies change the nature of mind and psychology individually and collectively the nature of culture”

Pre-industrial education and non-Western education systems had different structures that naturally produced integrated thinking rather than compartmentalized thinking, suggesting that compartmentalized education is not a universal human educational approach but a specific invention of modern schooling.

“I don't think it is actually necessary that people learn that way I think it's not even the case in say um pre-industrialized education it was just wasn't even the case in the same way um”

Developmental theorists have documented that people develop greater capacity to process complexity, notice context changes, shift perspectives, and integrate perspectives, and these are real and important developmental progressions, though some critics argue that these measures reflect societal training rather than universal human developmental potential.

“I have friends who are developmental theorists uh who [Zach Stein] who I work with closely and many others who we'll talk about how there's an increase in the type of um complexity of what someone can process the way they notice changes in context for processing the same content the way they can seek and shift perspectives and then integrate them...there have other friends who are critics of Developmental Theory because they say there's a lot of societal normative assumptions based on how people are kind of ubiquitously trained”

Real mentorship and deep learning happen through one-on-one relationships with skilled practitioners who care about the student as a whole person, not merely as a passive recipient of information, and this type of transmission cannot be easily scaled or replaced by institutional education.

“whenever I found a teacher that seemed like they knew something I really wanted to learn I figured out what I could possibly do to be useful to them and that looked like cleaning their house and changing babies diapers and learning skills I didn't have they needed electrical done I would learn electrical so it's like whatever the it is this is who I want to study from so I'm going to figure out how to be around them and be useful to them and so much of my learning was not what I studied in University that was cool or even just in books on my own it was people who were really really brilliant spending time with me directly”

The quality of one's early childhood education—whether it is designed around curiosity-following (constructivist) or curriculum-driven (compartmentalized)—shapes not just knowledge but the very structure of how one's mind processes complexity and integrates domains, with profound lifelong effects on capacity for systems thinking.

“the sense was rather than have a curriculum based thing have some sense of trust the kids innate Curiosities if facilitated will Orient them in the right direction so it's kind of constructivist”

The traditional religious framework where actions are observed by an omniscient deity has a positive social function (moral constraint) even among people whose motivation is not truly virtuous, because it requires virtue at the level of thought and intention, not just external behavior.

“even if you're really just a who just doesn't want to get punished and wants to get a reward you still have to be good all the way down to the level of your thoughts that's kind of awesome right like from the point of view of just how do you get a lot of people who might still be narcissists in a low degree of truly ethical development to do the right thing that kind of like Sky God judicial system is kind of Awesome”

A quote from Gibran captures a key insight: 'It is in meditation upon the dewdrop that I discovered the mysteries of the ocean'—this points to the fractal nature of reality where a deep understanding of any part gives insight into the whole.

“when jibron said it's in it was in meditation upon the dewdrop that I discovered the mysteries of the ocean right the kind of poetic way to speak to the the fractal nature or the as without”

We are not in a phase where we can avoid catastrophic harm; we are already in the great harm phase with species extinction and wars ongoing, and the question is not whether catastrophes will happen but whether we can make it through without total extinction or complete ecological collapse.

“we're already in that right now...the answer can we make it through without catastrophes where hundreds of millions of people die is one question do I think we can make it through where there are any humans left I think we may get through where there are humans in something that isn't just a totally scorched Earth these are all different questions um the answer can we make it through without the catastrophes intensifying no no no chance”

The capacity to perceive both the radical uniqueness of each part of reality and the radical interconnectedness of all parts simultaneously is essential, because believing only in homogeneous oneness makes the extinction of any particular thing seem unimportant, and believing only in separateness allows exploitation, but both truths held together create the foundation for ethics.

“if it is just uniqueness but not interconnectedness well then in the service of this one I can damage these ones it's every part unique and every part radically interconnected in which case it is all an expression of the whole so I whatever I care about I also have to care about all of it because it's connected and also each part is irreplaceable and that's totally precious”

A meaningful life is constituted by a recursive relationship between three modes: being (deeply taking in and appreciating the beauty of reality), doing (being in service to protect and add to that beauty), and becoming (deepening the capacity for ever deeper appreciation and service), and all meaningful action arises from perception of beauty and sacredness rather than from perception of what is broken.

“the motive being at its Essence is about really deeply taking in the beauty of reality and appreciating it...the mode of doing is about being in service to the beauty of reality protecting it adding to it...the mode of becoming is deepening the capacity for being and doing...that a meaningful life is a recursive relationship between those three”

The meaning of life is not something separate from the experience of being alive—when you're truly engaged in being alive (having peak experiences, genuine connection, real work), the question of 'what is the meaning' dissolves because you're experiencing meaningfulness directly.

“we think what we want is to know what the meaning of life is when what we're actually seeking is the experience of being Fully Alive and I don't think that is the whole because someone can experience being Fully Alive and fairly self-centered ways just doing uh you know extreme sports and whatever um but it is also true that in the moments where someone is experiencing feeling Fully Alive they're not an existential angst about what is the meaning of life”

There are two categories of problems in the world: problems where we knowingly advantage something at the expense of something else (intentional harm, the 'nasty' problem), and problems where we don't know we're causing harm (unintentional harm, the 'dumb' problem), and solutions must address both by expanding the circle of care and expanding the complexity of process to calculate effects.

“the problems in the world happen by be by intentionally advantaging some things at the expense of other things we know it'll cause an expense...or at the level of Corporations or anything else or humans with regard to the biosphere...the other problems in the world is where we didn't know that we're causing the harm”

Technologies that emerge within competitive or military contexts become optimized for dominance and destructive capacity rather than human flourishing, because 'winning' in conflict means imposing your worldview and systems on others, selecting for technologies that consolidate power.

“and if the world view and the technology it creates don't win at War it just gets wiped out um”

A significant portion of young men are being deprived of adequate fathering and role-modeling in positive masculinity, which is causing harm to their partners, peers, and themselves, and the solution requires not just individual healing but also cultural transmission of what healthy masculine development looks like.

“I had in conversations arise in the week or two before of men young men so boy into man phase who had just clearly never been fathered in important ways and were causing pain to women they were in relationships with to people around them were being poorer leaders”

Consciousness is not an emergent property of brains alone; there are strong arguments for believing that consciousness or some quality of interiority exists in things that don't have brains, and there is a panpsychic quality to self-organizing systems at all scales.

“if I wanted to speak to beliefs do I think that Consciousness is an emergent property of brains probably not do I think that there are things that don't have brains including other types of biology and whatever that might have some quality over there or something that it is like to be them probably yes”

A person's willingness to risk their life for strangers they've never met (as Schmachtenberger's father did) is not exceptional but rather represents a particular development of human capacity for empathy and sense of kinship, and this capacity can be cultivated or trained in anyone with the right developmental conditions.

“there was a time here in Encinitas and that was like uh Wendy where which is usually not a violent area my dad was in the uh parking lot on thoroughfare here El Camino Real gunshots rang out handful gunshots from a blind store and uh everybody who's in the parking lot around the other way or dropped my Dad ran straight at the blind store um he figured the shooter was still alive and in there turned out to shoot her after killing the other person killed himself so by the time my dad got into the shooter was dead um it was a husband who was going in there to Suicide homicide his wife”

The distinction between conceptual questions (which have definite answers and end the inquiry) and wisdom questions (which deepen understanding every time you ask them) is important; wisdom questions bring you deeper into yourself and life, while conceptual questions have terminal answers that close inquiry.

“I would draw the distinction saying a conceptual question is you know is it raining outside take a look no end of question but wisdom questions are more like cons every time you ask them they have the potential for taking you deeper into the question deeper into life deeper into yourself”

Every virtue and principle lives in dialectical relationship with its complement—for example, discovering one's unique gift to offer vs. doing the unglamorous work no one wants to do—and wisdom involves holding both poles in dynamic tension rather than over-norming one of them as absolute.

“almost every value or principle lives in a dialectical relationship with another value or principle that is complementary but they might seem almost opposite and that without holding them together the full version of just that one thing the reducto atom of it actually becomes evil”

Peak experiences of beauty and meaning are so profoundly valuable that they would be worth incarnating for despite all the suffering and pain of life; having multiple such experiences creates a sense of gratitude and abundance that doesn't require the world to be fixed or improved to have meaning.

“I remember thinking if I had the choice if there is a spirit before this life if I had the choice to come here and incarnate and go through whatever painful things that I've went through my whole life just to get to have this one experience of color and vision and the wind and the insects in this moment would totally do it like I would take every pain in my whole life to have had this experience as opposed to no experience and then I'm like I've had that I've had so many of these experiences and one of them is worth incarnating for I've had so many of them”

If a job is worth doing it's worth doing well, and this principle conditions the unconscious default to do things with integrity even when no one is watching, because mastery and beauty have intrinsic worth beyond external validation.

“if a job is worth doing it's worth doing well meant you just know half-assing the thing like we and so like I'll give you an example that was so beautiful I remember the first time we're building a building from the ground up we laid the studs and then we drilled through the studs to run the wire um for the outlets and it was very important to my dad that the way the wiring was in the wall before the drywall went on was beautiful that the holes were at the same height that the Romex was not twisted and that it was beautiful and no one would ever see it we're about to cover it in drywall and you're like why and he's like you know you know you know”

Forgive and help them do better—this means not just saying 'I forgive you' without the commitment to help the person transform, but genuine reconciliation that combines pardon with investment in growth.

“forgive just as a given you've got to forgive and the second part is help them do better so you just don't forgive okay I'm okay I'm clear you know it doesn't bother anymore because I forgiven but the other part is help them do better”

The nature of mind that leads to loss of orientation to complexity and interconnectivity—fragmentation—is the primary psychological generator of the meta-crisis, and this is more fundamental than claims about impulsiveness, selfishness, or addiction, which are themselves expressions of part-conflict (conflicting needs within a fragmented self).

“if I say anything else first I'm concerned that people over Norm on that as the thing and then again lose observation to all the things and complexity of all things so if I wanted to speak to something as the thing it would be the nature of mind that makes us lose orientation to the complexity and the interconnectivity of all the things”

The distinction between subject and object, consciousness and matter, is less fundamental than often assumed; they are equally fundamental and co-informing co-arising facets of an integrated reality, and the relationship between them is part of that fundamentality, making physicalism and idealism both partial perspectives.

“I would not say that I am a physicalist or an idealist in the classic philosophical sense...nor am I an idealist in that Consciousness comes first and all of the physics is an emergent property...I would say that um the the subjective stuff and the objective stuff...are equally fundamental and co-informing co-arising facets of an integrated reality and the relationship between them is part of that fundamentality”

Daniel's parents conducted an educational experiment by providing curriculum-free homeschooling based on facilitating his intrinsic curiosities rather than imposing a predetermined curriculum, which created integrative thinking because pursuing interesting questions required bridging across multiple disciplines naturally, unlike compartmentalized school education that trains fragmented thinking.

“my education was self-directed it also didn't have clear delineations of topics I was never doing math or social studies I was doing an inquiry about something that was interesting that might have involved some math and some you know quite a few things so if you're trying to understand integrative things like how does a body cell organize how does a fetus actually develop how does that then you're having to intrinsically be radically interdisciplinary”

When a child asks complex questions like 'why is the sky blue' or 'why is fire hot', answering it well requires understanding multiple layers of physics, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind simultaneously, and parents often either don't know how to facilitate these interests or force the child to study predetermined curriculum instead, which can break their intrinsic motivation for deep learning.

“when a kid asks why is the sky blue or why is fire hot you have to understand many layers of physics but then also neuroscience and then also the philosophy of mind to be able to translate the subjective experience of hotness from Sensations that happen on the skin and what is communicated between cells and in the nervous system to what is the thermodynamics of Fire or the nature of the molecules in the upper atmosphere”

Birth control decoupled sex from reproduction but human neurochemistry and evolutionary psychology still associate sex with reproductive consequence, creating a mismatch where people act as if sex has no reproductive meaning but their embodied psychology still processes it that way, contributing to psychological dysfunction.

“we get birth control and we're like oh sex doesn't have to equal reproduction anymore even though forever sex always equals the positive reproduction we evolved to have our neurochemistry means x equals the possibility of reproduction we put in birth control our neurochemistry and our evolutionary biology didn't just change overnight but now we're acting in a way where it's like as if it doesn't mean that thing but a huge part of our whole being is responding that way”

There is a question of whether the consciousness and values of people determine what technologies and social systems they develop, or whether the technologies and social systems that are successful in competition (winning wars) determine what consciousness and values emerge in people born into those systems, suggesting bidirectional causation rather than unidirectional control.

“there's always this question of um does the what technologies the world develops and what social systems it develops are those the result of the Consciousness and values of the people or the Consciousness and the values of the people who are born as babies being conditioned by the world that they're in in the dominant systems and what things happen to be successful and if the world view and the technology it creates don't win at War it just gets wiped out”

Daniel does not believe propositions about God adequately capture what he means by experiencing transcendence or connection to wholeness; he has experiential connection to sacred aspects of reality but does not hold propositional beliefs about God, and too much certainty about metaphysical claims is problematic.

“do I believe that there is some sentences that I can say that Define what God is uh uh where I would say yes that is a description that I think is both true and comprehensive and you know adequate and no I don't”

Concepts and propositions can both obscure and reveal reality; any model or framework reveals some aspects of reality while concealing others, and the belief that a model is comprehensive enough leads to deadened perception and arrested learning because it prevents perception of where the model fails.

“any statement we make is you know is that it can be valuable but it's never fully adequate to the reality of anything and to the extent that you think that you even unconsciously even fuzzily think of it as adequate now it's actually harming you yes because now it deadens your perceptions now it creates less you don't see the reality you see the frame of the reality that you expect to see it in and you stop seeing where that model is inadequate which means you stop learning”

When you perceive reality with sufficient clarity, the sacredness of life is self-evident and obvious; it doesn't need to be argued for or constructed, it is Prima facie, and this is the primary deficit in those who ask 'why should we protect nature'—they have not had sufficient contact with nature and their own embodiment to perceive its inherent sacredness.

“if someone is perceiving somewhat clearly then the sacredness of life is primification just is is”

Dharma inquiry involves asking: what are you bothered by, what are you inspired by, what do you have aptitude in, and what are you called to—and your unique Dharma is at the intersection of these, not in any single one alone.

“there's something both very beautiful about the kind of bodhisattva Direction and something that is incomplete about a certain direction of it...Dharma inquiry which is more personal because that's obviously true for everybody that our main query gets more into specific things one is bothered by and is inspired by and has aptitude at and is called to to have a sense of what is your unique relationship to that is your own Dharma with it”

Daniel's father believed the highest value for men is serving women, nature, children, and future generations, and that men are either on path when serving family (biological and human family) or off path, with no other valid orientation.

“my dad would say things all the time like you're either serving your family or the family of mankind or you're off path those are the only two things you can be doing that are not off path”

Joseph Campbell said we think we want to know the meaning of life but what we're actually seeking is the experience of being fully alive, and this distinction is important because meaning-seeking as intellectual pursuit can mask the actual longing for embodied, felt aliveness.

“I don't remember the exact quote but it was uh um Joseph Campbell quote it was something to the effect of that we think what we want is to know what the meaning of life is when what we're actually seeking is the experience of being Fully Alive”

Most great polymaths and geniuses historically were the product of high-quality aristocratic tutoring and personalized education by master teachers, not just genetic ability, and the democratization of education inadvertently reduced access to this type of intensive mentorship, making it harder to develop integrated polymathic thinking in modern times.

“most of the great polymaths the super Geniuses if you want to call in were have one thing really clearly in common obviously not 100 correlation but a higher correlation than anything else which was that they were the result of aristocratic tutoring high quality aristocratic tutoring”

Suffering and trauma, once healed and integrated through deep work, leave lasting gifts and benefits while the pain becomes temporary; this creates a beneficial asymmetry where one who has done healing work receives the lessons while avoiding ongoing harm, unlike those who haven't done the work and remain perpetually affected by pain.

“when you've done the healing work with it you don't still feel messed up by the trauma or the pain but you do feel ongoingly benefited by the lessons and it's kind of like a lot of people don't have the resources or know how to do the healing so they never get the lessons and they're just always affected by the pain and that's a bummer but if one kind of has the resources knows how to work on it then the pain is temporary and the gifts are lasting”

Working on cars broken down on the side of the road isn't experienced as a sacrifice of service when it's done from genuine care for people and joy in the relationship and competence, making service indistinguishable from the thing you most enjoy doing.

“it didn't feel like some Dreadful sacrifice of service that we had to do...if I like the most fun thing we could possibly do like it was just actually really enjoyable because one I'm getting this high quality time with my dad right...and then helping people where there's this immediate you know expression of these people being delighted and surprised and so there was absolutely it wasn't just like an ethic of service it was like uh like a way to condition that as that the what I want for myself personally and who I want to be for the world there wasn't even a distinction”

The consilience project is based on the principle that the more perspectives one can take on a thing, the more depth and richness of information they can get about it, because different lenses (thermodynamics, evolution, complexity theory) reveal different aspects of the same reality.

“one of the projects we launched called the consilience project that's what the word consilience means is the more perspectives one can take on a thing the more depth and richness of information they can get about it um so and I think you know the The Meta crisis this area of study of like what are all the problems of the world”

The way most problems get solved in the world produces other problems almost all the time because we define the problem too narrowly and create a first-order solution (technology, law, business) that produces unintended second and third-order effects elsewhere in the system.

“the way we solve problems causes other problems almost all the time because we Define the problem too narrowly we create a first order Solution that's a technology or a law or a business or whatever to solve it but that's connected to a complex set of things and it produces second and third order effects somewhere else”

The traditional concept of an afterlife with ancestors watching and judgment awaiting one's arrival in the afterlife has a psychologically ennobling effect, inspiring people to live up to the standard of departed teachers and respected ancestors, even for those with skepticism about the metaphysical claims.

“the idea that many many Traditions had that when I die I'm going to be with the ancestors and uh I'm going to like end there are some Glory of my of the great teachers and will and they're still watching me right and and when I go to be with my forefathers with the teachers um in eternity and afterlife do I actually deserve to be with them there's something in Nobles that that can do right there's something powerfully ennobling that that old tradition can do”

The bodhisattva aspiration to become whatever is needed is beautiful but incomplete if taken to mean one should be equally capable at all tasks; rather, the questions should be: what is most needed AND what are my unique capacities, which requires balancing self-sacrifice against the principle of irreducible uniqueness.

“I realized that there's something both very beautiful about the kind of bodhisattva Direction and something that is incomplete about a certain direction of it...but where it's missing something is I really am not equally good at all the things that are needed nor can I do all of the things even if I try there's a lot of people have to do all the things so if medicine work is needed and if economics change is needed and if care of the individual people and animals is needed as well as macro systemic thinking about systems to do that cool not only what is most needed but what is most needed that my being is well developed to be able to be in service to is important”

The phrase 'sapiens is in service of sentience' is a useful framing meaning that human rational capacity should be oriented toward serving all sentient beings, not toward dominating or transcending them.

“a friend that I think you know Samantha Sweetwater...she just left me a message this morning with a thought she was saying uh the way she phrased it was that sapiens is in service of sentience if it is to be rightly guided oh beautiful”

The highest expression of love is not just emotional affection but the desire to know the beloved deeply; love without knowing is incomplete, and knowing deeply is one of the natural byproducts of genuine love.

“what does it mean that I love somebody if I don't really know who they are um and if I have some love for reality then wanting to know it more is one of the things right wanting to appreciate it more”

A 'hard fork' in human futures is likely, meaning bifurcation into radically different trajectories that are no longer connected, one of which may involve significant harm or extinction and another which involves survival and recovery, and the outcome is genuinely undetermined and depends on choices and actions over the coming period.

“I think there's something like a pretty hard Fork and I think it can go either way and I think it is not determined and I think it is increasingly potent and hard over the next while on in figuring that out”

There is an 'omni-influence' model where everything influences everything else (rather than 'omni-determinism') but not in a way that is absolutely deterministic, meaning that understanding the metacrisis requires recognizing that all of infrastructure (technology), social structures (institutions), and superstructure (culture/values) are co-informing and no single one is deeper or more causal than the others.

“I would say that they are co-informing co-influencing and that to really address it there are necessary things that have to happen across each of those areas and its efficiency only happens across all of them”

Atoms do not exist as self-contained entities independent of all the forces and fields that constitute them; they require strong force, electromagnetism, Higgs field, gauge bosons, gluons, etc., none of which are included in the formal definition of atoms, so any truly adequate definition of atoms would require specifying everything in the universe that makes atoms possible.

“if I Define an atom...you've got nucleons and you have electrons and you have orbitals and whatever um you can say where in the periodic table row and column it is...but does that atom exist without the strong force does it exist without electromagnetism does it exist without the Higgs field does it exist without the gauge bosons that mediate the connections...it doesn't exist without any of those things and yet none of them are included in the definition when we say atom”

The first verse of the Tao Te Ching 'the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao' points to the impossibility of propositional adequacy regarding ultimate reality, and trying to reduce transcendent experience to propositions is misguided.

“it was uh um Joseph Campbell quote it was something to the effect of that we think what we want is to know what the meaning of life is when what we're actually seeking is the experience of being Fully Alive and I don't remember the exact quote but it was uh um Joseph Campbell quote it was something to the effect of that we think what we want is to know what the meaning of life is when what we're actually seeking is the experience of being Fully Alive I don't think that is the whole because someone can experience being Fully Alive and fairly self-centered ways just doing uh you know extreme sports and whatever um but it is also true that in the moments where someone is experiencing feeling Fully Alive they're not an existential angst about what is the meaning of life and I think that oftentimes the actual intrinsic sacredness and meaningful of meaningfulness of life that happens through a deep enough bandwidth of connection and sensing uh the longing for that it's filtered through the Mind as a desire to understand what is the purpose of all of this what is the meaning with a whole bunch of bad assumptions about like what thing is it building to it seems like a terminal value that then I can't that will be a satisfying answer where if we say well the purpose is love then I say well what is the purpose of that or the purpose is learning what it's versus it's so we can the first the concept of purpose and the concept of meaningfulness are not identical but the reality of them and the concept of them are not the same either um and so how to develop a h a deeper connection to the to a deeper connection to life and deeper ability to perceive the innate uniqueness of everything and the interconnectedness of everything at the same time right the interconnectedness of it all but not it's not it's not a homogeneous Oneness where because if it's a homogeneous Oneness doesn't matter how many of these ones die doesn't matter if a species goes if Oneness is still Oneness uh if it is just uniqueness but not interconnectedness well then in the service of this one I can damage these ones it's every part unique and every part radically interconnected in which case it is all an expression of the whole so I whatever I care about I also have to care about all of it because it's connected and also each part is irreplaceable and that's totally precious right and it's not that as the thought it's that is the perception from there from that base state of perception I think the right other questions in analytics more naturally arise you know yes so the to the extent we can open ourselves to uh the totality of experience uh to to life the world and to ourselves to that extent in some ways and it's not in one sense one could say the questions fall away because the questions are conceptual and we're you know you're now speaking to an experiential openness and directness uh that uh give birth to understandings or intuitions which can plow into Concepts uh and but obviously I'm obviously in the concepts right I'm obviously into work and they're really good company um I wrote a Blog piece a while ago called the dance of the Dao and the ten thousand things and um maybe that one can be linked I'm specifically talking about that because you know there's this um Concept in Taoism the that every day in the practice of knowledge something is added every day in the practice of the data something is dropped and but I think they are both meaningful and I think that not only there is a way in which learning more about the ten thousand things the field of conceptuality and interfere with one's connection to the doubt there's a way that it can also enhance it yes you don't know how they can dance together if you don't know how it can enhance it then you have to just avoid intellect mind past future mostly the things that are uniquely Sapient uniquely adult Sapient and say look at the Lilies of the Field look at the little children you're like yes the things that don't have the prefrontal cortexes yes the prefrontal adult brain can cause problems but it also has unique evolutionary purposes we just have to know how to use it right um two things there Daniel one one is the intention what's the intention of using the intellect is it to get lost in the abstractions or is it in the service of a solution and the other is the skill and capacity to integrate into a kind of uh Vision logic say I think those are both part of it I had a friend that I think you know Samantha Sweetwater yes she hasn't been on this podcast she'd be great to be on she just left me a message this morning with a thought she was saying uh the way she phrased it was that sapiens is in service of sentience if it is to be rightly guided oh beautiful I thought that was a nice way of phrasing it I um in terms of the Greek the true the good and the Beautiful Triad I remember writing to an artist friend of mine on her birthday once uh that the true and the good only matter because the beautiful is um or no I think I said truth and goodness only a matter of beauty is that the beauty was actually the fundamental thing if reality did not have intrinsic Beauty I wouldn't actually care to be good do it or to know it or to whatever there's something that is intrinsic that is deeper than the why Daniel yeah I have a follow-up question to all this and I know they they threw it at Carl Young so uh I'm gonna throw it at you um do you believe in God um [Music] I remember many many years ago and I wouldn't phrase it this way any more at this maybe 15 years ago I wrote a poem called uh The Atheist who writes love poems to God and um it was saying do I believe in God not in any God that is believable meaning that I don't remember where it went but the idea that what the word belief means is the idea that a proposition about reality actually maps to reality and so belief is a thing that can happen inside of propositional logic and propositions have to be formed in semiotics right in in semantics and syntax do I believe that there is some sentences that I can say that Define what God is uh uh where I would say yes that is a description that I think is both true and comprehensive and you know adequate and no I don't I think that's why the first verse of the tattoo is the Dao that is speakable is not the Eternal thou so if you believe in the doubt you miss the whole thing sure um if you you can have a outside of semiotics outside of propositional experience outside of propositional knowledge experience of a kind of wordless knowing and a connection to wholeness but you don't then try to reduce that to propositions about the world so I think there's a lot of people that will have real experiences that are numinous and transcendent and then try to make a belief based on that and I think that's usually misguided so uh if I wanted to speak to beliefs do I think that Consciousness is an emergent property of brains probably not do I think that there are things that don't have brains including other types of biology and whatever that might have some quality over there or something that it is like to be them probably yes but I'm holding all this I say probably even though I think there's some pretty strong arguments uh because I think too much certainty about any of these things is really problematic um do I think that anything that self-organizes has some type of interiority or softness in some kind of pan psychic type way yeah sure I do do I think that um even though each cell in our brain or body is its own self-organizing thing they come together to make something that is synergistically more than the sum of them taken separately yes do I think that might be true for say universe as a whole or very large things within Universe like galaxies or whatever yeah I think that's interesting so do I think that um there are types of sentients and types of intelligence that are more deep and vast by far than our imagination can think about totally do I think that there is the possibility to in some meaningful ways connect there and have results come from that connection yes do I think that there is an inherent sacredness in all that is physically and metaphysically yes I wouldn't reduce all that to saying I believe in God uh I rather think of it as something um more respectful than the reduction to a proposition I get that yeah um but but I was actually just talking with um a very close friend the other day about an aspect of learning theory there are certain things that when I learned them I have to work to implement them as effectively as I can because I can't not I just I cannot and and uh and their many people who don't have that they um they forget that like they learn things and they forget and they're like oh yeah that was a bummer I forgot let me get back on path with it there's some different depth of the care about the thing that is of course the result of all the exposure and whatever and I'm like yeah there is something where it is like actually like the differences actually believing there's a God right meaning um but it and that was the term that I used to just kind of make it simple in which if one actually believes there's a God then they can go they can work to perfect themselves go to a happily die in a holy war whatever it is because there is some superordinate thing that is so important that everything else Falls in line to that so there there is something for me and belief in karma can do that right there is something that is like believing in a god that is the ordaining basis of everything for me but it isn't believing in a God and I can't do better with words no that yes I think that's a very sacred holy answer I think you handled it really well and thank you for even even doing that means a lot yeah and beautiful look certain that some of the some of the intimations in your response were about the uh unknowable mystery of reality bottomless fathomless inconceivable and to the transconceptual nature of that mystery and actually of life that any that the ieo so the Dao that can be named is not the Eternal doubt and even more than that we can't any statement we make is you know is that it can be valuable but it's never fully adequate to the reality of anything and to the extent that you think that you even unconsciously even fuzzily think of it as adequate now it's actually harming you yes because now it deadens your perceptions now it creates less you don't see the reality you see the frame of the reality that you expect to see it in and you stop seeing where that model is inadequate which means you stop learning because you're now filtering reality through that model because it's convenient so in that sing the dance of the Dao and the ten thousand things there's one part where I say do atoms exist I'm like kind of kind of because uh uh and I'm and I didn't play with it from the point of view of is there physicality at all or is that all just nip a phenomenon of Consciousness or is this a simulation I wasn't even playing with it in that direction I was just saying do atoms exist well the periodic table works pretty well we can actually uh do atomic level engineering and chemistry pretty well right this is a it's about as good a science as we've got there's a a lot of um good empirical things regarding adults but when I Define an atom the formal definitions will I we can do it in terms of the Schrodinger equation or information Theory or particle physics or whatever but we'll say okay you've got nucleons and you have electrons and you have orbitals and whatever um you can say where in the periodic table row and column it is and it's an ion or but does that atom exist without the strong force does it exist without electromagnetism does it exist without the Higgs field does it exist without the gauge bosons that mediate the connections the gluons and the Higgs bones it doesn't exist without any of those things and yet none of them are included in the definition when we say atom we take them all for granted so if I removed those that are not part of the definition do atoms exist nope nope so if I want to Define an atom adequately that it actually exists can I do that nope and so I have to take for granted a trans-finite amount of reality to Define this thing in a way that is useful but is it real well I mean kind of you've walked your way into the buddhista and into the uh philosophy of the concealed in the revealed that any perspective unveils or conceals the universe and simultaneously conceals and other one this is absolutely fascinating we could go anywhere with this but I want to I want to ask you um from this this perspective or these multiple perspectives you're bringing to bear on your own your understanding of of everything uh what do you see as some of the deeper unrecognized usually unacknowledged causes of the meta crisis and I'll I'll just give a little context and I think one of the beautiful things about the way the way you appreciate the medical crisis is you're very aware of the traps of reductionism or what I would call a single Focus fallacy uh which there are three years a single single issue fallacy the the we're facing global warming that's it a single cause fallacy it's all due to capitalism and the single solution fallacy so I love the way you're thinking transcends those limitations and and recognize the traps of reductionism so I've been asking you what you see is some of the deeper causes I certainly acknowledge that you don't know these aren't it but they are important elements and they're ones that don't often get don't as often get spoken to yeah okay to the question is understood are are there drivers or causes of the issues we face in the world and of the thing that uh I sometimes call The Meta crisis that we haven't defined here but I'm defining enough of their places if someone is not already familiar they can check it out that are not the ones that we usually talk about that are somehow deeper and I'm going to translate that to are there things in the inner landscape of people's um experience and psyche uh specifically which is when we were saying are there spiritual Dimensions or interior dimensions the reason I want to make the distinction is because I don't know that the term deeper makes sense um just for quick point of reference I would not say that I am a physicalist or an idealist in the classic philosophical sense of physicalist meaning that physics comes first matter and force fields and um third person stuff and the Consciousness emerges from that somewhere um nor am I an idealist in that Consciousness comes first and all of the physics is an emergent property of Consciousness structures of mind or something I would say that um the the subjective stuff and the objective stuff whatever you want to think of that all the words have problems we could talk about first person third person can talk about um the quality and the physics but they are equally fundamental and co-informing co-arising facets of an integrated reality and the relationship between them is part of that fundamentality so I wouldn't say Consciousness is deeper than physics to the nature of reality um I think that's a weird kind of dualism still um I think information Theory affecting physics has already started to get a lot of people at least in this realm because if you say okay well Consciousness stuff is deeper than physics stuff like well what is physics stuff well it's like atoms atoms or subatomic particles and subatomic particles or some weird Heisenbergen Schrodinger thing which seems a lot like some type of pattern of information it doesn't sound like physics anymore right and it doesn't necessarily sound as different it's not like just some dead inert matter it doesn't sound as different from the Consciousness stuff especially as you start to do a similar dive on with the conscious and stuff is because you say well is that information processing on some information processing substrate what does that mean so in the same way that I wouldn't say Consciousness is deeper than physics or the other way around I wouldn't say that the psychological drivers of the metacrisis are deeper than the technological or the economic ones um I would say that they are co-informing co-influencing and that to really address it there are necessary things that have to happen across each of those areas and its efficiency only happens across all of them and uh I won't belabor the point because we've written and talked about it we wrote a paper um in the consilience project called why technology is not values neutral and it's worth people looking at and then beautiful paper yeah it shows just a brief overview of the work of Marvin Harris and um and Marshall mcluhan and uh so many people and theory of Technology of how Technologies change the nature of mind and psychology individually and collectively the nature of culture in ways that are really subtle and not obvious so I you know there's always this question of um does the what technologies the world develops and what social systems it develops are those the result of the Consciousness and values of the people or the Consciousness and the values of the people who are born as babies being conditioned by the world that they're in in the dominant systems and what things happen to be successful and if the world view and the technology it creates don't win at War it just gets wiped out um and so I I'm framing it this way because I think the deeper thing is actually really problematic it's uh you mentioned um Roger the reductionism one type of reductionism is to say there's only one thing the other type is say there's a handful of things but my favorite thing is the most important one um and so being able to understand the co arising and non-reduced process is actually really important um if I can introduce the concept here Daniel I find I i have a neologism which is Omni determinism everything determines everything and I think that's what you're speaking to yeah um yeah I might more usually talk about Omni influence that everything is influencing everything but not in a way that is absolutely deterministic because uh nice refinement thank you there are things that are outside of hard determinism still the influence the net result of what happens also when we say Omni we mean in the direction of all inclusive but we can never actually know we're being all-inclusive um so in fact we can know for sure that we aren't being that's actually important um I can know for sure that I am not being all-inclusive because computationally it would be impossible um so the framing of the meta crisis we often talk about uh involves like a frame will use often is um from Marvin Harris's work but to understanding civilization you can think of it in terms of these three areas it's infrastructure it's social structures and it's superstructure its infrastructure is all the Technologies the whole Tech stack and all the modes of material development and like that the social structures are all the Collective Agreement Fields everything from the system of governance the law the institutions that mediate it and the superstructure is the religion the cultural ideology the values the definition of The Good Life so the the superstructure is kind of the spirituality psychology interiority of the people at the collective level and so of course we're always talking about that so I think seeing the top level frame of how all those fit together is worthwhile so if people haven't I'll just reference talked about in a bunch of places uh good friend Nate Higgins who's very good thinker on um specifically the relationship between the environment and energy and the financial system and I just did a five-part series on his podcast and then the fourth part we do a kind of an overview of the meta crisis that covers this the third part unintentionally just because it came up we ended up covering how does one like emotionally psychologically and spiritually deal with the reality of the meta crisis given that there's so much to care about beyond what we feel like we have a sense of agency about those are ones that people might find interesting the fifth one we talk about Frameworks to things through Solutions confidently so with all that prefacing I'll say some things here that I think maybe have not said as much other places that are relevant to what in the interiority of human psyches and experiences and cultures uh is a key or key drivers of the problems of the world I want to mention how many things there are that we probably have no clue about that are really critical just just to give a tiny couple examples um we know that there are a lot of species that have gone extinct at somewhere between 100 and a thousand times the background rate of Extinction since the Industrial Revolution as a result of human activity those species are not just in the world externally there is a similar biodiversity loss in species Extinction in the microbiome of the human being and the microbiome of the human being produces some of the necessary chemicals for us to work our genome doesn't actually produce all the things some aspects of the macrophage binding protein and various things like that are not adequately coded in the genome without a microbiome and um and so Extinction of some of those is pretty humongous it's like deleting chunks of our genome right and but if you start having ubiquitous antibiotics and chlorine in the water and pesticide exposure and all those types of things so how much when you realize that somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the major mono and amine neurotransmitters like dopamine serotonin and Agave are produced by the microbiome in the gut and that how you think how you perceive what you believe how happy you are what you your orientation towards violence will largely be a result of that how much of what seems like a spiritual crisis in the world is the result of effects of the unintended consequences of um our kind of War on bacteria and biology and actually destroying part of the the code set that makes us able to be us that's not something that people often would think of when they're thinking of um the spiritual drivers of a thing but that is really important and if we you know if we look at the anthropocene of the human built World there are so many aspects of the human Bill world that built a world we did not genetically evolve in we're not genetically adapted to that makes us Misfit to our own being in important ways um obviously for the 200 000 or 300 000 years of homo sapien history in the couple million years of hominin History uh we always lived in tribes there was no such thing as not living in tribes until extremely recently but we've been this way long enough that it seems like the nuclear family household is the most obvious thing and the only thing that could ever be and we can't really imagine anything else and yet evolutionarily we evolved to fit in tribes so we so all the about attachments Theory we we love to have attachment to like 150 people like strong attachments and where our life literally dependent upon them we couldn't get our the the person who knows medicine is the only person who knows medicine I'm not going to interact with other people so I can't just have a market opportunity to go to anybody so I can't just have a market opportunity to go to anybody so I can't be a to them so I can and everybody's going to see what everybody does so I can't lie and get away with it so like everything about psychology attachment Theory uh bonding the ideas of codependence and interdependence were totally different and we evolved in that setting right so then we get birth control and we're like oh sex doesn't have to equal reproduction anymore even though forever sex always equals the positive reproduction we evolved to have our neurochemistry means x equals the possibility of reproduction we put in birth control our neurochemistry and our evolutionary biology didn't just change overnight but now we're acting in a way where it's like as if it doesn't mean that thing but a huge part of our whole being is responding that way so the reason I bring this up is if we were to try to comprehensively list all of the things that are conditioning our psyches in ways that they did not evolve to process and that are not optimal for a set of individual thriving a community thriving or Global thriving would be we this podcast would take days um and so that's a big topic I just wanna yeah um if and I say that because if I say anything else first I'm concerned that people over Norm on that as the thing and then again lose observation to all the things and complexity of all things so if I wanted to speak to something as the thing it would be the nature of mind that makes us lose orientation to the complexity and the interconnectivity of all the things um so if I was going to try to say what is the psychological generator function of the metacrisis one I think as good a way of saying it as I could is kind of it's not exactly the way David bone said it but it's derived from the way I heard him when he said the problems of the world result from a fragmented Consciousness that sees the world as a bunch of parts and doesn't see the wholeness of things and he talked about wholeness and the implicate order and can we perceive through that wholeness and obviously we know he was a student of Einstein's and Einstein said it's an optical delusion of Consciousness to believe there are separate things there is one thing that we call universe and that we have to work to develop our perceptions um so some of the problems in the world happen by be by intentionally advantaging some things at the expense of other things we know it'll cause an expense so we're advantaging our country at the expense of another country in a war which means our people our land our riches or whatever at the expense of that for those people um that obviously means we're able to separate the world enough to be able to think about this trade-off of good for these ones and even though we know it's bad for these ones okay because we separate the interconnectedness of everything and whether it's a country doing that to another country or in a relationship a person doing that to another person thinking they can possibly win a fight and someone they love actually not get their needs met and that equals a good life for them somehow which is ridiculous idea um uh or at the level of Corporations or anything else or humans with regard to the biosphere other animals we can advantage ourselves at their expense which obviously a factory farm in a and uh industrial fishing fleet are not good for those animals or not good for the oceans are not good for the people working on them in poor conditions the other problems in the world is where we didn't know that we're causing the harm right so we can either benefit something at the expense of something else knowingly or we can benefit something at the harm of something else not knowing so conflict theory and mistake Theory um and the real politic assessment of humans is the problems in the world are because we are dumb and nasty right like roughly if you want to make it very simple dumb is we caused problems that we didn't anticipate and nasty as we call problems that we knew were going to happen and so the how do we Enlighten humans has to deal with both the dumb and nasty part right if we're talking if we're talking about how do we have the not not just how do you affect human behavior through different rewards and deterrents and social norms and systems of law but through people wanting something different having an internal motivational basis it would be can we expand the Circle of Care where they care about more that's even the nasty part and can we expand the complexity of process where they can actually calculate their effects so that they are not unintentionally harming things more that's the deal of the dumb part um but similarly there if I'm thinking about CO2 and how critical it is to get it down but I'm not thinking about ocean dead zones uh from nitrogen affluence using nitrogen fertilizer to grow more crops that will sequester more CO2 it seems like a good idea even though it's going to cause this other externalized issue so again my ability to separate the ocean dead zones and the CO2 is what's causing that unintentional harm right or thinking about that Facebook will be some cool system for people being able to tag photos and get to know each other not thinking about what its effect on Democracy will be with that particular ad model I would say all the problems look like people all the problems come from harm happening somewhere as a result of human choice but the choice was motivated by someone trying to benefit something so they're all based on trade-offs so it's either I'm trying to benefit myself now at my own future expense addiction and compulsiveness I am uh so the parts conflict can even be within oneself right um I'm trying to benefit my people My Religion my nation my political party whatever at the expense of the other one so great you get your political party elected you polarize the population worse next time they'll swing back harder and you're actually not progressing anything other than increasing polarization um or I am seeking to benefit things and the harm I'm causing elsewhere I just didn't know I didn't know that leachate was going to cause that pollution over there or whatever the other thing is so when bone was talking about the fragment of Consciousness it was both at the level of aware of the connectedness and care about the connectedness and so really the key is seeing reality as parts right same reality is a bunch of separated parts leads to being able to care about apart and seek to Advantage it in a way that causes harm to other things and then Cascade effects of other agents doing this similar stuff and so you get cumulative arm effects and you get escalating arms races so not being able to perceive stuff as a bunch of separated Parts but perceiving everything in relationship to everything else perceiving everything as a part of an interconnected whole where your ability to benefit that thing had to mean both caring about everything that it's connected to and being able to think through everything that's connected to come up with a strategy that is Omni beneficial or as close to that as possible and that where you made a mistake in it you're also ongoingly aware and working to correct it I would say from the psychological perspective that's probably as deep a thing as we can say and even stuff like but aren't people wouldn't wouldn't we say impulsiveness and selfishness and addiction or even deeper than that because obviously all of the environmental harm is happening because people are buying too much to get a keep up with the Joneses or get a hit of something well it's still the same thing right like it's um it is still the thing of their future self is being armed for their momentary self because their momentary self feels up enough that it thinks that it needs to get ahead um so the parts conflict the theory of trade-off starts within the self between the parts of itself the jungian parts reconciliation then would be the basis for being able to also have a wholeness of Self in relationship the wholeness of world okay um yeah let me let me um a couple of things uh given that and I've listened to uh you talk about these issues a lot and sometimes I'm just left with just oh we are so you know but given that the solution of survivability as our current species on this our home uh seems to be ignorance and just uh Being Bad actors uh do you feel that enough of us if there's any kind of Hope or sense that enough of us can evolve to a level where we can recognize this fractured and recognize what we're doing enough to keep us together as a human family connected to the whole so that we can survive this this choke point in our evolutionary history I don't think there is much of a human family to keep together that is anything other than an abstract idea at this point that some people hold and many people don't even hold that's an idea um I think the question of is it possible to make it through the issues that the world is facing today the whole plurality of issues that are unprecedented historically because we hadn't had sentries of industrial Tech bringing us up to planetary boundaries and we hadn't had exponential Tech or even small number of actors could everything up so quickly and we didn't have a world that had so much fragility um given that we could have massive catastrophic harm from so many different vectors from synthetic bio-created pandemics and from AI autonomous drone weapons and from climate change and from chemical planetary boundaries and from scaling war is there to make it through we have to avoid all of those to fail we only have to have any of them happen um and our track record doesn't look good right if you look back at the history of Empires at all uh the history of war and environmental destruction is a pretty big part of that story we don't seem to be really Noble stewards of power so as we're getting exponentially more power and we've usually used our power to do power games with each other meaning destroy each other and in ways that harm the environment is there any way that we can Steward exponential power in a finite space I would say it takes a step function like uh it it will take something significant that is more than just the continuation of whatever good aspects the enlightenment created or something like that um in the huge shift after World War II it was a big shift we made a whole new world system but the answer was still uh extract more from nature even faster make more money and make more attack like the bread and woods World system was a a world system but in more increase for everybody was still a somewhat easier thing to do than when you're hitting planetary boundaries and you have to say no you actually have to reduce consumption across everybody where a lot of people are like no I would rather not reduce my consumption go to war and have less people and I think I can win like this it's hard the situation we're in right now is unprecedented at a global level in such deep ways right so do I think it is possible to make it through I think the question is it possible to make it through without great harm doesn't even make sense because we're in species Extinction and War today like great harm has happened today people are being killed in Ukraine people are being killed in Armenian Azerbaijan people are being killed all over because of these issues and species are going extinct today so we're already in the great harm phase um I almost know adolescents don't have body dysmorphia in the Instagram Etc world like that's so we're already in that right now do I think we can make it through without catastrophes where hundreds of millions of people die is one question do I think we can make it through where there are any humans left I think we may get through where there are humans in something that isn't just a totally scorched Earth these are all different questions um the answer can we make it through without the catastrophes intensifying no no no chance so so so given all this the the question comes up how then should we live given the truth of well this next part is critical can we make it through without the catastrophes intensifying no they're going to intensify because no matter what we do today there is no enactable path to preventing the extreme weather events that climate change alone is going to mediate there's a lot of things like that and then the human migration that's going to come from that we can if we do the very best things we can make it less bad but there is also no we there is no we that is a unified acting group right um the what China's interests are and what the US's interests are what the individual with the left and right within the US's interests are what the individual us people versus the Elites in it they're not the same and so the whole like one of the biggest mistakes I made growing up was I always saw it in this Royal we did like Humanity thoughtfully was all reading Bucky's PL operating manual for spaceship earth and we're all you know thinking about you and Charters and looking at the Earth from the astronauts perspective and carrying Carl Sagan's pale blue dot and of course we want to do the right ends Mark and good thing for everybody uh the the thing that some people think is really good other people think is really horrible and when you realize that the enactment gets really hard right is is the legality of abortion protecting women's freedoms and rights or is it murdering infants um you'll see the most severe uh ideological differences on what is good they create a basis for massive conflict and you see that across so many things right so um that's why I say that there isn't a human family to hang together like that's that's an aspirational thing um do I think that if there is already a trajectory of some people who care about not just their own political party or their own Nation or their own race or even their own species but care pretty considerately and are working in service of that there are increasing number of people who have both more care more capacity and more interconnectivity and they cannot then also work with other people who maybe don't care about all of that but in increasingly good coordination for the things they do care about yes that's happening right there's a good thing an emergence that is happening do I think that that could be sufficient to make it through without total Extinction or scorched Earth yes totally do I think it can make it through without the catastrophes intensifying no they will intensify before even on the best course do I think that it's a given that we make it through no which means we are no matter what in a phase of increasing intensity ahead and with I think both the what it takes to avoid all the catastrophes is deep enough change to the world systems that it's like that boomian thing that we are neither harming each other on purpose or accident which means a kind of more Universal Omni consideration or things like a human family is actually a you know a real thing uh so I think in order to not have it get much worse changes have to happen at a deep enough level that it gets much better so I do think there's something like a pretty hard Fork and I think it can go either way and I think it is not determined and I think it is increasingly potent and hard over the next while on in figuring that out so with that then the question how do we live um as the frame is I can't imagine a context in which one's choices could matter more indeed it gives a whole nother level and uh depth and dimension to the choices we make and the priorities we serve and the how we live our lives and offer our lives and so what what are some of the parameters for an effective contributing life that you've seen a few more resources that I'll offer here another short little blog I wrote on how to live a meaningful life uh which was intentionally not answering the question what is the meaning of life which we discussed earlier um but it said a meaningful life and it was just it's a way of talking about it there's lots of ways of talking about it that's not particularly better than lots of other ways but I um there's something that is kind of comprehensive and kind of elegant about it so uh for it and it was looking at uh the mode of being the mode of doing and the mode of becoming all being relevant and defining all of them in terms of beauty and that thing we said earlier the truth and goodness matter because beauty is so there it says the motive being at its Essence is about really deeply taking in the beauty of reality and appreciating it giving gratitude for it honoring it loving it you know all those things it's the essence of what the mode of being is really about and that the mode of doing is about being in service to the beauty of reality protecting it adding to it perfect and the mode of becoming is deepening the capacity for being and doing that I can appreciate ever more fully and that I can add to it every monthly and that a meaningful life is a recursive relationship between those three um and if what I'm doing isn't arising out of everything's up so I have to fix everything but it's arising out of perceiving working on this hunger issue because we're perceiving the utter meaningfulness and beauty of these kids or these people in their life and the importance of it and the and so then the doing the desire to Serve and Protect arises not from the perception of all the Badness but actually arises from the perception of the Beauty from which the good which also means the bad is framed at all right so the thing that really is terrible and pisses us off is because something that is beautiful and sacred is being harmed which then brings us back to there's something that we actually love and have Devotion to so we trace it back to that and say how do I be in service there so the doing must arise from the being and the becoming is I don't just want to perceive the beauty I currently see I want to perceive ever deeper dimensions of things that I had missed you know I want to ask what aspects of the of reality are important and beautiful that I'm missing that other people are noticing that I'm not honoring as fully as I could um and then similarly with our doing where do I have Frameworks for what I'm where is what I'm doing coming from ego and Trauma and wounding where have I been running a strategy so long if I stopped and thought about it from scratch I might come up with something better you know like I want to be deepening the doing as well so I think if one relates to appreciating the beauty of Life adding to it deepening the capacity for both that's a nice framework to start um and then there was another resource put on there called Dharma inquiry which is more personal because that's obviously true for everybody that our main query gets more into specific things one is bothered by and is inspired by and has aptitude at and is called to to have a sense of what is your unique relationship to that is your own Dharma with it I realized that there's something both very beautiful about the kind of bodhisattva Direction and something that is incomplete about a certain direction of it I was I was incredibly influenced by valve the bodhisattva and the may I become whatever is needed and when you look around and try to perceive what is needed and try to develop within yourself what can offer something there I remember the the first time I actually read it was in Alex Gray's art book The I think sacred mirrors and he had the ability painting and then he had this poem next to him so beautiful and it said something like where there is uh thirst May a rainfall upon the people in Miami may I myself become that rain where there is hunger may I be transformed into the food near them where there is illness may have become the medicine you know wherever there is need of any kind may I become what is needed I think that helps one to recognize that what they love is deeper to who they are than who they think they are beautiful because I think I like these things and I don't like these things I'm good at these things not these things but oh I can't help with that because I'm not a a legal scholar or I'm not a construction worker I'm not a whatever it is and yeah it's like but if that's the thing that is most needed and would help what you care about most can you can you become something that you are not and I've had many times where there was something that I was not good at that I actually really identified as a thing I would never want we go down and realize that it actually mattered to what I cared about enough that if I held that limited identity I was not in maximum service to what I claim to care about and I had to get like well I I care about what I care about so long as it fits with my identity easily identity so that's what I like about the Battle of the bodhisattva but where it's missing something is I really am not equally good at all the things that are needed nor can I do all of the things even if I try there's a lot of people have to do all the things so if medicine work is needed and if economics change is needed and if care of the individual people and animals is needed as well as macro systemic thinking about systems to do that cool not only what is most needed but what is most needed that my being is well developed to be able to be in service to is important and so those Dharma questions are trying to help hone that for people beautiful and and you're pointing to the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves in order to in order to orient ourselves to be most effective instruments of service or for the in the bodhisattva aspiration for the welfare and Awakening of all and I really think that probably that body side for aspiration may be one of the highest ideals the miners human mind has ever come up with and such a beautiful thing and you're pointing now to the questions we ask which the first question that emerges is well what what can I do but then you're pointing to the idea that this because there are questions deeper than that what's the most effective thing I can do and d and along with that the question well the colon actually what am I called to do and deeper still in your implication is is the question how can I live my life so as to be an optimal instrument of service and each of those is I think better thought of as a as a cone or a wisdom question and I would draw the distinction saying a conceptual question is you know is it raining outside take a look no end of question but wisdom questions are more like cons every time you ask them they have the potential for taking you deeper into the question deeper into life deeper into yourself and so you're pointing us towards we're the real the wisdom questions of our time I would also say that almost every value or principle lives in a dialectical relationship with another value or principle that is complementary but they might seem almost opposite and that without holding them together the full version of just that one thing the reducto atom of it actually becomes evil and so this is the everything can be a medicine or everything can be a poison topic um so what is what is my unique self calling what is that which I can offer the world based on the unique set of experiences and capacities I have that no one else could offer that if I spend my life doing things other than that that other people could do the most novel offering that I have doesn't occur that's a deep and important and beautiful question but taken to its extreme it'll make you a total because often do the dishes when you need to do the dishes no it's not your unique self the only thing that you can do like anybody can do the dishes or take out the trash but like damn a lot of life is just doing the dish out of the trash and maybe the unique self that you have is in is unexpressible infinitesimal qualities with which you show up to those things you know um so the what is uniquely mine to do that no one else can do and what needs done that nobody wants to do I'll just show up to you got to hold those together right because also on the other side if you always just say what is nobody what is the shittiest job that nobody wants to do let me show up to that which is this incredibly a nobling question incredibly beautiful question you can also in the uh failing at some unique self dharmas and capacities you could have because of only orienting that way and so uh every every principle and every virtue needs held in a dialectical relationship and not over normed is absolute yeah and this is the ancient concept of the interdependence of Virtues that that they require require each other and complement one one another and you I think you're also pointing to the contextual nature of our inquiries that we have to keep the context as well so again a beautiful beautiful Reflections and deepening and expanding our that I see you pointing us to yeah and I've I've just felt that we've been spending I don't know x amount of time in the heart of philosophy and I feel a connection with fin Century Athens and all of that stuff it started long ago in another land and it's still it's still churning in a universe that can produce um a u and to me can't be all bad and uh I feel deeply moved and deeply um uh renewed in my commitment to do my little things you know whatever that calling might be and I think I pretty much found that but also to shampoo my dog and take out the trash and you know wipe the counters and that sort of thing you know and you say it can't be all bad it's funny because so I focus on the meta crisis which is like all the most up stuff that could be all together um it kind of seems like that but it's not really what I focus on I mean it's in appreciation and love of this world and life there's the desire to protect it and uh so paying attention to things that need protecting but where does the motivation come from the motivation doesn't come things being up the motivation comes from the Wonder of it right from the beauty of it like I've had I know you you both talk about bringing the philosophic concepts into daily practice on this show a lot and you know I've had a lot of practices throughout my life in terms of types of meditation and types of inquiry and whatever but like I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do pretty much every morning is I just look out the window at the trees and I just watch the trees move in the wind for a little bit and I don't I don't have to try to care about them or try to find them beautiful they're just beautiful and there's a happiness that comes just watching that and then there's a gratitude to be alive in Consciousness you know arising again and there's happiness to be on this planet and then there is a because of the happiness it comes from just the perception of the beauty of it I don't need that much for myself right there's not an unhappiness it needs me to do a bunch of stuff and then there's this gratitude that I I like I was sleeping this Con this Daniel Consciousness wasn't here and then in boots again and now it's here and I think about when Daniel's dead the Consciousness that we'll be perceiving the world and falling in love for the first time and climbing trees and reading hafez and Rumi for the first time it's all the things and I can't not feel connected to those consciousnesses a hundred and a thousand years from it like I can't not feel what it feels like to perceive through those eyes and it's I'm actually not trying to get it to go anywhere I just want that kids get to keep experiencing falling in love with trees for the first time and mothers get to keep falling in love with their kids and people get to fall in love and do poetry for the first time and get heartbroken and all the things the pot like it is intrinsically already meaningful without going anywhere and it's already beautiful and you know one of the other things I know y'all talked about is Peak experiences and one of the things I always felt is once you have had one of them like for me I remember I remember discreetly I've talked about before there was this one time I was watching a sunset and writing poetry to Nature and watching a sunset as a teenager and I remember the sunset was just so incredibly beautiful and I remember thinking if I had the choice if there is a spirit before this life if I had the choice to come here and incarnate and go through whatever painful things that I've went through my whole life just to get to have this one experience of color and vision and the wind and the insects in this moment would totally do it like I would take every pain in my whole life to have had this experience as opposed to no experience and then I'm like I've had that I've had so many of these experiences and one of them is worth incarnating for I've had so many of them and so it's like the fact that I will probably have more of them is gravy and it's like a ridiculous Beauty and abundance but that every that future life gets to keep having those and that other people get to have more of those is kind of more what I'm motivated by then they make us a better persons when we experience those things it it shifts you know something happens uh uh maybe just a little bit but something happens in a positive thing and shifts in our soul and iron carriers and maybe we behave a little better or a lot better I'm not sure I think the what's in it for me thing chills out you know and it's not that it doesn't reboot because we're complex people with lots of parts and there will be a pain body that reboots and so it's not like Enlightenment is a static thing and you have a Satori and then you never have a pain body boot again it does but there's something about even just thinking about and just being like there could have been no I no experience at all and there's experience and have been such amazing ones and and I feel this pretty much with every difficulty or trauma too is like when you've done the healing work with it you don't still feel messed up by the trauma or the pain but you do feel ongoingly benefited by the lessons and it's kind of like a lot of people don't have the resources or know how to do the healing so they never get the lessons and they're just always affected by the pain and that's a bummer but if one kind of has the resources knows how to work on it then the pain is temporary and the gifts are lasting and it's like this just beneficial asymmetry like this beautiful asymmetry where it's like yeah I just I'm a yes to the whole thing let's say yes to the whole thing yeah and there's there's a beautiful uh couple of lines that came out of San Quentin prison uh there's a project uh group guiding rage into pain which people work very intensely with with people many of them life as many of them have been murderers and work on life transformation their ideals the body side for aspiration the commitment is even if I stay in my in this prison for the rest of my life I'm going to do what I can to help people and one and one of them after after the and is a very intensive exploration of their pain and the trauma they've both caused and received and these are very traumatized people and there's a video of one of these sessions in which one of the one of the prisoners suddenly lights out lights up and says oh I get it hurt people hurt people and healed people heal people it's like oh oh it's so beautiful yeah I think they're both self-propagating yeah I would love to explore that with you Daniel uh we've gone long and far and deeper maybe that's the wrong word to explore the the darkness and the addiction and the way out of that and just what you said um Roger uh hurt people hurt people and healed people heal people and that's uh maybe that's a good place to wrap it uh for this evening I really enjoyed the conversation with both of you I think that the this podcast where you're exploring these topics and sharing with people is uh a really beautiful service and I'm honored to get to be here with you oh it's such a delight to anyone it's such a such a gift to be able to investigate at this step and go explore so thank you so much for this gift to to everyone who listens to the podcast and thank you so much for your life's work it's truly a gift Priceless we get to share this with thousands and thousands of God knows how many people that's tremendous that's just tremendous if there is a second time we come back to and explore that hurt people hurt people that there is some autopoetic trauma Force almost and there's also some kind of Auto poetic healing or integrative force that if you wanted to think of the light and dark sides of before so that's actually kind of a good way of thinking of it is the auto propagation of those things [Music] um and we wanted to explore that sometime maybe also if the listeners have thoughts or questions or topics coming from this that can inform it we can get to those next time too right well we'll we hereby extended Invitational listeners to let us know the questions you have for Daniel and uh I think you're implicitly suggesting you're open to coming back and we of course would love that and I know how does this would too so that's beautiful and again in regards to your father and mom if they're still on this plane and if not regards them anymore okay tell tell them they they deeply touched one old guy in Louisiana made a difference for him I'll send this podcast to them when it publishes Daniel thank you so much take care [Music]”

Beauty and aesthetic sensitivity are more fundamental than truth and goodness; truth and goodness only matter because beauty is—without intrinsic beauty in reality, there would be no motivation to know truly or to act well.

“the true and the good only matter because the beautiful is...or no I think I said truth and goodness only a matter of beauty is that the beauty was actually the fundamental thing if reality did not have intrinsic Beauty I wouldn't actually care to be good do it or to know it or to whatever there's something that is intrinsic that is deeper than the why”