Evan Thompson Discusses Enactivism, “Quantum Phenomenology”, Buddhist Exceptionalism, Etc.

(upbeat music) Welcome everybody, and we're up in Jake here. And I tell you how excited I am to be hosting our guest today, my friend Evan Thompson. We've been bringing emails back and forth, probably for six or seven months to arrange this and he's been extremely generous to give some of his time and offer his tremendous expertise and scholarship on these topics. So I can't wait to dive into some really juicy material in this upcoming session. But I of course want to introduce Evan and I will do that in a more formal way and then we're just gonna let this thing run and see where it takes us. So Evan Thompson is a professor of philosophy, the University of British Columbia, where he is also an associate member of the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Psychology. He's the author of many books, including waking, dreaming, being, self and consciousness and neuroscience meditation and philosophy, mind and life, biology, phenomenology and the sciences of mind and co-author of the embodied mind, cognitive science and human experience. His latest book and I really wanna talk a little bit about this at the very end of our program is provocatively entitled Why I Am Not A Bluest, which is the available for Yale Press in January. So Evan, thank you so much my dear friend for taking the time to join us. What a delight. - Thank you very much for inviting me. It's great to be here. - Well, I have to share with our audience, we met under the most interesting circumstances. You may recall it was this utterly unique event that was hosted by Richie David Sanemis, his amazing center for the investigation of healthy minds. And the reason I'm gonna say just a little bit about this is because the meeting was actually resonant with part of what we're doing and our nightclub charter, which I'll give you a brief review on. And for listeners, what we did here was that the rest of his home in the Sedale Lama, he hit asked Richie David Sanemis, who partake in an extraordinarily difficult study, both culturally and scientifically, and an effort to study what it depends on who's hooked on, which is a kind of post-death meditative absorption. This is wildly esoteric. And the collection was really extraordinary. We had neuroscientists, we had philosophers, we had Tibetan medical doctors, meditators, mystics, and basically anybody we could pull in off the street. It was an extraordinary event. And so I had the great good fortune of meeting you during that occasion. And I don't know about you, but that stands out for me is truly one of the inevitable events of my recent couple years. - Yeah, that was an amazing event. So I guess that was back in, like, I don't remember, 2010 or 2011 maybe. Yeah, and I wrote about it in the chapter on dying and death in my book, "Waking Dreamy Being," and that was an amazing event. Yeah, and that, as you say, that's where we met. - And I was back in the Madison about a year ago, and had a chance to hang out with her, she, and actually the anthropologist who is now on site, I'm not sure you're aware of this, and in India, with all the gadgetry that they have out there, trying to collect this data that, if and when, it can be substantiated and kind of Western ways, really, kind of the presence of his own, and it's the Dalai Lama, is a paradigm buster. I mean, it really does expand the kind of myopic lens that the West has on what mind is, and how it expresses the stuff on things like that. But anyway, maybe we can circle around that, that's such a fantastic topic, but I wanna get back to a couple other things with you to least launch this conversation. And one is, first of all, my friend, I want to applaud you for the extraordinary contributions that you've made, and certainly the influence you've done in my life. I think you're one of these rare beings who, possesses a truly open mind and has the ability to tolerate open questions, and very much in the spirit of your mentor, Francesco Borella, and you are kind of an exemplar of the scholar practitioner. You walk the talker, I should say, you sit the talk. And you know, you're text, I wanna start by talking a little bit about it, about it, about it, mind is leading to waking dreaming being, but waking dreaming being, if there was a core text that I had to recommend for our audience, this would be it, because this magnificent focus covers such an extraordinary array of topics, and is every page is just packed with insights that for our listeners, I cannot recommend this book to highly is, and I can't tell you how many times I've read it, I've studied it, and every time I go through it, I discover more. And so, let me just tell you, I mean, I'm very briefly what we're doing with our nightclub adventure, and then I'll turn most of this over to you. But part of what we're doing is designing a kind of an online international forum, virtual university, virtual monastery, whatever you wanna call it, where we can support the nocturnal adventures of on-iron-off, those who are willing to explore the nocturnal mind, which, today, is just subtle states of mind, that's what's revealed in the journey. And in the back of our nightclub, we have playfully what's referred to as night school, which is basically six kind of tracks, or curricula, where we create a container for this exploration. The first one is the science and medicine of sleep, then there's the daily meditations, which include a classic mindfulness, shamanth of a poshna, and then the practice of a wheelchair reform. And then we start this kind of four part, track of the nocturnal practices themselves, lucid dreaming, dream yoga, sleep yoga, and then Bartolio yoga. And then in my scheme of heaven, the way I kind of map these out is somewhat hey, galean approach, where dream yoga transcends, but includes lucid dreaming, sleep yoga transcends, but includes those two, and then Bartolio yoga transcends, but includes all three. So as that is some perpetuary comments, I would love to start with a brief summary, and I know it's difficult to summarize such a profound text, but the work that you co-authored with, Francesco Varela, the really eminent neuroscientist, and really the father of neurophenomenology, and then Elano Rache, the embodied mind, this book is really been a landmark text in the cognitive sciences. And if you could, Evan is kind of a prelude to where I want to take this conversation with you, is talk to us a little bit about the inactive view. What in activism really represents why is this such an original contribution? And in particular, as I hope to unpack with you, how we can use these inactive tenets to understand the construction of this thing we call self. So with that, a lot of reasonable place to start. - Yeah, that sounds great. So let me just start by thanking you for the very generous words you said about my writing. That really means a lot, and it's great to get that kind of feedback and response. It's very inspiring to hear something like that and to take that and go on in new writing and new work. So thank you for that. I really appreciate that. So with the book, The Embodied Mind, so that book actually, we began writing that book in the mid-1980s. 1986 is actually when we really first started writing Francisco Verella and I and Francisco Verella was a neuroscientist and a practicing Tibetan Buddhist, very pioneering scientist known for a lot of original theoretical and experimental work in a number of different areas. And the basic reason we started writing that book is that cognitive science was, you could say it was really emerging and exploding in a way in the 1980s. And by cognitive science, what we mean is the interdisciplinary examination of the mind and its relationship to the brain and the body using the tools of neuroscience and computer science and psychology and philosophy, linguistics. And one of the things that cognitive science was really making clear is that what we call the mind or the self isn't a thing. It's a collection of changing and interrelated processes and that's in a way a very profound insight but it wasn't being connected back to what mind and self are for us experientially or you could say phenomenologically in terms of how we live our experience and the various structures that our experience takes for us. And so we were concerned to build a bridge between the scientific perspective and the experiential perspective and then the question was, well, how exactly to do that? And that's where Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist meditation practice entered the story for us is that the Buddhist philosophical view of mind was always one that saw the mind as not a thing but as a collection of interrelated processes. And so we wanted to take, but that was grounded in an experiential perspective. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't a theoretical perspective, but it also had an experiential dimension. So we wanted to, we wanted to draw from the resources of that tradition in a way that could feed into an enriched cognitive science. And the way that that culminated for us in this idea of an action was to kind of develop a line of argument drawing on both cognitive science and what it's thought where instead of seeing the self as something fixed and the world is something fixed and the relationship between them being the self is representing an independent outside world to see them as both interdependent and co-emergent, where meaning was as we say enacted or created through that interdependency. So the way I just stated it now is very abstract, but we tried to illustrate that through a whole bunch of concrete examples in how perception works, how action works. And we use the term "enaction" to mean you could say cognition as embodied sense-making rather than as the representation of an independent outside world by an independent inside mind. Yeah, it's amazing. And I don't know, I guess you're already hitting on so many topics that we could really start to riff on one is this, you know, this idea of, I mean, in a very real way, I think you could argue and you do in embodied mind when you bring independence of a dependent origination in the 12th Madanhas, this is another way to talk about dependent origination/emptiness, kind of joining the best of the East and the West and this somewhat unsettling notion about how fundamentally nothing is fixed. It's not just self or other, it's any phenomenal display rises in this vast interconnected nexus of causes and conditions. And this, you know, as you were also pointing out, even less we think this is some like abstract philosophical parlor game, this has tremendous implications for how we live our lives and how we relate to ourselves and others. And also, you know, kind of the double entendre of how it is that we literally make sense of reality that, and this is where I want to take this idea of an activism and kind of both this topic and to the practicalities of our lives, this process of that you talk about quite extensively and or making journey meaning of I making, how it is that we go out and usually a completely unconscious I.e. non-loosening way and are constantly co-creating our entire reality, both self and other, in this kind of elegant dance, however unconscious it may be, that can either give rise to a great deal of suffering if it remains unconscious because then we're just kind of prisoners of this process or if we can bring these unconscious processes into the light of awareness, and this is for me is how I use the word lucidity. I usually, when I play with lucid dreams, I'm more just a lucid principle, the lucidity principle together, the awareness principle. So let's go a little bit further with this. Let's talk a little bit about how it is neurologically and even, you know, in the resulting phenomenonological expression, how it is that we literally go about making sense of our world and unaware that we're actually doing so. Yeah, so well, that's a huge topic. So the way that I come at that in waking dreaming being is really through, as you say, thinking about how our sense of self is constructed. And I use the term "I" making for that, and that's a, that's actually a more or less literal rendition of the Sanskrit term aham kara, which is used throughout different Indian philosophical systems, understood in different ways by those different systems, but generally refers to the how the sense of "I" is constituted or created or you might say dynamically put together. And in waking dreaming being, what I'm specifically interested in is how our sense of having or being a self shifts across the whole sweep-wake cycle of consciousness. So for example, so the framework I use to talk about this is to distinguish, and here again, I'm drawing this from from Indian philosophical traditions, is to distinguish between awareness, the changing contents of awareness, and then ways that various contents get identified with as "I" or "me" or "mine" and others as "not me" or "not I" or "not mine". So there's a kind of division or cut made within awareness with regard to contents that are identified with as self and those that are then, you could say, disidentified with as as not self. And what I'm interested in is how that, I see that as a dynamic process and so how that changes across, let's say, waking perception where when you're very much engrossed in say a kind of task that requires perception and movement, and you know it might be driving or it might be playing tennis or it might be tapping at your computer, you have this kind of an absorbed sense of self-wood that's very much grounded on the feeling of the body as self. But then if you start daydreaming or mind wandering, then the contents that you're generating are mental contents that are, you could say, decoupled from that immediate perceptual context and that are drawing on images from memory, images that you project into the future, and they're purely mental images, but you identify with them as something that is you, both in terms of you could say what's presented in the image, so you might have an image of yourself in memory, but also the experience of imaging as a mental process. It feels as if it's yours, but it's happening in this kind of mental arena that psychologists call mental time travel, where you project yourself into the past or forward into the future, and of course, meditators are very familiar with this, so if you're sitting in meditation and maybe you're practicing a kind of mindfulness of breathing, well as we all know, you know the mind generates its own kind of spontaneous contents, and many of them are images of things that you immediately feel affectively and cognitively identify as self, but they're within this mentally created space that projects you into the past or projects you into the into the future, so that's sort of one dynamic of eye making in the, just in the waking state, which is the difference between you might say sort of absorbed embodied activity with a very bodily grounded sense of self, and then a sense of self that's like the mental spinning of a tale or of a story, and then we can think about what happens as you start to feel drowsy and as you fall asleep, and that might happen in ordinary night sleep, or it might happen in, say, the context of sitting meditation, and they're, especially if we are thinking of trying to be as attentive to what happens as possible, so not just kind of crashing into sleep, but being very attentive to the way that the transition from waking into sleeping is actually quite extended and has a sort of fine-grained texture that we can examine, that psychologist called the hypnogodgic state, the state meeting into sleep, whether we have the same kind of mental content generation process happening, but there's a sense of absorption and a kind of dissolution of self other boundaries that happens, what some psychologists call a kind of dissolving of of ego boundaries, so that sense of eye making then is in a way you might say it's shifting or it's coming apart so that it's not this very subject object kind of structured experience, it's more of an absorbed, almost rolling, you might say spellbound or kind of fascination with images, and then, there's a drop into sleep, which is a kind of, you might say a kind of blackout as it were, and then in the dream state, if it's a vivid, imagistic dream, that sense of the word dream, then that sense of self re-emerges, where again, there's a distinction between what's self and not self, but now within the context of the dream state, but the dream state is, of course, entirely and mentally generated content. And then in Erlusegryne, you become aware of that. And so the sense of self shifts again. So these are the, this is the question. This is what the term I'm making for me really encompasses is a way of tracking all of those changes in the sense of self and how they're very much being dynamically created through mental activity across the sleep wake cycle. Yeah, that's fantastic. It's really exactly common with what my aspirations are with our little my club venture because really, you know, I there's a lot of kind of stealth help or code word going on with what we're doing, you know, darkness is a code word for ignorance in conscious mind, you see the deep of code word for awareness, dream. And this is what I like to talk to you a little bit later because you talk and ask this question and attempt to answer it in your book, you know, what is dream? I want level for me, dream is manifestation of mind. But what I think is so kind of resonant here is this is exactly the way I use these nocturnal practices as, you know, excuses in the right word, that is a medium to explore the construction and deconstruction of the self sense is that transitions to these different levels of integration and disintegration and just to come back to something you said at the outset, I believe this kind of self othering self and that self distinction is also something that Francisco was starting to explore towards the end of his life when he was working with kind of the deeper iterations of the, you could say the immunology principle and how it is that, you know, well, we know it's biological immunology may have, you know, kind of philosophical applications. But what I want to talk to you a little bit here is to me what it seems like, maybe this is one way to look at it and I'll see if we can see this lands with you, is one way I talk about ego is ego is exclusive identification with form and one thing I'm hearing when you're speaking this way, I mean, is that in a certain sense when we go from the illusion of a fully constituted self here in the Freudian sense, you know, ego is first and foremost a body ego and we fall asleep where, you know, ego is provisionally falling apart because this identification with somatic physical form is falling apart, but the way I look at it now, especially in these kind of liminal dreaming states, which is a new term sometimes used for the hemagogic space, it's almost as if the sense of self is being handed off from growth to subtle to very subtle form is ego disintegrates from as the exclusive identification without a form, then the baton so to speak is handed to, you know, imagistic or so-called mental content until that eventually dissolves and one loses consciousness altogether and the non-experience of the dreamless state and then of course the whole thing is kind of reconstitute is we come out from that and kind of reconfigure everything back together. But to me, would it be a fair thing to say Evan that the common denominator throughout this entire cascade is in fact either gross or subtle levels of identification with form? I mean, is that one way to talk about what you're just referring to? Yeah, no, very much so, I think, I mean, you could use the word form. I tend to talk about it in terms of identifications with different kinds of contents, mental contents or contents of awareness. And though, I mean, but those contents have, you know, various kinds of forms, so they might be, you know, if we're thinking of, say, the hemagogic state, they can be visual images, they can be images in other sense modalities, they can be thought forms. And of course, all of those kinds of contents and forms reappear in the dream state. And then there's an interesting question about sleep states that are dreamless where you may have other kinds of subtle forms that don't really make up a dream in the sense of an immersive experience of being in an immersive space that has some sense of time and sense of place that would be the case for a sort of typical imagistic dream. But there may be other, you know, subtler forms of contents that are present. And still, there's, I mean, it's an interesting question to ask, you know, what exactly the sense of eye or subjectivity is like for those, for those subtler forms, as you call them, or subtler contents. And so actually part of what I talk about in waking dreaming being is the whole nature of dreamless sleep or deep sleep, both from a physiological perspective and from a experiential perspective. Because the standard sort of line in neuroscience that we often hear is that, well, dreamless sleep is a blackout state. It's a state of absence of consciousness. And if you actually look at what the neuroscience evidence is and what people mean when they say that, it's not so straightforward at all. It's the state of dreamless sleep is not one thing. There are many sort of substates and different kinds of forms or contents and qualities. And it's not one thing in terms of what the brain is doing. And if you wake people up from that state and you ask them to describe their experience, you get different kinds of reports depending on the questions you ask. So that's a complicated realm in and of itself. Whereas you say the forms are not gross in the sense of kind of course, they're much subtler. Yeah, and really here, you know, it's interesting to me, where it comes to mind is what Ramana Harshi wants, what's famously and cryptically said, really when I take it to heart almost puts the Western view of reality completely up on its head where he said that which does not exist in deep dreamless sleep is not real. And so, you know, the implication there is that, well, what really does exist, quote unquote, is one could argue, "formless awareness." And in that sense, that is, and as you mentioned in your book, especially as a representative of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, I mean, that state is referred to sometimes actually as the causal state. I mean, it is from that formlessness out of which everything then arises. And then what happens in the West, at least from island's evidence is this kind of wake centrity, this kind of ontological supremacy that we attribute to the waking state, because that's fundamentally the state that we have the most control over, at least allegedly. And when that control falls apart as we fall asleep, we tend to dismiss these more subtle states simply because we're not lucid to them. And so, the reason I'm saying this is that part of the chart of these internal meditations is that if in fact we can maintain lucidity, perend awareness as we drop into these states, we realize this kind of ultimate democracy of the mind, what the Buddhist tradition refers to as one taste for the great equanimity, kind of the equanimous nature of consciousness to all these different states. And that's what I find just fantastically interesting is to see how it is that we come online in the morning, literally go offline in the morning, or I should say at night, and then how each one of these experiences that we have access to every single night can bring a greater sense of awareness and appreciation. And as you see on your book, this is what's so beautiful, gives us the opportunity to really be more fully human. I mean, on one level, if we only attribute reality to the one third of what's available to us temporarily, not categorically, not temporarily, in other words, the waking state, we're leaving out two-thirds of reality. And so I think this fullness that you're alluding to could really be explored using the meaning of these doctrinal practices. And obviously, the really subtle daytime meditations that support them. So I just wanted to toss that into the mix. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm very sympathetic with that. Of course, I mean, I think that William James in his lectures on the varieties of religious experience in his chapter on mysticism, he has this wonderful statement that the ordinary waking state is just this very limited kind of slice of a much, much wider spectrum of consciousness and that he says something like it's the filmiest of screens that separates the waking state from all of these other states. And all of these other states include the ones that we cycle through on a daily basis as we fall asleep and as we dream or as we practice or spontaneously have lucid dreams as we descend into the depths of sleep and then as we reemerge into awakening. So I think that that's exactly right. I think there's an interesting difference in perspective. I mean, as you say, there's a kind of orientation that we're culturally very familiar with. But that privileges the waking state. Whereas when Ramana Maharshi speaks in that way that you quoted, you know, that's very much reflecting. Well, in his case, really, I would say probably a kind of yoga Vedantic perspective where what happens in deep sleep is you return to sleep. turn into a kind of ground state of consciousness that is, as you say, causal in the sense that's, that's kind of the fundamental level like a zero energy state in physics, and then the waking state and the dreaming state are sort of excited states out of that low energy state, which is what's present in deep sleep. And so a tradition like Vedanta and yoga, you could say prioritize that state because it's what you descend through in order to experience, you could say the fullness of being or brahma, and if we're talking about it in a, of Vedanta or yoga discourse. And of course, there are, some versions of Buddhism are not so sympathetic to that idea, but then other, you know, other developments of Buddhism are much, much closer to that. So that's an interesting cultural difference. - Yeah, and it's interesting, and also Matthew Walker, I don't know if you read his quite compelling book, "Why We Sleep." He goes so far as to say something quite compelling where he says it's, perhaps worth hypothesizing that the sleep state is really even from a neurological point of view, the primary state. And in a certain sense, you know, kind of resonant with exactly what we're talking about here, that even the dreaming state, let alone, what we call waking consciousness, are, you know, just expressions of this more foundational state. And one of the reasons he says that is because there's so much repair that has to take place when we spend so much time lost in the waking state. And in other words, if you don't sleep, you die. And the less you sleep, the shorter you live. And so he makes this really quite courageous and compelling, pervisional argument that even from a Western point of view, the sleep state may in fact be the foundational state. Again, it certainly speaks to my understanding of these doctoral practices. And as we know, dipping into the really deep end of the pool, this of course is one of the tenets of Bartolio Ga, that this is kind of a primordial bed of mind that we return to in the Tibetan term, you know, the dream at the end of times, the way they talk about death. We plot back into this dream state in what's referred to as the luminous bar of Dhamma Ta. That's exactly what you was trying to, you can just try to establish with this what took on project. But let me turn to this. One of the most compelling things, really helpful things in your book is this notion that you talked about of quantum phenomenology. I thought that was really elegant because what it suggests is kind of the increased refinement of the mind through intellectual study, through meditation practice, you know, kind of really typified in your book altogether, which was so elegant and articulate, that allows us to make these very subtle distinctions between levels of mind and experience. And otherwise the gross mind just glosses over. I would argue largely because of the speed, but you know, the kind of the raw velocity of the mind. And one of the things I want you to talk to our audience about Evan, this is really interesting notion in the philosophical arena, the difference between access, consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness. I think that's an incredibly important distinction for people who explore these subtle, not eternal states of mind, that can give them some sense of inspiration, that they're actually maybe more than going on than meets the outbound eye. So talk to us a little bit about this wonderful distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness. How it plays out in this domain. - Yeah, so this is a distinction that cognitive scientists and philosophers make between two different senses of consciousness or two different senses of being conscious. So one sense of conscious is that you are, you might say, felt awareness. So there is a feeling of awareness with some qualitative character to it, and that's phenomenal consciousness. So phenomenal here means things are appear or seem or have some kind of qualitative character. And then there's another sense of consciousness, which is your ability to access and mentally use or put to work in various contents of the mind, cognitive access or access consciousness. And these two things are interrelated in the sense that right now I'm feeling certain things and I can talk about them and describe them to you. And I can reflect on them and I can decide to shift my attention to one thing that I feel versus another thing that I feel. So those kind of cognitive activities have to do with what is accessible to me experientially. But there may be aspects of my felt awareness that are not immediately accessible to me and that I would need to in some sense learn how to gain access to. And I think people who are familiar with meditation practice or even with the idea of just gaining increased awareness of your dreams would have an intuitive sense of the distinction I'm making. So one of the things people often say, oh well, I don't dream very much. Or I don't remember my dreams. And there are various kinds of practices or techniques who can give people to gain more dream consciousness or dream awareness. And the idea is that well, actually dreaming is something that maybe not for absolutely everybody, but for most people happens in the night. But there's very little cognitive access to it. It's dreams are rolling experiences that are often then forgotten. But if you wake yourself up periodically in the night and you write down your dreams and you practice, you can gain a kind of increased, your dreams can become more accessible to you experientially. So that's the idea basically between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousnesses. One is the feeling of awareness, the feeling of being aware. And the other is the access that you have to that through things like attention and memory and reflection. And one of the very interesting questions just to go back to our earlier mention of states of sleep that are deep or dreamless is it's an interesting question. If we just say consciousness is absent in dreamless sleep as some neuroscience is sort of do, not all do this 'cause there's increased awareness that this is a complicated issue. But when somebody says, well, dreamless sleep is a blackout state because when you wake people up and you ask them what's going through their minds, they don't report anything. Well, that statement, they don't report anything. That confounds two different senses of consciousness. One is phenomenal awareness and the other is access consciousness because it may be that in the process of waking up, they are losing access to something that actually was felt awareness that was happening sort of rolling in the minute or in the moment, but then upon awakening and the transition from one state to another, there's an inability to access it. And that right there then means that we have an interesting question from even from a scientific perspective, which is well, how might we disentangle these different senses of consciousness in order to get a more fine-grained view of what exactly might be accessible versus inaccessible, but nonetheless felt in the moment, or in a moment by moment, in a moment by moment way. - Yeah, exactly. And this is where we can launch into yet another, I think quite important distinction using this kind of quantum phenomenological approach that has to do, and this is where I want to test them on my ideas against you here at Infra bit, is I think the critically important, but very subtle difference between consciousness and awareness or consciousness and wisdom. And several things came to mind, and then I'll come back to the, kind of, it gemologically, why I think this is so foundational. And that is that when we fall into deep dreamlessly, dreamless is formless. And if we associate ego with exclusive identification with form, it reminds me of something that Trump Ramishai once said, ego cannot attend its own funeral. And that if ego is exclusive identification with form, you run into a formless dimension, then I would argue that there is in fact a legitimate claim that consciousness, as I define it, is in fact absent, which is one reason we go unconscious. And this is where I want to tie in, what I believe is a really important distinction from the Yolkachara tradition, you refer to the Yolkachara teachings quite frequently in your book. But there's one thing there that I think is really worth talking about, and that is in fact the difference between Janana and Visjanana. So Janana, Janana, Janana, is awareness, non-dualistic, knowing in the deep sense, the bitch now that you put the pre-frax in front of it, the vi is, means bifurcated, fractured or separated. And so the implication is that consciousness is in fact a type of fractured wisdom. And so I would say that we go on consciousness because consciousness really only operates in this kind of dualistic way. And when we're experiencing, as you mentioned in your book, it's not like we're experiencing nothingness, we're experiencing no thingness. And from a thing oriented perspective, IE the ego, that's no experience whatsoever, which is why I think the untrained mind blacks out. But for advanced yogic practitioners who work with non-dualistic medications, who work with shanana, then in fact when they drop into that state, I would argue this is one reason yoga-nidra in the Tibetan scheme is called luminosity yoga, that mind actually lights up in the foundational light of the mind itself. So I'm wondering how that speaks to you. I have a little bit more I want to take this to, but I'm wondering if that lands with you. Yeah, I mean that's my immediate response to that is to be very resonant to it or sympathetic with it. I mean so partly it depends on how we're using the words, consciousness and awareness and so on. In waking dreaming being, I use the word consciousness to mean these three things, awareness, identification with contents of awareness and, sorry, awareness, changing contents of awareness and identification with contents of awareness or consciousness means all those three. So then in a state like deep sleep, the question then for me is whether or dreamless sleep is whether there's still a subtler process of identification that's happening. And if there is, then you could say there's a kind of minimal sense of self or minimal self-wood. If there isn't and it's completely selfless, then we might say that it's awareness, absent of changing forms and contents, and absent of identification and that's in effect what you're describing when you talk about, you know, Tibetan ideas of luminosity or pure jianna, pure awareness. And I think there it's the discussion. So I mean the easy thing to say is I'm very resonant to those subtleties and to those distinctions. I think the complicated issue is that those frameworks coming out of contemplative traditions, I would want to be cautious about reading them as straightforwardly phenomenological. In the sense that they are direct as we're printouts or readouts of somebody's experience, because those frameworks are also, you could say normative, I would say religious ones that are meant to orient us on a transformative path. And in that sense, they are prescriptive concepts, not simply descriptive ones. So I think we need to sort of need to tread cautiously around those ideas and not just immediately flatten them into, oh, so this is a kind of descriptive experiential concept. This is actually related to things I talk about in my new book, why I'm not a Buddhist. But we don't need to go there yet. So all of that is kind of how I would respond to the things that you're saying. I mean the other thing I would say is that although I myself am very, you know, I'm very, as I say, resonant or sympathetic to those ideas as they're articulated, say in Yogacara or in different terminology and in Advaita Badanta, there are other, you know, contemplative philosophical systems and perspectives say within Buddhism that reject those ideas. For example, Teravata Buddhism doesn't really talk about that idea of a kind of pure non-dual, non-discriminative luminosity of awareness. I mean, some people read the idea of Bhavanga, the sort of life continuum consciousness that way. But usually the standard view within, say, Teravata is that consciousness always has a subject object structure and the idea of a kind of pure awareness without a subject object structure isn't really something we see in that way in that tradition. So I'm not taking sides here. I'm just saying that, you know, there's a lot of different perspectives on these questions. Yeah, and that's also, I think, where you probably point out in your book where his whole name is the Dalai Lama says that when we have these kinds of, this obviously is a very interesting, almost political issue within the tradition itself, that when we have these types of discussions, obviously he would say this because he is a Vajrayana that we kind of deferred to the highest stage, but that becomes well what's the highest stage then? And he says there, you know, it would be descriptions from the Vajrayana point of view. So that enters into a completely different point. It's not so are you saying that Evan? I just want to make sure I understand. So when you're talking about the difference between kind of descriptive versus prescriptive, are you, is this a polite way of saying that these could be hypothetical states or say me a little bit more about that distinction that, you know, because when I look at it, I think this again, it comes back to this kind of quantum phenomenology thing is in the deep dreamless state, it's not, it's not just one state. There are there are degrees of increasing subtlety. So for instance, as you know from the yoga chart perspective, when you drop into deep dreamless sleep, you could either be in residing in the alia, Vajrayana, the eighth consciousness, or if you are a complete yogic master, then you actually substand that and rest in what some scholars provisionally refer to as the ninth consciousness, which of course would be correlative with like clear light mind or the pure utterly foremost awareness that we're talking about. But I'm back to this issue of descriptive versus prescriptive and whether you are actually saying that some of these states are hypothetical, are you going so far as to say that or are you trying to kind of throw out a word of caution? I would say I'm throwing out a word of caution. So then the question is, well, why am I throwing out the word of caution? And so let me try to describe the sort of complicated terrain as I see it. So on the one hand, we have, let's call it a scriptural tradition, where we have we have scriptures of many different kinds. We have sutras, religious texts, we have philosophical texts, where we have taxonomies and systems and philosophical psychological distinctions and arguments made. And then we have, I suppose we could call them practice texts, which are meant to give instructions on how to engage in one or another kind of contemplative practice. And all of these texts, they require interpretation and they are functioning in different contexts. So even a practice text is one that sort of sets things up in a certain, you might say, rhetorical way, where previous scriptures have to be acknowledged and a particular perspective is being put forward. And these texts don't, they're not, you know, they're not like straightforward how-to manuals in the way that we Westerners think of how-to manuals, you know, like meditation for dummy or something like that, right? They're very complicated literary creations in a way. So we don't want to go into them and sort of literally think, oh, this is a straightforward description of an experience because what's being described as being presented in a very rich philosophical scriptural, you might even say the "turgical way" and they're being presented from a perspective, as you just said, in the case of the Dalai Lama, where some systems are seen as higher than others. And no individual contemplative teacher traditionally will say, oh, I've experienced X and Y because that's like, that's, that's pride, that's arrogance, that's bad form. You're not supposed to do that. So all of it is to say that we have to tread cautiously in how we treat the materials. Now I'm not, I'm not trying to say that I'm not asserting, oh, it's all high hypothetical. I'm simply saying we need to be very cautious. And you know, in the meeting where you and I met, the Tukedon meeting, this, you know, this really came out as a kind of issue of cross-cultural negotiation where the idea of a consciousness or let's say a state of awareness at the moment of death or after death, depending on what death means, either biologically or you might say philosophically or religiously, it's not like we can just sort of literally and straightforwardly interpret what that is. We have to, you know, really triangulate between anthropology and practice and philosophy and science to bring this complicated thing into view. So that's really what I'm saying. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And thank you so much for bringing that because I think that's one of your great contributions, my friend, to find my say, is your ability with your capacities to really, you know, part of the French bring out the bullshit meter and just take really, let's take a really closer, more honest look at the confirmation biases that we have, all these kind of subliminal redistributions we have that we unwittingly just continue to pull over our own eyes. And so, you know, even in the in the tantric languages, they talk a lot about self-secrets or twilight languages where exactly what you're talking about, where some of these texts, especially the tantras, are intentionally cryptic, they have to be decoded. And it's the kind of the purview of the meditation master to provide you with those access codes. So you can then actually unpack these things for yourself. And as you point out in your book, I thought one of the really sominal contributions in the Bartow chapter is exactly what you're talking about here. It is a very important distinction that you make between these phenomenological, alleged phenomenological experiences, especially when we die. And what you refer to as ritualized phenomenology, I thought that was just absolutely brilliant. That, you know, we have this tendency, it's a little bit like, I mean, my language for this is the the near enemy of articulation is reification, that it's super easy. They take the grasping tendencies of the egoic mind and to latch onto these descriptions is immutable really, just portraits of what's actually taking place. And so bringing it out of that and re-instituating it, re-contextualizing it in this larger framework that you're talking about, I just think there's a very honest way to look at virtually anything. And it brings to me about a quality of humility, a quality open-mindedness, kind of integral approaches to thinking, systemic or holistic ways, where everything is context dependent. I mean, the postmodernists have definitely contributed to that. Everything is situated. And if we can understand those situational frameworks in those contexts, then we can bring an honest lens to what's really happening. And so I really applaud you for your willingness to go after in that sense both of the East and the West in this regard, because I was having a fruitful conversation with Robert Thurman not too long ago. And we were both talking about how blind both the East and the West can be to their various forms of reductionism, like in the West. There's a tendency to reduce everything to frisky dirt, to materialistic bases. And in the East, there's an unwitting tendency to reduce everything into karma. For that matter, you just remind the mind only schools, I think, fall prey to this type of trap. And so I'm so grateful for your willingness. And it takes a lot of guts to do this because you're setting yourself up as a target from both arena, right? Yeah, well, I appreciate you're saying that. And that's very encouraging to hear. But I definitely, I mean, sometimes it is, it does set you up from criticisms from multiple sides, which is fine. I'm a philosopher and we thrive on criticism. So that's okay. But it's a plea for complexity. It's a plea for treading cautiously. And a reminder that we're in a culturally very unique and I would say both precarious and precious situation and the sense that we have unprecedented access to different cultural traditions and different knowledge systems you might say, contemplative philosophical, scientific. And we don't just want to sort of throw everything into one, you know, mishmash. We really want to, you know, do justice to treating all of these elements carefully and, you know, with the integrity that they deserve. And, you know, that's very much what I try to do in waking dreaming being is to, as my mentor, Francesco Verellisette, is to stay with the open question and kind of keep that openness. Yeah. And so, and so with that in mind, very practically. So with the listeners and our community, we have, I think, a pretty eclectic group, but we have a lot of practitioner spiritual meditators on the mic. How would you advise, you know, I guess it's a way to ask you to summarize what you're saying, because I personally think this is really important. I mean, I see, I mean, here's a very practical case in point. I teach in various locations, you know, I've been doing so for many, many years. And I find people come up to me 10, 15, sometimes even 20 years after I first met them at some event, kind of struggling, wrestling with precisely the same issue they had 20 years ago. And they go see their meditation instructor, I mean, this is just kind of an archetype. The meditation instructor says, oh, you need to meditate harder or you're doing the wrong type of meditation or whatever. And to me, I think that's a really common problem. There's very big people and people can get really stuck and waste a lot of years kind of barking up the wrong tree. So as an advisor to help bring out blind spots, what would you advise to spiritual practitioners altogether to to maintain this kind of larger aperture of awareness and greater sense of humility and openness for other systems to benefit them and the life? That's an interesting question. I mean, I'm not sure there's any kind of one prescription there because, you know, people are so different and circumstances are unique and it's not a kind of one-size-fits-all thing. I mean, I can say that at least based on my own experience, having grown up as a kid in a commune in the 1970s and being exposed to different spiritual teachers and kind of having to sort of find my way through a lot of that. I think that there's a way in which in our culture meditation gets, you might say privatized or individualized and people kind of almost treat it. I mean, this is an extreme, but it gets treated like another self-help commodity and I really think, you know, connectedness socially is very important. I think the idea that it, you know, spiritual practice should just be about what happens to you when you're meditating on the cushion and the different states that you might experience or the different qualities of mind you might experience. I think that in and of itself is a kind of trap. I think I think it's really important to remember that, you know, we're human beings, we're in communities. It's about helping each other and interconnectedness and compassion. And I think, unless that larger kind of social, you could say ethical framework is in place, that the meditation just becomes like, another privatized thing and, you know, it can take you down all sorts of roads that I think in the larger scheme of things are not really so beneficial. Yeah, I'm reminded there of what almost age almost said so famously, at least famously to me when he said, you know, when many spiritual practitioners set out on their path, they're unwittingly setting out for heaven that it's an unconscious ecithemancy. And so this is an incredibly important point. Tick-knocked on sometimes is paying on this is that, you know, the next Buddha is the Sangha. And, you know, in the Buddhist community, as you know, we take refuge in three jewels, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. And most people, I'm sure you know this one, haven't, most people are pretty okay with taking refuge in the Buddha and the Dharma, but they are not okay in taking refuge with the Sangha. And I would argue just as you're putting forth, that may be the most important one to take refuge in because they're the ones, I mean, they're going to call you on your stuff, they're going to reflect your neurosis and your wisdom to you, and they're going to pull you out of your comfort zone. Because otherwise, these practices are just ways to kind of plot into very delicious kind of psychospiritual bubble baths where we may just basically be looking for a greater sense of comfort and instead of reality, which is I think fundamentally what these people practice is in light. So having your own experience, have you been challenged by the community and find yourself willing to accept that challenge by stepping off the Christians so sweet and into the community? Well, I've, I mean, I've existed or existed. I've sort of worked and lived in different kinds of communities and they've all been really important to me. So one community is the academic community where I do my research and where teaching is really important to me. I find teaching extremely important because students reflect back to you all sorts of things and that's a kind of consummate evolving thing that's, that's very important to me. I grew up in like, you know, an alternative community and, and that experience, you know, shaped me in a lot of ways from a very young age. I've worked with different kinds of alternative institutions like the Mind and Life Institute, for example. And so I, I find having those like diversity of contexts really important because it means I'm not sort of just sliding into one group and only talking to, to one group. And, and this is just in terms of my own personal experience of what, of what's been important to me. I would say in terms of the, in terms of like specifically having to do with meditation. I mean, I don't self identify as a Buddhist. So I'm not, you know, I don't, I don't belong to a Buddhist Sangha. Although I've worked with different Buddhist groups on different Buddhist Sanghas over the years. But I do have a, you know, I do have a personal meditation practice that's evolved through, through different kinds of practices that I've, that I've learned or, or, or groups that I've participated within some, some Buddhist, some, some yoga, Vedanta, different, different kinds of, of practices from those, from those different groups. I also, and just, this is just now me speaking purely personally about my own experiences and meant to be a prescriptor for anybody. But I also, for, for many years, have practiced Tai Chi and standing meditation coming from, from Taoist traditions of standing practice. And I, personally, just in terms of like what works for me, find that type of practice very usefully balanced with sitting practice. So there's a kind of standard, Taoist or Chinese statement, which is to bring the, the calmness and quietude and stillness of sitting practice into movement practice and to bring the energy of movement practice into sitting practice and, and standing meditation as a form, or both of those kind of intersect. And I find that a very rich and rewarding practice. So it's a, it's a kind of waking state practice. It's, it's standing so it's more energetically demanding than, than sitting. It's a kind of open awareness rather than a focused concentration. And so it's, it's in a way more engaged, you could say with, with the world as, you know, as presented in the alert waking state. And I, I find that really very important just for, just for kind of balance. So that's, that's not so much about community. That's just more about, although I, I do work with, you know, other practitioners and, and a teacher for, for that practice. But that's more just about styles of practice and what I've personally found beneficial. I have to echo you there, because it's very much the, you know, the kind of the charter underneath, even the internal practices is the narrative of, you know, the coquial expression of yoga and stretching, you know, stretching awareness to all states. And, and again, it's a very easy kind of default. If you only associate on meditation with sitting, where does your meditative mind go when you get off the cushion and into your life? You leave that awareness back on the cushion. And so to me, these not, these so-called internal practices, as I refer to them, and also their, their sister, or diurnal correlate, you know, the practice of, the individual's reform is very in resonant with what you're saying, where to me, it's like, stretch your awareness to all states so that your entire life becomes your practice, you know, in a real way, to me, sitting meditation is remedial work. It's, it's, it's practicing in an incubator. But, ah, you know, if you want to grow up and out, you can't really live your life in an incubator. And so, standing practice, you know, the other practice is sanction, so to speak, I'm a study patonist, you try out walking meditation, lying down meditation, fundamentally, um, learning how to extend the qualities into all states. And, and again, this is kind of encapsulated in these internal practices themselves. It's not just what you do during the day. I mean, wherever you go, there you are, right? You know, I mean, you have your mind under any circumstance. Why can you not, in fact, bring the qualities of your meditative mind to be absolutely everything that you do. And so, with that said, Evan, do you engage, you, you write so eloquently about lucid dreaming and dream yoga? Is that part of your curriculum? And do you still engage in those types of adventures? Yeah. So, I would say right now, um, I've been less, specifically focused on that. So, when I was writing waking dreaming, I was, I was really working with that a lot, um, in a, in a, in a very, I suppose you could say, discipline daily or nightly, or nightly way. And, um, I did some, I did some meditation retreats around that. I did a, I did a, a dream yoga retreat with Alan Wallace, um, I was working on that, on that, on that book. Um, and now I would say, uh, I haven't been, I haven't been specifically as focused on that. I mean, I would say, in terms of just my own like dream life that I spontaneously have lucid dream experiences. Um, I reasonably frequently, I guess. Um, and they're always, they're always interesting and important moments that I, that I find valuable, but I haven't been working as, it has just disciplined a way, I guess you could say with that in, in recent years. But when I was writing waking dreaming being, I was, I was very much, uh, I was very much concerned with that. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. So I wanted to, um, let's see, what I, I wanted to talk to you about. Oh yeah. Um, just switching gears a little bit. I want to come back to some of the kind of personal things before we close. But one of my favorite questions these days, I get these kind of pet peeve questions. And I'm curious how, how you would, um, play with this one? But it's a certain way one kind of summary statement of Eastern versus Western approaches to, to mine and reality. And, and the question therefore would be from your understanding and experience, Evan, would you say that the universe exists within the mind or the mind exists within the universe? Is there a kind of a primacy that you would attribute one over the other? Do they both have valid, um, you know, trajectories in your own experience? That's a huge question. Um, I mean, huge just because, uh, there are so many different philosophical grappling with that question, you know, in, in Asian philosophical traditions, where, where, within Asia, they say different things, you know, India, China, different, different schools within those cultures have different takes on this. And of course, in Western philosophy, it's a, you know, longstanding topic of debate. Um, so, you know, I would, I would say that my own, um, approach to that question, um, is, is one that looks at, let's say, interdependency. So for me, um, whenever we're talking about, uh, anything in the world or the world as a whole, the cosmos, um, we're doing that in a way that presupposes the, the givenness of that world to awareness. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to talk about it. We wouldn't be able to frame it as a question. And, um, at the same time that it doesn't follow from that that the world or the cosmos is somehow inside consciousness. Consciousness is not a container. It's not a box in, in that sense. That's like the wrong, sort of spatial metaphor or geometry. So I see it as a kind of circularity or interdependence where you emphasize one and you sort of explore it, whether it's, let's say, mind or world. And in doing that, you're going to be led to the other one in a kind of like, mobius strip loop. And you can't really, uh, reduce one to the other that you're, you're, you're in this, you're in this loop of each one folding back on the other. I think that's really beautiful because again, this is a subtle form of reductionism. I mean, I, I, I see this quite a bit in the non-dual communities, whether it's Nanduusha and Tantra. I mean, you name it. Nandu, Nanduusha trajectories altogether. They tend to profess that, you know, it is in fact, the university exists within the mind. But then, oh, boy, you know, you got a horse that's even there. What, when you start, obviously you have to take a part what does this thing called mine even mean in that regard? And so I love that kind of flexibility that it really, let's say it's context-dependent, but that there's room for both of those. They both have their own valid stance, depending on the way one actually was a lex to look at the world. But so just to make sure I walk away with this one with clarity, so in contrast to distinction to the non-dual assertion, so you would not kind of profess the superiority of the view that the universe exists within mine. Or actually, what I would say, a universe exists as a display of the mind. Is that-- Yeah, I wouldn't be comfortable with putting it that way. I think that that takes a complicated, interdependent knot or mobius strip, if you want to use that image. And tries to cut it in a way that flattens it out and puts one thing as primary in a way that I think generates all sorts of philosophical problems, but also-- I'm not sure what the right word is, but it can lead to a kind of arrogance, a kind of valorizing of the mind over the world in a way that disengages us from the world. And so that's something I'm very much not sympathetic to. And so where does this leave you? We're talking about really about the inactive view. And in one term that we've been circulating here that we haven't really addressed, is in fact this axiomatic, this kind of given view, which sometimes is referred to as the myth of the given, of a big, existing world that we plot into. And that as you know, sometimes referred to as correspondence theory or the representationalism, where does that fit into both your academic and your personal experience and views? Yeah, so the inactive idea is very much this idea of the kind of mobius strip of the mind in the world that I was just talking because what it emphasizes is how processes, embodied processes, bring forth what we experience as mind and what we experience as world. And there's actually a statement from a very important influential American philosopher that I really love, Hillary Putnam. And he has this marvelous statement where he says, the mind in the world jointly make up the mind in the world. And that's very much the philosophical core of the inactive perspective. And so what that means more, you might say pragmatically or experientially, is that the environment or the world that we experience in our everyday dealing with things, it's not inside our minds in any kind of subjective sense. But it's also something that's not independent of us because it's contours, it's landscape, it's shape has to do with the way we are in the world, the kinds of bodies we have, the kinds of cognitive processes we have. And there's no way to pry those two things apart. I think that's fun. And again, the beauty of these things for me is from the kind of angles that you may kind of bring into everything you're saying is how can we take this information that could be otherwise left in the world of philosophy? Because there is shadow element, of course, to the mere philosopher is one who just gets lost in their own kind of internal milieu, disconnected from reality. And what I so appreciate about what you're doing in your work and also in your life is your ability to take these teachings, this information and kind of bolt it into your life. And so with that in mind, you've been sort of circumambulating this, but how has your work transformed you? Like there's this term that I've heard some scholars talk about these days, hermeneutical mysticism, when you're actually translators, for instance, when they're engaged in deep translations of texts, there's a kind of spiritual transformation that takes place within that very enterprise. And I love this kind of broader look at spiritual practice. Because again, it challenges the supremacy of pure meditation as we know it. And so how has your experience with your research and all these different fields changed you? I mean, how are you a different better person from your own exploration of these things from an academic perspective? Well, I'd be the last person in a way to be able to comment on that. Because my perspective on my own evolution is probably pretty calm up in my own evolution, whatever that is. But I would say maybe just autobiographically, I suppose, that I was always even going back to when I was a kid. I was always drawn to philosophy or philosophical modes of thinking because it seemed to me to be a kind of-- you could call it-- spiritual or transformative path. And so I think of meditation, for example, as not just, for example, sitting on a cushion and attending to your breath or whatever practice you might be doing in that context. But I think of philosophizing as a kind of meditative or contemplative discipline. And I think of-- I try to bring that to life in the way that I teach philosophy. I try to convey that in not all of my writing. I do writing that is more narrowly academic. But in waking dreamy being, for example, I tried to write in a way that brought that out. And so I would say that trying to enliven philosophy as a contemplative path and show others how it can be a contemplative path is very important to my sense of what it is that I do in my life. And it's a personally transformative thing because it's a journey. Just to give one concrete example, when I went into writing, waking, dreaming being, I had certain ideas in advance, especially concerning some of the issues around death and the Western, near death experience literature. I had ideas about really how to interpret that, that I then, through the process of exploring the literature and reading it and doing the being with dying, a contemplative end-of-life care training program at the UPAIA Institute and Zen Center, that really, I think, opened me up and changed my thinking about just how to deepen this sensibility of staying with the open question. I realized ways in which I went in thinking things that then I actually had to step back and just try to rewrite and re-understand in a way that made them much more open. So that's part of an answer to your question, I suppose. That's really beautiful. And what it brought up in my own experience has been the profound revolution in change in my appreciation for psychedelic agents. And maybe we can turn to that for just a second, because it is incredibly comprehensive as your work, especially in waking, dreaming being has been. The one thing that is not mentioned, as you know, is now getting some very interesting traffic with Michael Paul and Jason. Well, and then I'm not sure if you're familiar with James King's one's book. He wrote quite a fine poem this summer. How-- where do you land on this somewhat controversial topic as using these agents? And again, as a neurophenomenologist, we suspect that this has some credibility for you. But it's obviously a very culturally sensitive topic, and there are a lot of hornets waiting in this particular one asked. But where do you land in the kind of the re-invigoration of the exploration of minds through these anthogens? And so I could argue. Yeah, that's a great question. I did write about it, basically, because I wanted to write about things that I had personal experience of. So all of the things about sleeping and dreaming, and lucid dreaming, I really tried to illustrate autobiographically in terms of my own experience and how my own experience fed certain philosophical questions and how the philosophical questions then fed back into my experience, because I wanted the book to have that narrative. And in the case of psychedelics, I don't have that experience. I mean. And the reason I don't, I've been very hesitant or cautious about personally going down that path is that I think of myself or my experience has basically been one where I'm extremely sensitive, I guess you could say, or maybe even biosensitive. You know, in having, you know, as a undergraduate student and then sometimes as an adult but not really very much, just, you know, like smoking marijuana, like I can have intense hallucinatory experiences just from that. And so I was really hesitant about doing anything stronger because I basically just didn't think that it was going to be too overwhelming, I think. I was always worried that for me it was going to be too overwhelming and I didn't really want to go down that particular path of exploration. So I was like, you know, with my friends as an undergraduate, I was always the one when everybody else was tripping, who was like the one person who wasn't tripping, who wouldn't jump off roofs and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. So that's just like experientially. I mean, as for the topic and the research, I mean, I think it's extremely interesting. I think it's extremely important. I think it's very, what's the word, it's very fraught in our culture. Because of the whole way that we look at mind-altering substances and just the complete lack of consistency and how we think about those things, the way we medicalize some things, criminalize other things. I mean, it's just so completely irrational that then entering into that and then trying to do responsible work and then in a consumerist culture that valorizes these things for individual gratification purposes. So it's a complicated and messy situation, but I think the research on it is important and should be done and is very valuable. Well, I mean, if it's true, for instance, I'm sure you've heard these stories that were somewhat like, you know, Rondas allegedly gave his swami something like, you know, 25 to its own rate. Until I, like, nothing happens. But, you know, if that is in fact true, that's a very interesting thing to say. Because again, normal phenomenologically, what is going on? I mean, it would be so interesting to put something like that in FMRI and see if, in fact, there's some fundamental alteration in brain structure that would somehow really account for this, really outrageous kind of proclamation. Does that hold water to a four-year credibility? And again, this is not the only account I've heard others where we're so-called spiritual masters are given these agents and fundamentally nothing happens. Yeah, I mean, I, there I'm pretty, I want to, like, put on my cautious skeptical scientist hat with reports like that. I don't, you know, not to dismiss them, but just to say that they're, they're anecdotal reports. And for any given individual, why something has an effect and why it doesn't is going to involve such a complex host of factors that just attributing it to their, you know, being, uh, meditators or spiritual teachers, whatever exactly that means, I think that's, I think that's pretty simplistic. And, and then these stories, you know, they take on, like, mythic proportions, right? So I'm pretty cautious and skeptical about that. There could be, there could be lots of reasons why something does or doesn't have an effect. And why something is experienced, you know, as mind-altering in a mystical sense, why it's experienced in some other way has a lot to do with contextual shaping factors. So, you know, I mean, there's things to investigate there for sure. But I don't, I don't put too much stock in those anecdotes I have to say. Yeah. Yeah. You have another second to turn to one last topic before I come on. Yeah. I'm happy to do that. Well, this is so rich to me. I mean, I, I, I, I feel like a kid in a candy store in my head. So the one thing that, that, that you write about with, you know, elegance and I have to say as another compliment, my friend, you're, you're, you're absolute sensitivity when you're dealing with some of these critiques is, is just lovely. I mean, even when his loneliness with Dalai Lama says certain things, the way, the way you come at that with a gentle and decisive look is, is, is applaudable and, and also in this regard, the way you talk about, about a body experiences, all these and the like, I want to turn to this for just a second because it, when I teach my programs, um, in fact, down and there's on it when I did this thing with the various just as best. Because virtually every single time I do when people come up to me and start riffing away about their OBEs and I, you know, I, I loved your account of that. I've read Susan, um, my friends account, I think that's very cogent account as well, but that it's not so much and this is what I want to plant with you. Not so much an auto body as an altered embodied experience. And again, it's not in any way, and this is where it gets so sensitive because, yeah, you know, you don't want to criticize these people, but, um, it's very easy to get lost in, in blind spots. You know, in, for instance, kind of a wild case is, I'm sure you've heard the studies of people in, uh, who experienced sleep paralysis and Harvard researchers have shown that, now, they're suggesting that a lot of kind of alien abduction stories are taking place within that, um, kind of strange, barital-like experience. And so, talk to us a little bit about the cautions of auto body experiences, um, whether that has, um, a real place in the world or whether that's just a subtle form of self-deception and delusion. So, I'll look at about altered environment versus auto body. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, um, I would say that, out of body experiences definitely have a place in the world in the sense that people have these experiences. Um, they're not made up. Um, I've had them myself, um, and, and one of the things that set me off on part of the path of waking dreamy being was having had these experiences going back to when I was a little kid and being given a certain metaphysical framework for understanding them, which was very much the kind of theosophical astral travel, uh, idea that there's a, there's a kind of subtle body that separates from the physical body and journeys and, and into other, um, dimensions or realms and acquires knowledge there and then returns to the physical body, you know, when I had my first, uh, out of body experience when I was like nine or ten years old and I told my dad about it, um, that was how he explained it to me. He kind of explained the theosophical world view in which, um, in which out of body experiences are, are seen that way. And that was very meaningful for me because it gave me a way to understand and experience I had, gave me kind of framework of, of meaning for it, but we need to, we need to distinguish two things here. So one is the experiences are real as experiences. People have them. They're, they're, they're very jivid, um, they're very compelling. Um, and then how we interpret them and how we understand what they are. And I, as a result of my own research and thinking and philosophy and in science and, you know, uh, further experiences, um, involving lucid dreaming and out of body experiences came to think about a body experiences very differently from that original, theosophical framework that I had been given to understand them in. And that's the, the way that I came to experience them is, is what you're referring to by this idea of altered embodiment. So we call them out of body experiences because their experiences in which you see, you have the experience of seeing your body from an outside perspective as if, say, for example, you're floating above it. Um, maybe it happens in a sleep state when you're, um, in your bed at night and you find your, your visual perspective is up by the ceiling and you're looking down on your bed and it's, you know, it's very vivid and real. So it doesn't really seem exactly like a dream. Um, so I described that as an experience of altered embodiment for a number of reasons. And when you are in this altered perspective, um, they're still bodily, experientially speaking bodily characteristics that are present. So there can be sensations of floating. You have the sensation of being oriented in a, in a vestibular space with up, down orientations, left, right orientations forward, back, all of those kinds of oriental orientations come from, um, from having a sense of embodiment and, um, have to do with how the brain maps space in relationship to the body. And we know from neuroscience that we can induce experiences or aspects of experiences that have these characteristics. We can also induce them through virtual reality technology. in part. So the idea that we should somehow take the experience as literally meaning, that there is a non-physical or subtle physical body that separates from the body, it's very understandable why we would look at it that way because it sort of feels like that, and in a culture that doesn't have access to some of the knowledge that we now have through neuroscience and virtual reality technology, that's a natural interpretation to have. But if you really investigate these experiences, that interpretation doesn't stand up to me as the most credible or the most explanatory. And that's really what I explore in the out-of-body experience chapter in Waking Dreamy being. So I come to describe them as altered embodiment, that is, there's still a sense of being embodied, but there's a separation between two things that are usually together in the normal waking state, for example, that is your experience of your body as subject in your experience of your body as object. Those two things usually are fused as it were, and in an out-of-body experience, they can come apart so that your subjectivity, your sense of attentional self-wood is up at the ceiling as it were, and then you see your body as an object down in the bed below, and your brain as a cognitive system is creating that based on a way, an altered way that it's putting together different kinds of sensory signals, visual, and vestibular, and proprioceptive, and so on. So that's another, I guess, case where in terms of my own journey through these materials where I started out with a certain kind of world view, and then through further experience and learning and thinking, I came to look at it very differently. Yeah, that's really terrific, and I think there's ways, I mean, when I tell people, there's ways to test this. It's interesting, some people are just going to even want to hear that, because they're so treasured, they don't want to be challenged, but again, I like to hear what you have to say about this. This is not that terribly difficult to challenge and to test and say, "Okay, hey, let's try to advance. Try, for instance, spinning. If you're in an antibody experience, then you spin, and you stop, you'll be in the same place. But if you're in a lucid or hyper lucid dream, and you spend the vast majority of times when you stop, you're going to be in a different place. So things like reading, it's not so easy to read when you're in the dream. So there are certain things you could do. You have any other tests for those intrepid explorers who may really want to challenge their experience and say, "Geez, I wonder if my OBEs are in fact just trying to hyper lucid dreams. Is there anything else they can do to set your future that out?" I think one thing that's interesting to play with is movement. So if you have the sense that you can move from one place to another, try to engage that and then see what the movement is like. Is it smooth, continuous, or are you actually jumping and scene shifting, where you go discreetly from one thing to the next? And I would submit that it's a lot of discreet jumping and scene shifting. It's not a smooth movement through a continuously present space. And I would say that's because you have, your brain as a cognitive system has a spatial map that it's relying on and that it's discreetly as it were activating to give you the sense of movement. But it's not as if you're moving through a continuous smooth, stable environment. Yeah, that's great. I thought of that one. That's a terrific one. So my friend is, we start to come to a close because I use so gyres with your time. We have to talk just ever so briefly about your upcoming book. I cannot wait to give this thing a read. And it's a preview. And if you are forward a year or so from now, when this thing comes out, I would love to have you back on and chat a little bit about that. But even the title itself, beautiful why I am not a Buddhist. And the first thing that came to my mind, of course, was, well, gosh, you know, the Buddha wasn't the Buddhist. So talk to us a little bit about what sparked you to write this, this idea of cosmopolitanism that I know is central to the book. And what you, what your aspirations are for, again, this kind of, I think, really healthy constructive criticism of the infatuation and the blind spots that occur with this, this transplantation and translation of Buddhism into the West. Because as you know, just as importantly, as the literal translation of the word is the cultural translation. And there's a whole lot that I think is lost in translation when it comes to culture. And so I am so excited about this forthcoming book. Give us a preview of what this is while you wrote it and what your aspirations are around this next 12th. Yeah. So the book is basically a criticism of what I call, or the critical part of the book is a criticism of what I call Buddhist exceptionalism. And Buddhist exceptionalism is the idea that Buddhism isn't really a religion. It's a mind science where it's a therapy or it's a philosophy or it's a way of life. And so it's either not really a religion or it's different from all other religions because it has this kind of special rational empirical scientific status. And my argument in the book is that this is a fundamental misrepresentation of Buddhism. That Buddhism is fundamentally a religious tradition. And that when we treat it in this exceptionalist way, we're distorting Buddhism and we're also not thinking properly about what religion is, what science is, and how the two of them should be engaged with each other or talking to each other or in dialogue. And I came to write the book because I had been involved for so many years in dialogues between Tibetan Buddhists and Western scientists and philosophers. And the dialogues had been originally meant to be dialogues that would bring out in a respectful way acknowledging of differences, fundamental, kind of philosophical issues about mind and world and self and human transformation. But as the dialogues progressed, there was a tendency to flatten them into a sometimes an attempt to validate Buddhism from a scientific perspective or sometimes to show that Buddhism is itself a kind of science. And that made Buddhism somehow special and different from any other religious tradition that might enter into a similar dialogue, whether it be Christianity or Hinduism or Judaism. And I think this is part of the kind of cultural fetishizing of Buddhism that has happened with Buddhism in the modern world, that some that historians call Buddhist modernism. This idea that Buddhism is more scientific than other religions or is itself a kind of science. And I think this is really not what Buddhism is about. I think if we really examine and understand Buddhism, then we have to face the central pivotal ideas of Buddhism like Nervana, Awakening, Liberation, Compassion. These are not scientific ideas. These are philosophical religious ideas. These are ethical ideas. And the idea that science would prove them is as confused as thinking that science would prove the validity of art. It's just not the right way to think about their relationship. So the book is basically about that. And in the course of the book, I defend a kind of alternative perspective as a philosopher, which is what's called cosmopolitanism, which is the idea that Buddhism is an extremely valuable religious intellectual tradition. And it should be one partner in a larger pluralistic conversation where it's not exceptionalized. And cosmopolitanism is the idea that all human beings belong to one community as human beings and that we need to value different traditions as different traditions without trying to assimilate them all into one. And that it's important that we be concerned for the welfare of the individuals in these different traditions. And that we acknowledge differences and respect them without trying to assimilate them or reduce them all down to one thing, especially on a scientific understanding of what that one thing is. It's like, you know, I'm a big fan of the idea of near enemies, you know, wherever you find light, you will find shadow and conversely, wherever you find shadow, you will find light. And to me, this is just spot on, Evan, because, you know, the great gift of this modern age with its information dissemination and the like, is this, in fact, this East West cross pollination. But the near enemy of that is cross pollution, where you take tennis from one tradition, and you misappropriately try to either conflate them or slam them into the other tradition, thinking that, you know, they're all saying the same thing, which is a common notion. And the so-called perennial philosophy that has been kind of taken apart, that, you know, the apex, all these traditions are saying the same thing. Well, that may feel good from a kind of new age perspective, but is in fact that the way it really is. And so, I love this idea of, again, just keeping the traditions honest. And, you know, maintaining the elegance and the beauty of, of conversation and communication, because that's probably the better of the two extremes, instead of divisiveness is the kind of aspiration to ignite. But, again, the near enemy of that is conflation, where all these things are just kind of slam together into this kind of inarticulate mush, that really has some shadow elements and life was just bound, and booby traps a bound, and all kinds of philosophical and experiential traps a bound. So, what else can we expect? Are you putting up your armor for this one? Are you? Well, it'll be interesting to see what the reaction is. So, the book is out this January. And, yeah, you know, I don't know what the reaction to it will be. I think, you know, as generally happens with these things, some people will be happy. Other people might not be so happy. There's definitely some critical stuff in it about a lot of the ways people try to put Buddhism and science together. I really have come to think that, that that's not the right way to look at the relationship. And when that happens, it's always slanted by a privileging of a kind of science or scientific discourse. And, you know, some of my friends are pretty invested in that in that project of putting Buddhism and science together. So, maybe they won't be so happy. I don't know. Well, we'll have to see. It'll be interesting. My favorite kind of maxims for shadow detection, you know, again, in this kind of a passion I have for exploring darkness that also includes shadow elements of the minds, things like projection and transverse and kind of transverse and all that. And one, one really helpful jingle in my life is, I don't think it's categorically true, but I think it has the applicability is that whenever something affects you more than it informs you, you're probably dealing with a shadow or a projection. And so we'll see how many people are adversely affected by your book or in fact, you know, transformed. But I can't wait to read it. I, you know, with a rigor that you bring is kind of, it's really beautiful combination of conviction and humility because of the way you write, you know, you're, you're just arming and you're openness. And I think that, you know, that was inculcated with Francisco's incredible openness and his value of the open question and your ability to incorporate that in your writing is, I find it completely magnetizing and it makes me want to listen to you more because there's an inherent humility to that. It is really quite beautiful and really attractive. And so I very much look forward to this next book and hope this kind of atmosphere carries over. So any any final comments, how, how can people learn more about you? How can they best support your work and what you do share some little information about how they can better get to know you and support what you're doing. Well, in terms of just kind of keeping up with what I do, you know, they can do the usual social media things, you know, I'm on Twitter and Facebook and I've got a, you know, a webpage that I actually haven't kind of in the process of revamping, but it's still up and so people can kind of keep in touch with with my writing and things like that that way. And, you know, I would say as a writer, you know, I write so that, you know, people will react and say things. So I always want to know what people think. I don't expect people to agree with me. In fact, I like it when they don't agree with me because I, you know, I learn more from, you know, people who have different reactions and responses to things. So I'm, you know, just eager to hear from people and know what they think when they read something, whether reactions are. That's awesome. Well, this has been an utter delight. Thank you so much for taking this time. I for one had a terrific time. I mean, it really just very moving as usual. And if it works for you a year from now, when this book is out, I would absolutely love to have you back on because really the one thing I will say to my readers or to my listeners, I should say is that, you know, Evan's work is so on and composing and so fast that we've just hit on just a handful of the topics that he covers. The idea of an activism, I think should be, is possibly disseminated in the propagated is such an elegant way to look at reality and let alone what you do. I mean, waking Jimmy being we could very easily do one entire kind of podcast on each and every chapter. And so for listeners, I strongly recommend you pull out this incredible tone, waking Jimmy and you will find it a treasure trove for information, especially for your social journey. So Evan, thank you dear friend. It means so much for me that you would take the time to do this. I very much look forward to giving you encounters with you and keep on writing. You're doing a lot of good. Thanks very much. So I really appreciate the encouragement and it's great to talk and I'm happy to come back and talk more. We'll do it. All the best of you. Take care of my friends. Okay, take care. Thanks.