Transcription
Does nature speak to us in a language that we don't fully hear anymore? Yes.
This video is about biosemiotics, a new way to understand nonhuman consciousness in nature. What you saw was the elephants on the coastal zones. They broke free from their shackles, and they headed for the hills, and the people followed them. Before the tsunami, this is of course, yeah. Hours before the tsunami. No human, and none of our artifacts of measurement, knew what was going on. But they knew.
Our mind is in the world. Our mind is emergent through the relations we have with all the other beings and all the other strands. Every organism sees a different part of reality, yeah, as a different dashboard, yeah. And insofar as we can become aware of any other organism, we are sharing some sort of—there's some overlap. You're killing ways of seeing the world, ways of being in the world, you know, uh, when we destroy olive trees that have been around for a thousand years. We don't know what relations those olive trees were were holding up on an ecological level, but also on a semiotic one. When we are scrolling through our black mirrors, you know, looking for that dopamine release, what we're actually craving is to be nestled in the branches or the roots of a tree.
In Japan, they have shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, where doctors prescribe, for various illnesses, "Go be in a forest, lie down, breathe, be there for an hour, feel all your emotions." We need to feel again. You said that's the only way that we will survive.
[Music]
Very warm welcome at the Asencia Foundation's YouTube channel. I'm sitting down here with Dr. Yogi Handlin. Yogi, a very warm welcome.
Thank you so much, Hans. Great that you are here. And what I found so nice is that you live so nearby because I found out that you live in Zutphen, and Zutphen, which is only like 20 km. So that's awesome.
Yeah, I took the train; it took me like 10 minutes.
Perfect. It's great that you are here. Um, you are an environmental philosopher, assistant professor at the Erasmus School of Philosophy in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and you've worked as a public health scientist at the University of California for 20 years, and very important, you are editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biosemiotics. Now, what biosemiotics is, um, we will touch upon later in this conversation, but I have an opening question that definitely relates to it. Um, we previously had a video with Federico Faggin, the physicist and inventor of the first CPU, um, who basically states that spacetime, the world we see around us, is the universe talking to itself. It's a symbolic representation of consciousness in his theory. Thinking about biosemiotics, so the meaning-making of nature in nature which you study, made me think and see a similarity with the thinking of Federico. Um, which leads me to the opening question. Does nature speak to us in a language, and in a language that we—I think in the West and definitely the last 200 years—don't fully hear anymore, cannot understand anymore?
Well, um, sorry for the long answer. The short answer is yes. The inhalation of 50,000 microbes and the exhalation of 50,000 microbes every time.
Is this every time we breathe?
Yeah. It's just a—it's amazing.
Yeah. It's a gas exchange of, you know, countless microorganisms. Now, are those microorganisms affecting our thought, our feeling, our physiology? I would say yes. They are impacting our interface or dashboard of perception. Now, are they doing this in a way that directly is um, sort of homunculus-style in our brain, in our pineal gland, typing away at a keyboard saying, "Okay, now we're programming him to say this"? Absolutely not. But there is an influence, however subtle and however um, however nuanced, that I think most of us are, including myself, on a day-to-day basis unaware of.
So when we talk about nature, there's typically a breakdown between the biotic, the abiotic, and the artificial, right? Sort of three different realms. Um, and one way to look at this question of is nature communicating with us uh constantly is the question that you get in biophysics, right? By biophotons, like with light, for example. There is some sort of communication in photons hitting our eyes, photons hitting our skin, in a similar way, but different from how red light and blue light affects us when we're staring at a computer screen late at night. I have a red shift on my computer so that it doesn't keep me up. Plants respond in the exact same way to red and blue light. Blue light wakes them up; red light uh puts them to sleep. And so when we understand through a synesthetic lens communication, then we don't need to privilege one or another.
What story was that?
Synesthetic. Synesthesia, right?
So, so synesthesia is like hearing a taste or um feeling kinesthetically a sound.
Mhm.
Right. And I'm not just talking about bass waves in front of big speakers at a rave or anything. I'm talking about how the senses in many people and in many uh altered states of consciousness or peak experiences um the the wiring of our different senses, our sense of smell, taste, uh sight, uh hearing and feel, touch um in fact um they interleaf with each other. So there are other ways in which we can understand reality than through a strict one-to-one sense channel relationship. And it's this harmonization of various sense data through various channels which impinge upon and supervene upon different um ways in which we are impacted as embodied conscious beings. Enables us to select wider.
What I hear you say, but correct me if I'm wrong, is that with our rational way of thinking, we we narrow down the world with our con—our abstractions, our models of the world, right? And are you saying that selecting wider would be open to much more data, also data that we sometimes cannot sort of conceive conceptually or scientifically yet, but that does influence us? For instance, you you were correctly—you were mentioning microbes. We did an—on our channel, I I made a documentary about sort of bacteria and was stunned about the gut—gut microbiome axis and and even certain guts uh microbiomes might really influence people to eat more fat—fat food because you have microbes that want that and somehow have found a way to tell your brains that to eat that fat food. So you're directly—they're like active agents influencing us. Are you saying with selecting wider we we should be open to all of that? And also I'm curious about that that question of agency because when you say if nature gives us signs, who is—who is sending those signs? Is there agency sort of in—in—in microbes, in plants, in nature around us?
So you're touching upon an ecological question when—when I mention selecting wider, I'm definitely talking about the decentralization of agency. So for the last 500 years or so um with the enlightenment, there was a certain strand of thought that became dominant which led to this notion that only humans—and if we're to be honest, uh historically only a very small fraction of humans—had reason, right? And this reason was very constrained. So it wasn't about uh practice or practical reason. It was about an abstract sort of uh I guess what Aristotle called nous. Um and that was seen as the only form of rationality that mattered. I am along the lines of Robert Sapolsky in his work in—you know, best known in *Behave*—and determined where he talks about we as humans, most of the time—you know, Kant talks about autonomy—and then on the other side of the spectrum we have automaticity, and Descartes and Bacon were saying these animals, these nonhumans, and most humans, they're just purely automatic. And what neuroscience and cognitive science, especially you know 4E—extended uh um embodied, enacted, ecological, and embedded and affective cognitive science—shows is that our mind is in the world. Our mind is emergent through the relations we have with all the other beings and all the other strands, both from the skin in and the skin out. And one of the really important things here um that I sort of just want to get off my chest to begin with is the compartmentalization of thinking. Okay. So if agency is desentered, then what makes us think that our unitary consciousness is ours or us, right? And would it be different if I didn't have a liver or if you weren't here or if the light were a different color? Um, would I still be me in the same way? And if the answer in any such way is no, then there is a relational ontology, right? There's a relational sense of self. But on the other hand, we know that there is continuity, right? So, you know, if I get my arm chopped off, I'm still me in many respects. Now, I will also change in some respect, but it would stress me in a way which would directly change me here in a sense.
Yeah.
What—what I hear you say is it makes me think of sort of going back to—we started with microbes and starting the world—and the empiricism of—you're mentioning the empiricism of Francis Bacon and he said stuff like that. Yeah. Like was—I think we should burn everything that has to do with—like if it's not—if you cannot prove it—you know, that hardcore empiricism—and what I found interesting uh I found out when making the documentary about bacteria that at the same time that that Descartes was in the Netherlands, by the way, writing—absolutely in Amsterdam—he was writing that, and at the same time we had Antony van Leeuwenhoek studying bacteria for the first time through a microscope—his microscope—and the—the both go very well—they go hand in hand because it was very functional to see those little blobs of order moving in front of his lens to just see them as them or they or the other and just studying and think that you can study it objectively that doesn't affect us. So if that—that cut—that made science possible in a sense—so if I'd ask you sort of the ontology—the metaphysics of scientism, right?—that we see right now—that sort of—that you think that you can sort of have this glass between you and the world which functioned very well—Um, do you think that that is at the root of the problems we see right now when you mention stuff, for instance, in your—like a meta-crisis of a purely crisis you call it?
Yeah.
Yeah. Absolutely. I think the the metacrisis, which is a crisis of mental health, uh physical health, chronic disease, societal disease, and planetary disease, all brought upon by um you could say unfounded assumptions of uh yeah, you could call it reductionism, you could call it a narrow vision of rationality um because I very much um think that rationality is extremely important for solving this. But what we're taking to be valid scientific measurement um is actually this recursive process that is not based on anything. So it's—you could say in attempting to lay foundations for a theory of knowledge, it in fact is um, you know, a castle made of sand.
That's a pretty bold thing to say. You sort of like the—the whole—what—what part of science do you think does this sort of um—well, you know, I I would go back to um the early uh 20th century where you have Heisenberg and Bohr and these scientists realizing the influence and impact of the um observer. Niels Bohr uh has this notion not of uh deflection, not of you receiving something, but of diffraction, right? So that every um uh you know, it goes back to Goethe's uh color theory. So what is light? What is color to us? It's neither in the uh object itself nor in our eye. It's in the relation. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about color in ancient Greek um uh perception says that it's not just a physiological change. It's also a cultural cognitive change. So that if you don't have the concept of the color blue, then the sea is wine red, the sky is gray. We are very much constrained by our cultural concepts for how we understand how the world works. Yeah, this notion that we live in a communicative order completely underpins uh biology. Biologists cannot get away from metaphors like signaling, communication, transcription, all these things which are process-based, they're relation-based, they're based on awareness in even molecules of other things. uh so there is this sense of at the most fundamental level an awareness of one's relations. Now in biosemiotics, we generally go down to the cell level as the sort of minimum model of communication. Um uh my colleague Jeremy Sherman talks about um the sort of sequence of the sciences. You have, you know, physics which begets uh chemistry which begets biology which begets uh you know, psychology and sociology.
Yeah.
Right. Pyramid of order.
Yeah. So it's really important not to apply to a more developed order like biology the rules of chemistry. And yet we have—you could say this physics uh envy or physics centrism—which attempts to apply to the biological world a Lagrangian or a theory of everything where it is somehow figure out a bull when indeed there are emergent processes that cannot be predicted from physics alone. And this is a big problem for science because we've been trying to for hundreds of years take the rules of Newton, take the rules of uh chemistry and apply them uh to biology, to uh human behavior, right? And so we're very good at this point of looking at the very small and the very large and being quite accurate on a physics level, but we're not very good at dealing with chemistry. And I, you know, I deal with uh um the chemical harms to all life uh with a lot of my work. I talk about chemical colonialism.
Yeah.
And the chemical Anthropocene. So we haven't quite understood how chemistry uh impacts biology because we don't understand biology, and we don't understand psychology and sociology in part because we don't understand biology and ecology.
I really like um or what I see when you—when you talk about sort of it being relational. Um we did a couple videos sort of into the foundations of physics where you really see sort of a—a—a shift towards relational quantum mechanics. So basically embracing Carlo Rovelli is very known for it. But there are all sorts of different flavors of this relational quantum mechanics. But it basically says that it's all about relations, and we cannot even speak anymore about sort of um facts in the world. Um, crazy stuff—and uh that shift is happening I think for the last 20—20 years. It's been sort of there from the—from the beginning. I mean, you mentioned sort of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, but somehow in the 20th century also quantum mechanics went to sort of this "shut up and calculate" mode, right? And sort of denied that sort of ontological questionnaire. So we—so we see it in physics, but how does it work, and we know a little bit how it works in physics, right? That we have the measurement problem. What's sort of the measurement problem in biology and how to—to go about it. And I'm—I'm also want to hear you talk about participatory action research—of becoming one with your—your research sub—object—subject—subject I should say, of course, sorry.
Yeah.
So as you mentioned, you know, even in physics um you see relativity playing a role. So this goes back to an old, you know, Heraclitus versus Parmenides battle. Uh the original—the original schism you could say. Um and here you have, uh, you know, Smolin at the Perimeter Institute, Lee Smolin, who's talking about um the laws of physics change over time, right? Maybe just a little bit here and there from our observed empirical analysis. But if there are changes to these constants, then that means that we're living in a processual universe, right? Dennis Noble also in uh biology has talked about biological relativity and this notion that we have um the rules of—of biology uh changing, and that's why I am firmly in the camp of evolutionary uh um the evolutionary uh synthesis um in biology, the extended evolutionary synthesis um and ecological evolutionary developmental biology. These fields that over the last 40 years have developed showing the importance of the holon—beyond the importance of epigenetics, the importance of group selection, even interspecies selection rather than selecting just on the basis of an individual. If we want to understand uh how other organisms communicate in their national natural habitat, which the field of ethology aims to do, we need to go and see how they do that. So in Brazil, there's these dolphins that for 40 years, maybe 50 by now, they have fished with local Brazilian fishermen. The dolphins will corral—when they see the fishermen coming out for—what's it been?—they, you know, early morning at dawn, they—the dolphins will see the fishermen coming with their nets and will corral the fish to the fishermen in Brazil.
Yes.
Uh, this is super well documented over decades. Um, and when the fish try to evade the dolphins, they get caught in the nets. And so the fishermen get a lot more. And the dolphins also get more. And you see that not all the dolphins in that area participate. There's some pods that do, some pods that don't. And so it is a choice. And it is a relationship that is multigenerational both with the human Brazilian fishermen and with the dolphins. And so you see these new ways of symbiosis evolving all around the world. Um, interspecies relationships. This is actually what I wrote my PhD on. um, my dissertation's on interspecies uh discourse ethics, interspecies communication, and you know uh there's another example—Barbara Smuts, a ethologist who—she was um following a group of primates uh along a river and at one spot they just sat down for half an hour. They were silent and still and just listening. They weren't grooming. They weren't—it was like they were meditating. And she would have never caught that if she was trying to get them to do something. Now, she had spent months earning their trust, being accepted into their troop. And then she got to have this magic moment with them. And she saw this as the culmination of understanding a different side of these primates than anybody else had ever—a behavior that had never been um uh observed before. And this required deep humility. So a sense of being humble in the face of a science system that you don't understand. Deep listening. So finding interspecies forms of listening—and and when I hear you speak, Yogi, it also sort of makes me think that we're somehow trapped in these hierarchies in thinking—in—in all of our thinking, but especially when it comes to consciousness—and um, I think nice to go a bit—oh yeah, nice some tea—to go a bit deeper into biosemiotics um and touching upon the notion of um which is an important one in biosemiotics—and the—the notion that um everyone perceives—we cannot perceive reality directly as it is. Right. So but maybe first—good question sort of just for lay audience. What exactly is biosemiotics?
Great. All right. So semiotics is the understanding that there are different sign systems um that we all use, and it's not reductive to writing or language um but also our gestures, right? Our looks, uh facial uh expressions, and biosemiotics builds upon this and says, "Yes, okay, so the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, which we use his triadic model." So Saussure—Ferdinand de Saussure is the other semiotician. This is sort of like the history of semiotics. Okay. You have two—the French and the American. Okay. And so the French—this is 19th century when we talk—when it came out. This is this is 19th—20th century—like a very rich time for science. Um and so what you have is uh in Saussure's model you have sort of this notion of coding and decoding. So it's a uh it's a a dualistic model. Charles Sanders Peirce, he—he was a polymath, um a very good friend of William James, and he's the progenitor actually of the um pragmatist movement of philosophy. So he's the father of pragmatism as well as being the father of uh semiotics. Um and so his triadic model shows that you have the interpreter—that's us—which is there in the world, and then you have our representation of it, and we can't really get to the object itself, and this is um the—the question of—and ontology which biosemiotics takes up from uh the Estonian—German—or or Prussian—uh father of uh theoretical biology, Jakob von Uexküll. And Uexküll has this notion of the Umwelt, which he gets from Kant as the absolute reality. Now, he's a—a numinal world, the numinal. Now, now he's a neo-Kantian, but he's not exactly a Kantian, and because he uh does believe that that numinal world is not just—is not at the expense of or exclusive of materiality. It far extends beyond materiality, but that he doesn't see a dualism there. Right? So um the Umwelt, on the other hand, is our dashboard consciousness.
Yeah.
Right. This is the interface um theory of perception uh that Donald Hoffman and others have developed, and my colleague and I—Brian Kamo—we wrote a paper about Hoffman's work and biosemiotics. Yeah. And what we showed is that there are many similarities because we both use this Kantian model of absolute reality.
Mhm.
And, um, which is our, uh, species-specific, um, uh, sensory-constrained understanding of what exists. And that every organism sees a different part of reality. Yeah. As a different dashboard. Yeah. And insofar as we can become aware of any other organism, either incarnate—that I mean in the material world—or in the imaginal worlds, insofar as we can become aware of them at all, that means that we are sharing some sort of—there's some overlap. Yeah. Um, and so the question is a question of more or less rather than of, yeah, uh, all or nothing.
That's super interesting because when you say overlap, what it triggers me—I mean that this is like magic realism—you've also written a paper about, um, what's it called, the object-oriented ontology. Yeah, that, but also sort of on, on sort of magic realist notion that that sort of plants may have sort of drive us in a certain direction, but it, it's sort of—that is magical thinking in a sense. But when you say those OOO belts overlap—so let's say a plant has an umwelt, it has a sort of a notion of reality that we don't have access to—and then an animal interacts with that plant, their welts overlap in a way that we still don't have access to, but we overlap with the animal—is there sort of a knowledge network then possible that we, that we sort of can get knowledge of other umwelts through interaction with, with animals, get information from plants? Is that sort of the part of this biosemiotic way of thinking?
Absolutely. Um, and so we would categorize this under applied biosemiotics, um, but you can absolutely see the example of, um, in Sri Lanka and the 2004, um, tsunamis that happened, you know, in Southeast Asia, killed over 100,000 people, uh, more. And what you saw was the elephants on the coastal zones. They broke free of—they broke free from their shackles and they headed for the hills, and the people followed them before the tsunami. This is, of course, yeah, hours before the tsunami, and it saved tens of thousands of people's lives. Wow. Following the elephants. None of our, um, uh, um, seismographs, none of our earthquake monitors were able to, uh, detect that what, you know, what was coming. Nobody knew. No human, and none of our artifacts of measurement based on the recursive human perceptions, um, knew what was going on, but they knew. And by following them, it saved tens of thousands of lives. And there are, um, countless—now understand how or still not how they sort of sound. We don't understand all the mechanisms. Um, it could be air pressure changes, but here, here's, you know, the T. Um, what's going on is much more complex than we can compute. Probably more complex than AI can compute. And that is really hard for us to accept. It's really hard because we want to be masters of the universe. We want to think that our science is, um, you know, unparalleled and, uh, is the scena. We want to think that our machines are, uh, creating the deus ex machina. Yeah. And really what it all boils down to is we want to feel safe, and we want to feel that we actually know the world enough to find our place in it.
And, um, from a colonial mentality, the only way we know how to do that is to make the world in our image, right? Just like we've made God in our image. Um, most cultures at least. Um, and so there's this recursivity to the, the human or the sort of, um, uh, atrophied notion of what humans can be.
And then, Yogi, sorry to interrupt, but what a notion in your work—what I, what really struck with me was sort of the word semiocide. So that's the killing of science, killing of symbols. So is sort of the way we treat nature—species going extinct—we, we are also killing meaning-makers that could have told us something.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's this old Sean Connery film called Medicine Man, right? He goes to the jungle. He thinks he finds the cure for cancer. It's actually in the ants that he's—that are in the sugar that he's using for the assays—and it's burning down. And so we just burned down the Amazon rainforest, you know, to, I don't know, graze cattle for McDonald's or whatever. And these ants had the cure to cancer in them. And he thought it was the wrong thing. He thought it was a different variable, right? He didn't even know that the ants were in the sugar, which were actually doing, doing the work. And, um, every genocide is semiocide. You're killing languages. You're killing ways of seeing the world, ways of being in the world. You know, uh, when we destroy olive trees that have been around for a thousand years, we don't know what relations those olive trees were, were holding up on an ecological level, but also on a semiotic one. Every ecocide is a semiocide. Um, when we talk about smaller, more local, uh, intimate versions of this, uh, when we take our old folks and we put them in old folks homes, you know, uh, instead of being with family, being in their home that they grew up in or had the smells, the familiarity, right? The extended cues in their environment which allow them to navigate as their senses start to erode—certain senses like smell might be able to guide them—but when you put them in a completely new habitat, that's a form of semiocide—that's a form of semiocide—and there are huge scientific losses. Now, I don't think that that is the ethical reason for not doing these things—I think that that's the instrumental reason for not doing these things—but I think the ethical reason, uh, for not displacing people and beings and climate change is semiocide. We have this question of assisted migration. You know, corals are bleaching because it gets too warm. When we disrupt these much slower processes and speed them up thousands of times more than their background level, uh, of, uh, sort of migration would work because I think of all reality as an inhalation and an exhalation, and all these rhythms, all these cycles, all these processes have their own temporality, all their own rhythms that are intersecting and interlocking. But when we speed some of them up, it throws off all of them. We know for a fact that when we heat up the ambient temperature of a country that it makes the people there more violent. That's a form of semiocide. When we, um, you know, uh, cut down a forest where, uh, you know, the Celts were praying in and the druids, uh, had their rituals with, we are destroying an entire cycle between the trees and those people. So even if none of the actual human beings died, their culture is, is, is dead in a very real way. It's a form of semiocide, and you see this actually used in warfare all the time in India. There's these movements, uh, of people who wrap themselves around trees that were going to be cut, and it's been happening for like 100 plus years where people will protect trees from logging because of their relationships with the trees and their ontology—they realize we might have forgotten it, but they haven't. Their ontology is bound up, their destiny, their fate and suffering and joy is bound up with the continuation of their habitat and ecology. Their web of relations makes them who they are.
Beautiful. It touches me because I, I only recently feel more connected with nature. And to be quite honest, it has been sort of the strongest connection with nature came through psychedelic experiences I've had. And thinking about it from, from Asencia Foundation's perspective, a science perspective, and I think we met even on an international conference on psychedelic research, right? That's where we met initially. Uh, I still remember interviewing Jussi Ylikka, and I titled our interview and his, his sort of way of thinking as sort of model collapse. Namely, the fact that, um, psychedelic substances in a certain way affecting our, um, what's it called? The, the default mode network.
Exactly. Sorry. The default mode network breaks down our models of the world. So sort of our whole sort of umwelt mechanism or Donald Hoffman's dashboard—sort of the dashboard—making it somehow breaks it down, opening us up—at least that's my, that was my take on it—opening us up more to different—and it has been like a deeply personal experience of mine on these substances and then walking in nature versus sort of like in, in normal waking consciousness. What are your thoughts here and how does it relate to your, your concept of ecodelia and ecodelics?
Ecodelics. Um, yeah, my, my preferred way of thinking about psychedelics is this, this notion that in psychedelics are not mind-manifesting but their ecology manifesting in this sort of, uh, 4E cogs notion of what our consciousness is made out of—five—the, um, extended, uh, embedded, embodied, inactive, um, ecological and affective, uh, cognition that we, which, which is our birthright. Um, which isn't in here. It's not a homunculus, you know, driving a tractor called a human body. It's, you know, we're not just a meat suit. Um, but we also are not the owners of our actions as, uh, you know, Robert Sapolsky and others talk about—we are the result of vectors, and all the vectors coming together in their various directions lead to the result of us being, thinking, feeling who, what we are. So this, this notion of ecodelia with, with, you know, trees and, and walking in forests. What we're talking about here is an, an a more open aperture, being able to surrender and feel all the weight that we've been carrying of performing humanness, performing some notion of the rational actor which doesn't allow us to tap into other sensory channels which are always already there operating with us but which the default mode network has been fending off at all costs. Yeah. And it's so funny because I had—and I, I'll just bring it in and it might, might sound woo, but I mean scientifically it's just a phenomenal experience I've had. So just an N of one experience I've had is that with a very specific tree in a forest that I very often visit. I always found the tree beautiful, but it was on sort of a walk in nature with a small amount of psychedelic substances that are—I mean, we live in that sense in a great country by the way. It's good to mention that in the Netherlands it's completely legal here, some, some of these substances—freedom of consciousness. Yeah, in a sense it is—and it was only on these substances that I could connect on—felt a deeper connection with a specific tree which I really felt as, as love—and coming back again, coming down so to speak, immediately the judging mind, the default mode network starts being active again. Ah, okay. That was just the psychedelics that works. And you, you create this story again of sort of feeling a deep intimate love for a specific tree is just sort of a psychedelic effect and not something more profound. Um, and my question to you is also thinking about psychedelic philosophy. I mean, Aldous Huxley made this distinction between seeing the, the, the psychedelic experience as a window into a deeper realm of, of, of truth of reality or seeing it as a mirror—just mirrors back. And I see sort of this—I wouldn't say clash, but it's a debate also at the ICPR, at the conference of psychedelic research between researchers who are much more on the mirror aspect, safely saying it's just, it's just what's already there and it shows it to you. So me thinking that tree is just something has to do with my own psychology and now it's like stronger and that other mirror—sort of the, the, the window on a deeper realm. I myself am much more towards the window sort of interpretation. What are your thoughts here?
So we humans are obsessed with being loved by the animate world, by the more than human world, because we have lost that animacy with ourselves. We no longer hallucinate gods all the time like maybe we did 8,000 years ago before our corpus callosum connecting our left and left and right hemispheres of our brain got smaller, right? And according to Ian McGilchrist, uh, you know, the left hemisphere of knowing all the time, being right, dominating and already having it all figured out started to, um, you know, invert the roles—instead of being the emissary, it became the master—and it gets very sick in that way and ultimately sees everything just as a mirror. It's a hall of mirrors. Yeah. Uh, you know, a labyrinth that you can't get out of. And the Greeks knew about this. If you go back to, you know, uh, the Minotaur and Icarus and Daedalus and all these stories about these labyrinths, they're labyrinths of the mind. And these labyrinths of the mind which, um, shackle us to certain perceptions are based on things that we do not value: fear, uh, resentment, um, smallness, cowardliness. These are—I, I don't think any culture worth its salt would say that these are things that we want to inculcate into our children. And at the same time, you know, when we say, "Oh, yeah, love, uh, is or, or the love for the tree," um, maybe it's not a mirror, but maybe it's also not a window. Maybe it's a relation. Now, I'm not saying that if you're taking enough psychedelics, you couldn't have been staring at a brick wall and also have the same experience. Um, but I personally, in my life, understand that ritual ceremony with the more than human, alive world in which we're snuggled, in which we feel comfortable, in which we feel at home allows us not just to project and also not just to receive, but to connect. And it's this connection in the middle, the relation which exists neither in our eye nor in the light but is made through the intention and the also the commitment that comes with that because I'm sure you know—you know, God forbid—if, uh, somebody wanted to cut down that tree and you knew about it beforehand, you would try to protect that tree. When you just said that example of people sort of protecting a tree, that's what triggered me to bring up the story because I thought if that would happen to that tree, I jump on my bike right now. Yeah. Go to that tree and I'll, I'll lay in front of it and bring my kids. That is love. And that is, that is an emotion that leads to action. If emotions lead to action, they're—I would say genuine, um, dialogical, uh, experiences and connections. If it doesn't lead to action, then I would say it might just be crocodile tears. It might just be a projection or a desire that you then fantasize about. But if it leads to action, there's something there where there's been an exchange. Um, and of course we don't have to put it in, you know, our, our scaffolding of known scientific mechanisms, but we also can be very clear that, um, there's a ton of research on nature connectedness, as I'm sure you know from the psychedelic world which they talk about which, um, shows that if you take a walk in a forest, um, if you are able to do that. You know, in Japan, they have shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, where doctors prescribe for various illnesses, "Go be in a forest, lie down, breathe, be there for an hour, feel all your emotions." And I think that that is as healing for those forests as it is for the patients.
That's interesting. You really think it affects nature if we do it?
How could it not? Um, our, our fear of feeling our own, uh, grief, our own solastalgia as Glenn Albrecht calls it, um, our fear of actually feeling the emotions which come with the degradation of our habitat. Those lack of expression of feelings are keeping us in ecocide. They're keeping us in this static pattern, right? We need to throw some, some, some chaos, yeah, at it. And that's what psychedelics are really good at. They're, um, non-, uh, non-localized amplifiers, right? I think that's Grof's definition. I don't know. It sounds like a very cool definition. They're non-specific amplifiers. Yeah. So, if you are in nature, you are going to be more open to that. Yeah. Um, and I think that psychedelics are always—and, you know, I, I don't want to say only, but—when we're not using them in nature, we're not fulfilling their full purpose, and we're also short-getting ourselves back into that hall of mirrors. We're understanding those imaginal realms as a mirror or as a window rather than a relation. M. And that's why, for example, if you're using psychedelics in the base—you know, say DMT in the basement—and you happen to have a, um, you know, a white supremacist ideology, it's just going to reflect back to you that white supremacist ideology 'cause you're not bouncing it off anything else. There's no connection. You're just fantasizing and about whatever is there to begin with. So that's why it's a non-specific amplifier. But these substances have always been used in community, in nature historically, and they've been used to heal—not it's not about healing individuals, like it's about healing the relationship between the human community and the more than human world, and that is what psychedelics are there for—and when we heal that relationship, you know, we may unlock whole another stages and levels of what psychedelics can offer us, and we also might be able to unlock that without the psychedelics at all. Not that I, you know, would ever want to forego that possibility, but I do think that we can live in an ecodelic world and state because all of this we're talking about states, mind states, uh, states of, of body of being, right, of connection. And when we're in these states, it doesn't matter how we got there, as long as we're listening and vulnerable and open and surrendering to that part of ourselves that's a Nazi, you know, killing our inner Nazi. Um, which is the default mode network, which is restraining us from acknowledging the synaesthesia, all the feelings that are constantly washing over us. Yeah. We need to let those spirits go instead of holding on to them and letting them make us into a meat puppet, which I would say most of us do most of the time, right? But if we want a little bit of free will, we need to let go of our ideologies. We need to let go of our notion that we're right, and we need to feel more, uh, the more than human world, the animate world, which is our birthright for 98% of our existence. We saw in every tree, in every cloud, in every body of water, we saw the goddess. We saw the mystery. We saw the part of our self that, you know, in Greece they called it the daimon—that's on your shoulder that everybody else can see, but the moment you turn to look at it, it goes somewhere else. So you can never see your own, your own sort of spirit, right? And when we can see through other species' eyes ourselves, so much of our insecurity in, you know, the 21st century as human beings goes away. When we are scrolling through our black mirrors, you know, looking for that dopamine release, which of course is super hyper-reductionist, let's select whiter. What we're actually craving is to be nestled in the branches or the roots of a tree. We're craving to be seen by the more than human world through the eyes of an other that we cannot understand and to feel seen and to feel love and to see beauty. We're looking for beauty. We're all beauty junkies, and that's what nature and creation and the imaginal realms are—the possibility for that. But the more we are afraid of that, the more we create ugliness, the more we create pollution, the more we create, uh, ecocide, genocide, semiocide, and the more impoverished we get, uh, on a level of significance and meaning.
So much depth here. And the critical part of me though, applying to me in nature and what I just shared with you is that I do sometimes feel a sort of disconnect with the suffering in the world. I happen to live in a sort of a rich country. I have a nice home, um, closely to nice nature in the Netherlands. This is great, sitting down with you, having conversations like these. There's a lot of suffering in the world, and I sometimes shut myself off from it, and then to—I feel that voice that says sort of this is spiritual bypassing—hunts also, also in my work for Essentia, thinking about analytic idealism—and I feel that sort of risk, and I, I'm just sort of openly exploring that for myself. What are your reflections there on sort of that notion of spiritual bypassing in all what you just said?
Well, I, I feel you on that because I hope that every single human being alive in a position of privilege like we are, um, feels that schizophrenia. Yeah. Between a world which we, you know, we sort of—this, uh, learned helplessness of like, "Oh no, my government or these corporations are doing all this horrible stuff all the way around the world," and these, you know, global commodity chains have been set up that, you know, just like export suffering everywhere, um, and we feel helpless. So we just go…
Back to our job. We go back to our family, our little garden. And on the one hand, and we do our psychedelics once a month, you know, that's that's go to church, right? Um, do our dancing. And on the one hand, you know, I would say that's like the u the exhale or the inhale, right? Depending on where you're at with it. We have to be able to live our lives and have the normalcy of believing that we're contributing to something greater, even if it doesn't look and feel like that right now. And hopefully we are right, because I don't think that that's empty. I don't think that that's empty. And I really want everybody to feel that whatever they're doing, however small or local or um, you know, it it is, that there is also this fierceness, this this sense of resolve that I'm not just going to be um, yeah, opting out, escapist, right? Like uh, Douglas Rushkoff, you know, writes about in *Survival of the Richest*, where you have all these half-baked ideas from um misled billionaires who think that they'll be able to escape our common destiny.
Yeah. Right. Um, by having their bat caves or their uh, you know, land in New Zealand uh, or their bunker, and all of this is, you know, like uh, I teach my students about this, and I I think very young children understand that there is no escaping our shared planetary destiny, and that this is very serious, and that we have to do something about it. Bruno Latour has written extensively on this. You also write like, like suffering is non-optional. I wrote in one of your papers.
Yeah. So you have to convert the suffering into beauty. So to not feel the suffering is creating more suffering. And so when we try to spiritually bypass and try to, you know, plug our ears, our you know, eyes and our mouth and don't take our autonomy, our our uh god-given sovereignty in the world as uh agents, agents of change, agents of upholding you beauty, truth, and goodness, which I absolutely believe in as one, just as Socrates did. When we neglect that responsibility, then we become what? Who who are we? How can we uh have pride in ourselves? How can we show up for our children, our family, our community, even our gardens, right? So there is this inhale, exhale. We, in addition to have living our small little lives, intellectual white-collar lives, whatever it is. Um, which I definitely, you know, I protest less in the streets now than I did when I was 20. Um, do I feel like I'm getting soft? No. Uh um, but that's also because I'm very active in organizing with others because the data is clear. By ourselves, we cannot affect government decisions because it's all about govern government and governance. You know, we ought to know all of our neighbors uh in theory and be able to say, "No, we don't want this um liquor store on our corner. Absolutely not. We don't need another one of those. Go away. No, we don't want you selling cigarettes to our kids. Go away." Exerting our no. But we've become flabby. We no longer take strong stands and know how to be successful. We don't know how to coalition build. We infight amongst each other, saying, "Oh, well, you don't have the same politics as me, or you know, you uh you know, also like these other things that are distasteful, so I'm not going to coalition build with you." This is stupid, ineffective, and it's nonsense.
Yeah. Um, so I see it as the two sides. It's like seasons, right? We have seasons in our lives where we organize with others to uphold the very fabric of our reality because if we just do nothing and pretend that uh doing um our work is enough in a time of emergency, I would say unequivocally with the meta-crisis, we are in a state of emergency. How do we create non-rival riskiness? This is a concept I've really um uh sort of naturalized from uh Daniel Schmackenberger, who uh has really uh written and and spoken about this eloquently. We need to create a framework both with governments and corporations, and you know, I'm writing a book about industrial epidemics, industrial pandemics uh and how they can be stopped um and how we absolutely need to stop them. But we can't blame a corporation that's just doing what governments have said it can do. We have to change the soup we're swimming in. And that's why I take an ecological approach to all of this, right? We both need to not spiritually bypass and also not blame ourselves for the entire world. And so again, it's neither cooperation nor competition all the way down. It's always a mix. So how do we deal with all of this on a personal, individual level? We all will have different affordances, different semiotic scaffolding that give us opportunities for bravery and courage. And I think that those opportunities, when we take them, that's our destiny. That's our dharma. Uh, these are the moments where we feel most alive, where we're acting in concert. Uh, Hannah Arendt says this actually is freedom. Anything else that you think of is freedom, your own private being able to do whatever you want in your own private realm, that's not freedom. Freedom is acting in concert with your equals, with your fellow citizens, with your fellow humans of the world, with your interspecies allies.
Um, and so I really prefer to think of it as all connected, the uh ecodelic work, the um the work that we're doing to try to change consciousness and rationality. What does that mean? To change what science is for and what's it supposed to do in our current culture. How to sort of disentangle the instrumentalization of technoscience from actual scientific inquiry where truth is the main focus. I see this as all part of it. It's necessary but not sufficient. Only we in our own lives will know those moments of kairos, stepping out of the the Chronos, of doing our daily tasks where we're like, "This is why I'm alive. This is my purpose. This is what I'm supposed to do." And acting and coming together. And it's such a hard thing for us to even think about because it's so scary because things have gotten so extreme in every way. You know, we feel so disempowered, so much learned helplessness where we've forgotten how to communicate with people we disagree with. We've forgotten how to mend our shoes or do basic things that people all around the world know how to do because they have to. And so part of the comfort that we have has also made us weak. And I don't mean that in any sort of like, you know, toxic masculinity sort of way. I mean it in terms of uh an intellectual weakness which disengages from the world around us.
Talking about sort of that the the the the metaphysics, the thinking behind it, the crisis of reason behind it because um I see sort of a tendency in some writers and thinkers to sort of just equate everything we see with nature and um you've written about something, I mean naive materialism in the sense that matter as small building blocks being fundamental in our universe is becoming sort of a minority position intellectually, right? To really uphold that, then you really shouldn't read quantum mechanics and you shouldn't read sort of what neuroscientists are telling us; you should definitely shouldn't read your work as well, so that's sort of a minority position, but there are these other flavors of materialism or physicalism I'd call them that are still quite widespread, and I was fascinated by reading about one of them called it called object-oriented ontology, ontology that you write about and you critique, P.E. um I was just curious how that how you see sort of how that plays into the dynamics we now see worldwide. Also thinking about stuff like AI because if you have an an ontology, a metaphysics that tells you there is no difference between an animate and the inanimate world, that sort of also enables you to spend billions of dollars on developing AI that can be disastrous on on many levels, but to just say it's all nature and this is just I'm just playing my role in evolution, right? So what is the big the battle of the stories, the battle of the metaphysical stories right now that you see playing out worldwide, geopolitically? Wow. Sorry, big question, but it um so uh you're referring to my article in the journal *Zygon* um in which I critique object-oriented ontology and other forms of speculative realism um on a biosematic basis, and I do this in part because there's a lot of ethical and logical flaws in it, which I enumerate um but first what is it, right?
Sure. So object-oriented ontology is this notion that objects speak to us uh whether it's a you know a a glass or a table or a cashew or you know a plant or you know a cloud, right? And this is a a form of uh I I would say truncated, like cut short, apotheosis. So apotheosis is seeing things uh seeing life where there is none, and pareidolia is like where you see faces in the clouds. Yeah. And so if you look at evolutionary biology and psychology um if you see a a false positive, right, a face in the clouds or a face in the bushes where there isn't one, and your cortisol levels spike for a second but nothing happens and then they can go back down. um it's not much of a a risk to your existence. However, if you have a false negative where there's, you know, a face of a jaguar or a crocodile or a hunter, right? Or, you know, as we say in uh our current uh discourse, a man or a bear. Um then if you don't see it, you're dead. So we are prone to hallucinate all the time into you know a shadow moves and we move. However, in our current world, we take everything as a threat, whether it's a comment on Facebook or you know as an existential threat. It becomes that sort of face uh in the bushes that we perceive to be real. If there's too many of those all the time, our cortisol levels spike, and it actually becomes a a degenerate um response rather than an evolutionarily helpful one, right? It becomes evolutionarily uh uh non-advantageous. And so object-oriented ontology um says that, you know, objects speak to us, but it doesn't talk about who's to interpret them. It doesn't talk about the question of interpretation at all. It makes lists and assemblages. It's sort of like bad Deleuzian uh uh you know phenomenology.
Um, let's assume for a moment that our dashboard mhm is zero-sum. You want to open some channels over here, maybe some other channels over there are going to become garbled. So you can't be open to everything all the time. Yeah. No being, no organism can. That's sort of the omniscient uh positing of of God or of oneness and wholeness, right? Where there is no opposition. And so, how do we deal with these connections to the world around us? Well, object-oriented ontology tells us that, you know, some people have privileged access to the nomina basically. and and these are the people that sort of build AIs or or Well, so that's an interesting question. uh the relationship between object-oriented ontology and you could say transhumanism, which is this sort of long-termism idea that came out of the really uh you know um yeah poorly understood notion of utilitarianism or effective altruism, which thinks that you know if we just increase the amount of um happiness in the most vague, bland uh general terms, terms that the world's a better place.
Yeah. Right. With no distinctions at all, right? Just happiness is this thing. So, first of all, nobody who is actually happy seeks for happiness. Nobody actually wants happiness. We want meaning, not happiness. So, that's a non-starter to begin with. Um, but the notion that the universe will be happier if we destroy the entire world, if we sacrifice all of humanity and the earth and we create a bunch of virtual bots in sufficient numbers that have sufficient levels of consciousness, uh, that their happiness is greater than all the beings on earth. And that's it. End of story. And then we win. And you know this fairy tale is actually a nightmare because a lot of people actually believe in this, and they're trying to create the end of the world where we all sort of upload our consciousness.
Yeah. This really taps into Have you read sort of Shoshana Zuboff's work, her sort of analysis of the hyper-capitalism or what's it called? Surveillance capitalism.
Surveillance capital. Sorry. Yeah, that's the word. And what we have here on the one hand is we have these um millennial Christians who want to um you know create war in the Middle East so then um you know basically using Israel as a a pawn in their own scheme so then they can ascend and create the apocalypse. And so you have them on the one hand working hand-in-hand with these AI people uh in Silicon Valley who have equal delusions, but they're pretending to be atheists rather than religious. They're pretending to be utilitarians where they're praying to this um this god of their own making, right? this Moloch of um of silicone uh that they think they'll get AGI out of which will never happen because all life, according to biosemiotics, has a digital component and an analog component. You have digital codes and analog. They just want digital. They think that ones and zeros is enough that you can get to actual consciousness from ones and zeros. And biosemiotics is bollocks. There's absolutely no way that that's ever existed and could not be because you need an analog dimension to interpretation itself because that's how meaning is made. So you you might have a thing that does a simulation of you know increasingly well, almost impossible to distinguish, but like who cares, why why all this effort to just deceive because you're not actually creating consciousness. You're not actually creating life. You're not actually creating something that's meaningful. You are creating a servant. You are creating more slaves. So then you can do away with human labor, you can do away with human meaning, you can silence people. It's just more weapons basically. Um, and these are not the tools that we actually need in our tool belt because as I'll remind you, E.O. Wilson famously said, we are living with Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technologies. And it's the mismatch between these which is driving all the problems. So I would say nope, we need a grand moratorium on all technological development until we fix our institutions and we deal with the fact that our unfelt, unmet emotions are driving this whole thing. We are being meat puppets because we're not actually taking account internally or externally or in the other realms of who is sucking our blood. What vamp what creatures have we let become vampires because we're not aware of them when they could be our allies. We need to feel again. You said that's the only way that we will survive is through acknowledging that most of our so-called rationality, most of our so-called science and technology and almost all of our government and governance is being driven by at this point dysbiosis in our um in our world, in our existence. And the only way to access that is through feeling and in you know Asher Walden's work on uh the symbiotic ecology in the imaginal realms, right? He's talking about psychedelics, psychedelic experience, and we meet all these other creatures, and if we are not able to acknowledge this ecology, this invisible these invisible realms and to make peace, to make to harmonize our relations, we must meet our own fear. We must meet our own feeling and sense of inadequacy which makes us strive for never having enough. Right? We can never have enough in our current culture. And what we find when we get to a moment of sufficiency is sufficiency, not through being Rambo, but through our network of relations, creating an ecology, a habitat both through our uh family and friends, our community, but also uh being able to eat from our surroundings, having nowhere to get clean water, know where we can make our own electricity, know where we can uh uh have plants and uh develop intergenerational projects of food forests, you know, permaculture, eco-villages, all all of this that will allow us to relax this notion that we have to prepare for the apocalypse all the time, which is burdening every human being's consciousness and actually all the other organisms too because we're mowing down the Amazon. We're mowing down um I just read Jean Baptiste Feros's book more and more and more about uh energy symbiosis where we have never gone through an energy transition. We're using more wood than ever, more coal than ever, more oil and gas. And so going to renewables is not going to solve the story. We need to reduce the amount of waste in our society. The invention of pollution needs to also have a cap, where the end of pollution.
Yeah. I want to zoom out with you like to the sort of really high metaphysical level, hearing you talk and um there's a lot of things that I that I think, first of all, I have this fascination through reading your work but also my own research into sort of biology, having interviewed Michael Levin for instance, on how we can be inspired in and when you talk about the inhale and the exhale sort of and and you could also sort of this this boundary. We have to somehow keep up. You know, evolution has taught us to in my own well to sort of keep my models going. My default mode network helps me to sit here down with you, have this conversation on the at the same time it hinders me sometimes to sort of feel. So I'm in this constant search of sort of models that I build up and and sort of strengthen my my my my membrane and sort of being porous and feeling and this dance and cells are very good at it. sort of they know how to how to just do it and sometimes millions of years of practice and that's super interesting and but zooming out this steps also of course into the director of our foundation, Bernardo Kastrup's work on on seeing sort of the universe a mind at large that dissociates itself into altars um a metaphor is of course cells sort of like it's the first time that sort of entropically we see sort of chemicals, a bunch of chemicals that say okay we're going to do this a membrane. And now there's an inside and outside. There was just this this entropic soup. And somehow we're sitting here as sort of two cells, buildup of cells, and we're in this constant dance. So I'm I'm sort of curious at your sort of end ontology on all of this. Do you also suppose a mind at large that somehow does this? And you already gave us a lot of tips on how to dance. But I'm just curious what your thoughts are. These are sort of my philosophical reflections on hearing you talk. So I'm I'm sort of curious how you or you know Bernardo Kastrup sees this mind at large um you know what are the contours of it, does it breathe uh you know does is it Parmenidean or Heracleitian uh is it processual? That's super in the first thing I'd say is that it is not uh self-aware, it is not how Bernardo would call it meta-cognit as we are, which helped me. But I think this would be a great conversation between you and Bernardo. Me personally, what really helped me was I have a Christian background and and and reading Carl Jung's *Answer to Job* was like the most important book I read. It was a tip by Bernardo who said I should read it. And it was like a complete upside down of how I understood sort of the book of Job in the Bible which sort of in my Dutch Reformed upbringing was told like the story of God's ways are uh mysterious, right? God has this master plan and it involves suffering and who are we to call out God for for the suffering we have to endure and then Jung says no, Job is an incarnated being who has to who has this sort of experience of the suffering that Yahweh in the story himself does not have. And even it's it's pure blasphemy if you're like what Jung does because he says Yahweh is not aware. He's not aware of what he's doing. Even in the story, Satan who sort of sort of you know he comes up with the whole deal with God to to give the suffering to to Job to inflict it on Job is even Satan is more aware of what's happening in the creation than than Yahweh in this story. And um so I'd say I now am I'm I'm much on that Jung reading that there is this sort of mind at large sort of this oneness uh that I do think is is in some sense conscious but very different than we are, and it needs us to report back and I mean a lot of religious traditions talk about sort of the divine incarnating into this sort of dance of existence and to me it's meaningful because now my suffering, my subjective experience of the world has meaning because it has meaning to to to give back to the universe to just cry out sometimes or um I guess that's that's that's my ontology. I don't know if it helps or is an answer to your
Question. Yeah. So when, when you said, you know, there’s this reporting back, I think that that’s a really important aspect. How do we report back? What are ways that, um, we take time on a regular basis to report back? And what does that mean and look like? You know, uh, Catholicism, part of it’s confession. And confession isn’t just the words and deeds. It’s also the emotion. It’s also feeling the things that are keeping us back that we’re hating ourselves for. It’s the guilt.
Yeah. Right. I have a Catholic mother, so you know, I know a little bit about this. Um, and and this this notion of guilt and, uh, I’m wrong and you know that you have to like, uh, whip yourself, you know, for your horrible deeds and the idea that that’s not going to actually allow you to evolve further. That’s going to keep you in a stuck model.
Yeah. And I think that we have exported this suffering to the world like this stuck model of like, oh, I have to be guilty for all of these things, uh, which is keeping us in these stuck patterns of the sides, right?
Yeah. Um, now to just modulate to Buddhism, right? There’s this notion the four noble truths and so suffering is a non-optional part of existence for all living beings, as far as you know, all incarnate beings, all imagininal beings which are beings, right? Rather than oneness. As long as you have a differentiated consciousness in any such way, even if consciousness is intertwined and interdependent, as long as you have any sort of differentiation into a sense of self, there’s suffering. Now, you have maybe imagininal realms where suffering has different subtleties and layers. Um, but we are incarnated on this planet and instead of seeing this planet as a bunch, a piece of that we’re supposed to transcend, or it’s not important, or it’s a lesson or a task, which are all delay and distantiation things, it’s all a non—they’re all tactics to not feel, to not confront ourselves with the preciousness and the beauty of what is here now.
Yeah. And these are all—that’s Satan for me. That’s, you know, that’s the the the sin of not being able to value and cherish and care for, uh, the the the life and what we are given. It’s a rejection of now and here. It’s a rejection of being, and it’s a hating, in fact, of incarnation. It’s a hating of the material. And I think that is an absolute mistake because that will never produce a society of peace or of love or of happiness in any of these ways. But least of all will it create a society with meaning? Because if we reject actively, and we’re actively spending so much energy rejecting reality as it shows up to us, our…
Yeah. Yeah. That is allowing us maybe one, five, ten percent max of being who we could be, right, and responding because we’re afraid all the time because we think it doesn’t matter, so it’s an a priori rejection of reality as it’s showing up to us. And in Buddhism they say, you know, um, if you have to suffer, make it beautiful, devote it for something greater, you know, and understand when, when you have correct understanding of our interdependency, of our, uh, um, of our interdependent co-arising, then you know that your destiny, your salvation, is bound up with the salvation of all living beings everywhere in all time, seen and unseen, in all possible realms and dimensions. And once you’re there, the present moment is everything, and as intense as the emotions are, the feelings, pains, you feel them because you realize that not feeling them would create more suffering. And then this is like pro tip, right? Bonus level: to create beauty out of the suffering, right? To create beautiful works of art, to create, uh, forests like the Amazon rainforest. Um, through terapreta for 5,000 years, indigenous people taught each other how to super low heat burn their, uh, bio compost to retain the minerals in the soil during the flood season so that they could have more abundance, and they helped create the Amazon rainforest as it was.
M. This is beauty, creating the Amazon rainforest, where, you know, the most biodiverse place on earth, that is creating beauty out of suffering. Wow.
And a final question, Yogi, on a personal level, could you share a little bit on on how you, in your personal life, through your what you call your echodelic practice, have transcended or or sort of created this beauty out of your own suffering?
I’ve transcended nothing, and I every day second-guess and doubt myself, and, um, and then I I move. Then I play music. Then I hug my partner. I play with my child. I go outside and go for a walk. I feed my chickens. I have a thought and I write it down. I correspond with academics all around the world. I meet with people like you, you know. I read some wisdom of the ages in a book. I have tea ceremony, uh, by myself or with others. I allow myself to both inhale and exhale and not resent either one and not to identify with either my best or my worst. You know, I just won a big grant yesterday. I told you.
Awesome. Congratulations. I’m I’m very happy about that. And at the same time, I’ve lost—I have not won more grants than I’ve won. And that is life.
M. And so to be able to create enough of a container to hold the roller coaster of life, the, um, yeah, the the highs and the lows, that is only possible for me with the more than human world, with my web of relations and to really live an ecodelic bioiotic, uh, existence and learning new things all the time. Like, uh, my son was interested in archery, so I’ve started learning archery with him, and that itself is something I’ve greatly needed, that just pure focus, um, of a target. And if you go too much to the right, then you need to overcompensate and go further to the left in order to hit the bullseye.
Yeah. And so I, you know, I am far from accomplished in the ways of being able to ride high, but I’m grateful enough to be able to express the full range of emotions. Um, you know, I had an accident a few week—a few months ago that was probably the worst accident in my life. And you know, my son, he was afraid I was going to die.
Whoa.
And, um, I just had to breathe through the whole thing, you know. I had to accept and use all the knowledge from, you know, my yoga teachers and everything to rehabilitate myself. Um, because nobody could do it for me. Of course, people could help me. Of course, I asked for help and received, you know, medical care and healing and all that, um, you know, the prayers of my my parents, you know, but, um, in the end I had to deal with all the blockages in my mind, in my emotions and in my physical body and with my re-web of relations, the people in my life. And I still battle with, uh, resentment and other emotions that are strong in my lineage that I’ve received, you know, um, both through life experiences and, uh, perhaps, you know, uh, through genetics. I don’t know. We we are given whatever, you know, hand of cards we have, but the sort of, um, I I say that I have like a metaphysically I have a, um, a a tripod that supports me, and one of those is, uh, Buddhism, like vipassanā; one is Daoism—I’ve had been very blessed with Daoist masters, teachers, shífùs; and one is a indigenous, uh, ritual ceremony, plant medicines, uh, that have brought me to a place where, um, I can feel on a very deep level, um, all the sadness of the world and not get caught up in it. And I can feel all the beauty in the world and not get caught up in it. And I do get caught up in both sometimes, and also to not get caught up in that.
Thank you so much, Yogi.
Thank you, Hans. Yeah, thank you for your openness and your heartfelt wisdom. And I think it’s also a—we’ve had a beautiful conversation that also is very much about what a sensia is about, in a sense that it is—I mean, we’ve started off analytically talking about sort of, you know, science and doing the thinking and just being critical thinking and using the faculty of mind, which is which which is beautiful, but which has its limits, but can free us in a sense. And I think in one of the statutes of our foundation it says that the the the mind can be the or the head can be the bouncer of the heart, that sort of can be wrong thinking that sort of prevents us from connecting with our heart. And some people are blessed with more direct access to the heart and have don’t have such a strong mind, but I sense for someone like you, you’re obviously highly intellective, so you are a thinker, and then to think yourself free, to think beauty, to think—I find that beautiful, and it’s it’s what our foundation is about. So I’m just super happy we can share your wi-wisdom with all of you watching, and, um, yeah, thanks again for that, Yogi, and, uh, we will make sure to—because you referenced a lot of authors and thinkers—I’ll I’ll think we should have contact to share those in the descriptions below this video so you can just sort of explore the wealth of, um, all the wisdom shared in this conversation. Thanks so much for watching this interview, and, uh, please come and ask questions that we can follow up on. You, uh, you’re close by, so if you like this, we could sit down and have a sure follow-up discussion. I’d love to do so. Thanks, Yogi. Thanks so much for watching and see you in one of our next videos. [Music]