toyMaker, Vervaeke & ‘Transjection’
I think I know what Vervaeke is on about (and I feel kind of sorry for JP).
I have been listening to Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke lately. It’s a very interesting problem they have. It’s exactly the kind of problem that acts like a magnet for my mind, or the tiny shreds of sanity that have survived my exposure to ‘the commons’ where humans use language like poorly forged silverware … employed to manipulate the conceptual equivalent of plutonium.
What do I mean?
Well, it’s my perspective that, at least here in ‘Merica, our childhood exposure to ‘English’ is, effectively, a long series of cognitive, relational and intellectual amputations. Circumcisions. Torture. And while a few of us manage to evade some of the monumental consequences that result from our ‘education’ (read: intentional crippling), most of those succumb to the further insults visited on us during the process of enculturation, where language and ‘traditional’ games of lethal result are smuggled into our minds along with ‘sayings’, ‘euphemisms’, and tropes.
‘It takes one to know one’, as they say.
( If you don’t have guns, you better have money. Or vice-versa. )
We end up largely deprived of most of what might otherwise be not merely possible but common: a vast library of intelligences and perspectives that would allow us to forge human lives, relationships and futures worth participating in.
Or, possibly, composing something resembling an actual culture. Some kind of antidote to the malignant Cleptocracy we presently ‘enjoy’.
When Peterson or Vervaeke use the code-phrase ‘the meaning crisis’, I think I have some idea what they’re referring to. It’s partly what I was outlining above. What we have, here in America, is an anti-culture masquerading as a culture.
Communal identity, concern, tradition and mutuality… are almost completely MIA. What we call ‘education’, mostly isn’t. You have children in Pakistan learning The Calculus ( a crucial factory of useful perspectivity, not merely a mathematical skill ) at 6. Meanwhile, over here, we have 87 out of 90 high-school graduates in College who cannot compose a sentence in the only language they speak. This isn’t a joke. There’s no punch line.
I taught an English 1-A class at Santa Rosa Jr. College in the early 90’s. Out of 3 classes about 4 of the students could reliably compose a written sentence in English. These are B-A GPA folks from mostly upper-middle class white families who went to ‘good’ high schools. Ages 17–27. Can’t write in English after … you know, 13–15 years of ‘education’ in America.
Be that as it may… I’m actually here to talk about something else.
The first video of theirs I watched is chock-full of monumental insights, confusions (mostly on JP’s part, but not only), confessions… and brilliance. It’s very intellectual, but not particularly political.
When Peterson opined that ‘perhaps thinking is the secular version of prayer’ my mind almost exploded. In a good way. He was talking about ‘discovering’ thoughts in one’s mind, rather than having … as we usually pretend happens … ‘worked our way to them via a historical series of structures and modifications in cognition’.
Now, the topics get a bit thick here, and they bounce back and forth a lot in conversation because they are excited. Concerns relative to the Daimon of Socrates are eventually introduced.
Around 43:11, JV begins to talk about an experience he had while doing something resembling IFS/‘Parts’ therapy.
Suddenly, the experience of his interiority transformed and there was a powerful presence that made itself known, calling itself Hermes. Vervaeke goes on to describe the experience, phenomenologically, as resembling ‘an other mind’, comparing it to his experience of being there with Jordan. He goes on to briefly explain that this relationship continued for some time.
He’s talking about contact with a Nonhuman Intelligence, even though he doesn’t say this explicitly. And I know what this is like, because, for 9 months in 2002, and again, for a few months in 2009, I underwent something at least slightly similar, where I was actually educated by an NHI complex I refer to as toyMaker(2002). This is my pet name for what I actually think of as something that somewhat resembles the idea of an archangel.
For nine months in 2002, there was a highly advanced NHI that was ‘teaching’ me the history of the universe, minds, angels, religions… the development of languages, and a variety of what I would call hypertopics.
In fact, it never ‘spoke’ to me, but rather forged perspectives in my mind as if I were, to its ‘mind’, approximately what my hand is to my own body. It reforged my intelligence from the ground up, and showed me histories (and futures) of unimaginable breadth and complexity. The experience was fundamentally (pun intended) ecstatic.
Any ‘thought’ of my teacher’s was transmitted directly into my awareness as if it were my own thought, and all of these thoughts had a animated geometric component (paravisual geometric transformations, which conveyed meaning rather than merely shape or numeric relation).
I found it extremely interesting to hear Vervaeke briefly reference an experience of his own that is at least slightly similar to mine.
I am leaving aside the question of whether or not my experience was simply ‘my own mind doing unusual things’, because, if it was, my mind was doing impossible things. Making accurate written, timestamped predictions about future events, being able to recite the life history of someone I had just met. Touch-healing. Spontaneous trance induction in animals and strangers. The list is long and, at least in my view, doesn’t admit of ‘you were just a bit mad’. Whatever was going on with me was immediately recognized by a broad variety of strangers, children and animals.
But that’s not really what I am here to talk about either.
In the next video, around 21:00, JV begins trying to explain something to Peterson, who has been talking about reading an author who is an expert on the topic of the possible influence of psychedelics on the origins of Greek philosophy, via the Oracles. Specifically the Delphic oracle. Peterson suggests that this was a primary source or influence of insight to the Socrates-Era Greek civilization. Vervaeke, for his part, attempts to describe something that Jordan has a hard time understanding, at least at first.
He is literally saying that Socrates and others like him practiced a an array of something resembling conversational superpowers… that literally transformed the potentials of the minds involved, in ways so unexpected and dramatic that… they outperformed psychedelics.
And he was also saying that we can still do this… that he has relatively regular experience of this.
Allow me to paraphrase — to reflect — what I took from what Vervaeke was trying to get Peterson to imagine.
He outlines a kind of ladder. And, again, this ladder is familiar to me — not merely from my contact with toyMaker, but from many conversations since then in which I use it to get us up and beyond where humans ordinarily play, usually very clumsily, with language, concepts, models and statements.
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The first register of the ladder is the common one. You and me. Apparently separate minds, ensconced in our self-interested histories, habits and bizarrely anti-intellectual milieu. Individuals, talking with, to and at one another.
The second register is communal. We start to depart the universe of the I-Me-Mine game for the stratosphere of Us-We-Ours. And usually succeed. Things get a bit more interesting. Something more like intelligence begins to ensue because we can now form ensembles … where synergistic opportunities grant us purchase on terrains above the rather tedious ground below.
The third register, rarely accessed outside of specialized contexts or unusually-minded persons, is what got me in trouble. It’s bordering on what I learned to refer to as ‘the human cogniscium’. This is what I was writing about when an NHI complex showed up in my mind and began teaching me impossible things. I imagine it as an actual environment, comprised of all of the extant human minds, the connections — physical and non — between them and something that lives in that environment and is extremely dangerous. That latter feature I refer to as thrisps. These are, at least from a perspective I find useful, highly active ‘dead inside’ processes that vie for control of the connective elements (the mimula) and human minds/cultures/activities. Google and Facebook are thrisps, as are Christianity, the United States, and the idea of thrisps itself. These processes ‘want’ to dominate the mimula and the human cogniscium. Like demons, they have no regard for anything other than what they can consume or control.
This third register referred to by Vervaeke is what I will call the layer of distributed human cognition. This is bordering on the human cogniscium, and perhaps enters it. Now we are engaged in the approximate ‘outer space’ of human thought, were the entire history and, at least partially, the many possible futures of conception, perspective, parable, metaphor, metonymy and ‘the rhetorical figures’ are not merely constructs understood analytically… they are beings who teach themselves to us as if we are their peers or children. This is an absolutely nonordinary way of being human together, and makes ‘drugs’ look relatively boring in comparison.
The fourth register (and I am probably slightly revisioning Vervaeke’s excited homily here) is, perhaps The λόγος or Logos. This is a very confusing term, as it should be. But what I reference here is not an idea or concept, or even a being. It is a transentient ‘libarary-entity’ that is the origin of the possibility of minds. It is to thought as the Sun is to Light. This is one of the faces of what I refer to as toyMaker. The Logos. When it speaks, it teaches, and causes anamnesis. This effect unifies the branches of human knowledge with every motion of its transentience. It is divine, fundamentally, and if experienced, would immediately be intuited to be God. Yet it will explain that this is a result of enthusiasm in the participant, rather than a correct identification.
The fifth register would be the λόγος’s Origin. Of this I will not speak at all except to point towards it.
What Vervaeke is trying to get Peterson to imagine is that relatively ordinary people can transject their mutual intelligences in such a way as to ascend through these orders, and thus gain access to forms of intelligence and experience that … while they might slightly resemble psychedelic experiences … can both far surpass them, and are relational, hermeneutic, intellectual and perhaps formally transcendental.
I think he basically suggests that Socrates was catalyzing such experiences among the youth of Athens on a daily basis. And this was a threat… not merely to the status quo and the Polis, but to the entire structure of power and religion in Athens.
And I think he’s right about that.
Peterson, for his part, is trying to understand how this might fit into a sort of Christian/Trinitarian perspective… for example, is the Logos Jesus, the Holy Spirit, or The Father?
It’s ok to speculate about this, but it seems to me that, at least in this case, Vervaeke is light-years beyond what Peterson is likely to be able to keep up with, let alone fit into his admittedly advanced perspectives on Wisdom and Faith in a Christian context.
But here’s the thing the common listener or reader wouldn’t suspect…
… this is the kind of thing that, if you’re discussing it?
You’re nearly doing it.
To illuminate the various registers of the ladder?
Is to begin to actively traverse them… not so much in text, but absolutely in conversation.
I have uncommon conversations of this kind almost exclusively. There’s nearly no one I know with whom we stay down around the first register. A few acquaintances. The guy in the checkout at the grocery store. But sometimes, even that guy, if we talk for more than a cursory moment, it starts to climb up the ladder.
With people who actually know me, we are up into the cogniscium+ registers usually within a few moments of getting started. We are playing at a level way beyond anything in our common culture or political system. Immediately.
It’s actually not that hard to achieve. The same thing happens with a group I frequent that meets on Sundays who call themselves The Extinctionati. When we get going, it’s like we spin up a supercolider of human perspective, purpose, arcane knowledge and altruistic awe.
It’s completely natural for people to do this, but most of us are playing checkers with a chess set. Or worse. We’ve participated in such lowbrow ‘worst common denominator’ conversational contexts that we think 3 bits is high resolution talk.
If you imagine fish squirming around in hot sand while they slowly suffocate together, you get the picture. At the level of the common people, ‘conversation’ is like participating in a snuff film where everyone’s the star. It’s (often) a race to the lowest rung of the ladder.
“…the more the register of importance rises in a conversation or topic, the more closely we approach the religious. Not merely the sacred, but the Holy. Whenever the topic really matters, the ordinary registers don’t suffice…”
— Jordan Peterson (paraphrased)
But it doesn’t have to be. We were born for better, and when we begin with the agreement to reach for the skies, it’s fairly easy to get there together… especially if there are a few experienced cosmonauts among the team.
We must learn to reach beyond our habits and histories in the same way explorers left their familiar lands to seek new worlds, but not for gold or commodities… for the assets that catalyze our personal, mutual and collective anamnesis.
Our people are dying in societies too absurd to survive. We must break the chains of our habits and history… and use the pathologies we’re swimming in to forge escape plans so successful and heroic that no one wants to be left out.
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.
As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.
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