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Nine in 10 young people in the UK believe that their life is lacking purpose and a lot of people are turning
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back to religion. There is something going on. This is about the most important thing that anyone could ever find out about
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their life and God has made us for a purpose and the purpose flows from that meaning. I kind of reject that cuz this is a
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perfect example of a solution being provided without explaining exactly why it provides a solution and that's what
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people are doing in religious traditions. I hard disagree. For me, finding meaning and purpose is like a
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very practical thing. And that's what I want to talk about today. We are joined by an atheist, Christian, and spiritual thinker
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to find an answer to the purpose crisis millions are facing today. One of the reasons that I'm a Christian
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is because it's the best explanation for the way things are. But if Christianity were true, we would not expect the kind of suffering that is
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present in the world. So, I'm very curious. What if I died from cancer at 1 years old? So, someone violated God's commands and
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that had an impact on the world. So children get cancer because a few million years ago someone ate a fruit. If you want religion to provide
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existential comfort for people who are suffering, you have to do more in the face of children dying of cancer than
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some reference to mythical human beings. But if your worldview does not have a way of making sense or moral intuitions
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about suffering, it's not an adequate worldview. What I would say a science and spirituality can really add is it's
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effective in terms of reducing suicidality, improving resilience, giving them a reason to wake up in the
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morning. And we'll get into that. And Alex, if someone's listening now and they feel lost in their life, is there any advice that you could give them?
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So, as an atheist, I'm offering a psychological explanation. So, I would recommend that they
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You're spot on, Alex. So, the first thing to understand is it is an internal feeling. And we found in our study that
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if you your sense of purpose increases by 68%.
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[Music] Ole, Greg,
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Alex. The reason I wanted to speak to all three of you today is to discuss meaning and purpose. And there's some stats that
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I wanted to share that kind of frame the discussion. Three in five young Americans believe that their life lacks
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purpose. Nine in 10 young people in the UK believe that their life is lacking purpose. And when I look across other
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stats as it relates to things like mental health, 59% of Brits said they lived a meaningful life compared to just
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25% who said they did not. In an October 21 survey, 34% of men in the UK said
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life had no meaning compared to 18% of women and 50% of the same group who said
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that their lives lack purpose and meaning said that their poor mental health was linked to not knowing what to
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do with their life. Mhm. And to give some further stats which I found really interesting around the rise of religiosity, in the UK, a belief in
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God amongst 18 to 24 year olds has risen from 18% in 2021 to 37% in 2025
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according to Yuggov. And in the UK, monthly church attendance has risen from 4% up to 15% in 2025.
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There is something going on and that's what I want to talk about today. But before we do that, I'd love
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to understand the perspective that all of you bring to this conversation. So if I start with yourself, Alec,
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you know, it's it's interesting you mentioned a lot about mental health. I'm a psychiatrist. So for me, finding
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meaning and purpose is like a very practical thing. So literally, a patient will come into my office. They'll say,
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"I have no reason to live. There's there's no nothing worth it in life. I am suicidal. I want to kill myself." So
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I have a job as a clinician to like fix that problem in a very like practical way. So, I've got, you know, a couple of
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weeks, hopefully 15, 20 weeks to teach them how to find purpose. And so,
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usually the way that I approach that is there's there's a lot of sort of evidence-based scientific approaches to
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finding purpose. I think those tend to work really well, but I'm I'm sure, as my philosopher colleagues will will
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point out and tear me apart, you know, science has a lot of shortcomings. And so then what I I tend to find works
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incredibly well is adding a certain degree of spiritual practice to that. And usually when we put those two things
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together, things work. And the the real proof point for me was when I started
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streaming, 10,000 people reached out to me in one month asking, hey, like do you have room in your private practice? And
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so I started to think about, okay, if this is a methodology, then can it be taught? So, I started this coaching
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program and what we found in our pilot study of,453 people is that if you stick with the
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program for about 20 weeks, your sense of purpose increases by 68%. I'd love to
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hear from my colleagues, but I I think, you know, if someone asks me, "What is the meaning of life?" I I don't know,
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but if someone says, "I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?" The answer is absolutely yes.
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And I want to attempt to just define two terms that you said there. One is purpose. And it doesn't have to be a
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perfect definition but roughly what you mean by that. And then you said you introduced spiritual practice. What did you mean by that?
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So what I think about is purpose is using something called factor analysis. So if you ask someone do you have
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direction in life? Do you have purpose in life? Is there meaning in life? All
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three of those things cluster together to some. Even being in control correlates with
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that. So if you were in control of your life, your sense of purpose will increase. So there are a lot of these like words that we use but all of these
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words tie back to some internal sense of what is happening in your life. So
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that's how I would uh describe purpose in terms of spiritual practices. What my
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experience is is that if you look at human beings who say they have purpose and human beings who don't have purpose,
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their lived experiences in life are different. So when I work with survivors
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of trauma, they have certain experiences like literally we can scientifically sort of measure this. You have a
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particular experience which destroys your sense of meaning in the world. I had a patient once who was attacked in a
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bathroom for about 5 minutes. And in 5 minutes this person had a sense of what
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they were doing in life, was dating, was doing well in college, had loving parents, and in five minutes their
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compass for navigating the world was shattered. So if we sort of think about experience
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can lead to a loss of purpose, experience can also lead to a gain in
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purpose. Now the spiritual tradition that I come from is all about particular
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practices that evoke certain subjective experiences and as
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people have those experiences their sense of purpose increases and
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this is where I think there's a major shortcoming of science. So science can tell you what you should do, but it
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doesn't create experiences in and of itself, right? So we can scientifically understand that the highest risk factor
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for pornography addiction is having no meaning in life. But even if we know that, that doesn't help us like fix the
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problem. Then there's always a question of how like so we can discover something with science, but then there's a question of how do we actually like move
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from point A to point B? And that's where I find spiritual practice is incredibly helpful. Mhm.
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Would you classify yourself as religious or or Yes, I think so. Greg,
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y what is the perspective you bring to this conversation and what's the the lived experience, the academia that um
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lends itself to that perspective? Yeah, there's a whole bunch of that fitting in and I relate to a lot what you're saying uh Alo about people's
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challenges. Now what's interesting to me about this whole discussion since I'm a Christian uh and I understand the world
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from a theistic perspective because I think it's the best explanation for the way things are just to give a definition to that um
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theistic what does that mean a personal god a god there is a personal god who is involved
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with the world he made the world and he still maintains activity as opposed to theistic which just wound up the clock
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and let it go okay so my view is god is still involved olved in fact so involved that he actually came to earth in the
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person of Jesus of Nazareth to create a rescue plan. Now, what's interesting to me about this broader question, we can
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get into more details too, is that it's not if there is a God who made the world for a purpose with meaning, people can
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participate in that meaning and purpose even if they don't know God. They're not they won't be experiencing what they
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were made for, which is to be in friendship with him with the plan that he's made for their flourishing, but
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they still can flourish in some measure in so far as they touch on these objective features. But in so far as we
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are able even without belief in God to kind of get in that groove the things
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that God made us for the purposes that he intends in light of being made like
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him in some way in his image there's going to be a measure of satisfaction but what they'll be missing is is the
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ultimate and that is that friendship with God and being restored in that. Alex.
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Yes sir. Same question for you about your what you bring to this uh conversation in terms of your perspective, your
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experience and maybe some of your sort of personal journey. Well, for for my
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own part, I was quite swept up in the new atheism movement, uh, which was a
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mid2000s publishing phenomenon with the likes of the Dawkins and the Hitchens of the world, saying that religion is evil
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and terrible. And I think promising an alternative, a kind of secular humanist utopia, that if you'll only throw off
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these oppressive religious systems, you will regain your spiritual autonomy and be able to assert yourself and the
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intrinsic meaning that you have within yourself. People tried that and it didn't seem to work. And I think that's
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because the new atheist movement was quite philosophically shallow. It didn't seriously engage with the existential
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component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place. And I think
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that is why it exists. I think humans are in a strange predicament due to the mystery of consciousness. We find
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ourselves possibly uniquely amongst other animals in the position of being
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mortal, being physically embodied, being in a world, but also knowing those
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things. It's one thing to experience the world. It's one thing to be it's another thing to be aware that you're experiencing it. Uh Josh Rasmusen once
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said there's a difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you've noticed a tree. We have this sort of
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second order abstraction that we can do. So, we know that death is coming, for example, and death makes a mockery of
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everything that we do. Seems to just obliterate any sense of purpose or meaning because anything that we're building will ultimately, as far as
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we're concerned, be gone. And that may well be unique to human beings. And so I'm not the first to suggest that the
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principal motivating factor behind meaning infused activities that humans
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do is an engagement in death denial or some kind of immortality project. People
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literally for fear of as a result of the knowledge that this
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will all come to an end engage in what we might call immortality projects. They engage in things which will outlast
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themselves which give them a sense of escaping this death. The most obvious example is in religious traditions which
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literally promise immortality for your own soul. But if you look just practically at where people subjectively
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report finding meaning, they find it in their children. They might find it in their job, but they're unlikely to find
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it in their job if they're doing something they don't really care about. They'll find it in their job. Maybe they're a maybe they're like a barrista
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and they find a lot of meaning in bringing justice into the world because they're participating in a system which they believe will outlast them and is
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bigger than them. So when people talk about meaning, we talk about transcendence, you know, something being above and beyond their own sort of
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material uh situation. And I think religion is the is is the the archetypal
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example of this and I think it's why it evolves in the first place. There is this idea that we are living in a
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meaning crisis that has cropped up maybe in the past 100 years or so or maybe in the last few hundred years or so as a
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response to the enlightenment and the decline of religion. I think that's far too easy. I think that's way too easy. I
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think that if there is such thing as a meaning crisis, it is literally the human condition and the reason why these projects were invented in the first
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place. I think literally speaking what people are doing in religious traditions is
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realizing the finitude of their existence and therefore trying to commune with something. Can I add a
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less finite of course we have this hunger and I I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic
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explanation can explain the consciousness's hunger for meaning and significant
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because that's all propositional. It's not molecules in motion. What's naturalistic mean? Naturalistic
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just means nature and that's all there is basically. So you have uh molecules
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in motion largely governed by natural law. There is no outside transcendent
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anything. There's no immaterial anything certainly not an immaterial god that has
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started the process and sustains the process and gives life meaning. There either is meaning
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objectively or not. Okay? If not then it's up to us. For example, a moment ago
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you said that if there is a creator God who brings us into existence, then you
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are designed and you are given purpose by God. And I think we need to
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investigate this a bit further. Mhm. Because for example, a quite sort of boring and overdone debate at the moment
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is the extent to which we are engaged in the production of potentially artificially conscious agents with
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artificial intelligence technologies. And there's all this discussion about whether or not these things can be conscious like you know whatever. Let's
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just suppose for a moment that they were. Let's suppose that I created an artificially intelligent machine and I gave it a purpose and that purpose was
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to produce paper clips. And because of the development of artificial intelligence technology, it became
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conscious in a recognizable sense. It had an interior sense of self. It sort
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of had say feelings or emotions about the world. But it is just an AI robot whose entire purpose in life is to make
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paper clips. Now I could say that because that AI was designed by a creator with a purpose
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that was explicitly given to it that that life is meaningful. But I think it would seem to most people that a life
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whose meaning consists in creating paper clips is not sufficient is not enough to
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address what people really want. It's not just some kind of purpose. It's not just even some kind of purpose which is
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given to you by an authoritative creative source. It's something which is further than that. Yeah. But if I can
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just relate this to the question, the problem that arises is that you have to answer the question of why God
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infuses life with the meaning that he gives it. Mhm. It's either something which he has sort of arbitrarily plucked up and and
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chosen to create in which case we have this problem of arbitrariness or no or in fact there is some reason why God had
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to give us a particular kind of meaning that's endemic to the human condition that he had no choice but for that meaning that more
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important kind of meaning to be given to human life but if he was beholden to that if he had to give us a particular
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kind of meaning it seems like there's a standard of meaning which exists outside of God. So I'm not sure in other words
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the mechanism by which being created by someone who says this is your purpose
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would be fulfilling in the way that people want it to be. The reason the paperclip illustration doesn't match is
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because it seems to me that you're subtly taking the thing that's conscious
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that makes paper clips and comparing it to a human being. And for human beings who seem to have a different purpose, I
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would argue be consigned to make paper clips, well that's dehumanizing to them. But if you have, just to follow your
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illustration, if you have a creator that makes something for a reason that the
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creator has in mind, then it's fulfilling its purpose perfectly. You know, for a human being, that's not
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going to be satisfying making paper clips. And a lot of people who are making paper clips are not satisfied with it. Okay? I don't think it's
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arbitrary if God is making something for a purpose. If God decides that he wants
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to make creatures to be in friendship with him because this reflects his
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loving character and that purpose is to be in friendship with him. I don't see
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how that is somehow negligible or arbitrary at all. I guess you could have said that God could have done otherwise,
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but his love and desire for communion is seem to me an adequate explanation for
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that. This is fascinating. Um, so my first question is what's the point of
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this conversation? Yeah. So I think that the ultimate
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answer that we're looking for is it appears that the numbers around purpose and meaning are fluctuating at this
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moment in time. a lot of people are turning back to religion as as Alex is we were just chatting about a second ago
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and I guess there's two questions which is one understanding why that's happening why there's this fluctuation
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why we're seeing a mental health crisis around purpose and meaning and the second is to try and figure out if
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there's a truth one can arrive at if there's an objective truth that exists.
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So for y'all I'm curious when y'all show up here like what is the purpose for y'all showing up? literally trying to
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discover like it's the stated purpose, right? It's literally just artificially given purpose by being designed in a
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particular way. We're going to get together and we're going to have a conversation and see if we can figure out this this meaning stuff, right? And
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by the way, like we're not going to solve that problem. I think it's worth pointing out that like these
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conversations have to be exploratory and subjective. If anybody thinks that the four of us sat at this table are going
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to solve the meaning crisis and give people a five-step guide to finding meaning in their life and that will be the sort of case closed, then they're
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delusional. I I don't know if I I agree that we can't find an answer, but we'll talk about
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Well, this is what I wanted to speak to. It it um obviously we're talking about this broader issue of meaning and purpose.
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All right? And as I mentioned earlier, there either is an objective one or it's only subjective. Okay? If it is an
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objective one, this is about the most important thing that anyone could ever find out about their life if they were created for a reason. In my view, the
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reason I'm here is because I'm convinced that that's the case and I'm willing to give reasons why. Okay? But I don't
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think I I'm sympathetic to the concern that you can't sit around a table and in two or three hours solve the problem for
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any individual because people going through the process of trying to figure these things out. It takes a long time
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as they put the pieces together. But I think there's a lot of people in the world that think they have put it together and they've come to conclusions
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about ultimate meaning and purpose and they don't come to my own conclusions. But many have. So what I would hate to
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do is to leave people with the feeling like we can all search and the glory is in the search but if you think you found
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the answer then you haven't. Of course this to me is a nealistic enterprise. Then I think it's possible to come to
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conclusions. Yes, I think so too to be clear. But I think what I'm what I'm trying to say is this will be something that one will
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experience for themselves and will discover for themselves in their own life. It's not going to be something that you know there's that old um is it
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Lynchi the the the sort of the Buddhist Coan that says if you meet the Buddha kill him. The idea being that you know
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if you think that the kind of enlightenment which is necessary to spiritual fulfillment can be found
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through some kind of guru um you're missing the mark. It's something that you need to do for yourself. But isn't
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that statement itself meant to be a truth about spirituality that you can actually count on or can I jump in?
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I just want to make sure I understand y'all's point. So, so you're saying that the search for purpose first of all is
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never going to go away like is a human condition, right? Yes. Like like so as
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humanity humanity will never find its purpose. I can tell you why if you like. No. No. I I don't even know why yet.
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I think I think individuals can but humanity that's yeah I'm just making sure I understand. Right. So an individual can
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find their purpose but as humanity it's never going to be solved. And then you said something about purpose being tied
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to opposing to death in some way. So transcending death that human beings
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basically look for purpose because death is inevitable and if we can find purpose
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then we can give our life meaning. But if death if we die and I don't leave something behind. Can you talk a little
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bit about that? This is essentially a version of Ernest Becker's denial of death hypothesis which famously suggests
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that the motivation for a great deal of human behavior is at least human behavior outside of immediate sensory
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concerns like eating and stuff like that. Anything that humans engage in on a societal level, on an abstract level
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is ultimately motivated by an apprehension of death. I think that's probably too simple, but it's definitely
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a contributing factor. I I think that for example, put it this way, right? Here's an example that comes from I
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think his name is Sheffller and he has this interesting thought experiment. Suppose I don't know maybe you're engaged in in writing a book. Suppose
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you discovered and this probably won't be the case for you because you believe in an afterlife, but suppose that you're an atheist for a moment. Suppose it were
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the case that you discovered that after you die, a meteor is going to come and
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wipe out all life on Earth. Everybody's going to die almost instantly after you do, but you'll be dead. So, you will live your entire life as it was anyway.
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Okay. And suppose the rest of the world doesn't even know this is going to happen, but you're told this is going to be the case. Would that motivate you to
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write your book more or less? Most people say that it would seem a bit pointless now. I What's the point now in
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writing this book? What's the point in in having children if they're going to die 30 days after I'm after I'm gone? What what's the point in in doing any of
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these things? What will they still do? They'll still do the sensory stuff. They'll still eat. They'll still have sex. They'll still sleep. This kind of
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stuff. But the the typically meaning uh laden activities of life they would certainly be demotivated to do. And it's
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an interesting thought experiment to give us some insight as to the fact that well maybe this means that at least in
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part the motivation for these actions in the first place is that they will extend beyond our death. I agree with so much of what I'll say
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and I also like hard disagree with some of the fundamentals. So let's say you
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have this example of like I'm write a book and then the world is going to end 30 days later and and so you say because
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a lot of what you're talking about is like what people say right so you'll say like okay so like people would say that
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this is a waste of time and I'm not going to do it if the world ends in 30 days and you're also saying people
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is a is an everlasting thing are struggling with purpose right you're saying both of these things
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so here's my question to you if you tell someone, you know, you're writing this book. Let's say you you you write it and
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then you die cuz we'll simplify the example. And then 30 days later, the world ends. Let's take two people. One
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who says, "I'm a write it anyway." And one who says, "There's no point." Which one of those two people do you
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think has a greater sense of purpose? Probably the former. Absolutely. So, this is the key thing.
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Purpose is absolutely because I I love that you're asking about mechanisms and I think maybe that's what I can provide.
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I I think that's that's actually the answer, right? So, it's not that people believe and I think you're right that
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the reason that this is a perennial problem is because most people do not live a life where they understand how
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purpose works. Mhm. And and what I think is really fascinating about sort of like this scientific clinical approach, like if
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you ask me, can I help people find meaning and purpose? I don't know. But
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if you ask me, can I help a person? The answer is absolutely. And we have like particular scientific things and this is
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where it's it's really counterintuitive. So a big part of like finding purpose is doing particular things and if you do
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those things the likelihood that you will increase your sense of purpose in life which is another thing that's very
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counterintuitive to people. Purpose is not binary. It's quantifiable. It's like a scale. So if I were to ask the three
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of y'all right maybe let's like let's do this not thought experiment but this practical experiment. Do you know your
00:24:07
purpose in life? Like how confident are you that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing in life? How confident am I about the God part or
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that I'm doing the things that are appropriate? That how confident are you that you're doing what God wants you to do?
00:24:21
Well, in that general sense, extremely confident or else I wouldn't be doing it. Perfect. Right. So, Stephen, what about
00:24:27
you, bro? About five out of 10. I knew it. Okay. Right. So, Alex,
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I don't want to be difficult, but I kind of reject the grammar of the question. Awesome. Reject away, bro. I think it's what a logician would call an exponable
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statement, something which needs to be broken down. You asked, "Do I know my own purpose?" That assumes that there is
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a purpose to know. It it's a bit like the comparison I would give is if I asked you the question, the classic
00:24:51
example in logic is is uh is the king of France bold? Yes or no? I can I can rephrase my question if you
00:24:57
have problems with my question. So, do you have a lived experience of
00:25:04
something called purpose? Oh, well, look, I think purpose is having some kind of reason to act or be. Yeah. And I
00:25:11
certainly subjectively am motivated to do things. I think everybody is. Otherwise, you literally wouldn't be able to do anything. Um, but it's a bit
00:25:18
foggy to me what psychologically speaking, on a personal level that fundamental motivation actually is. Wouldn't purpose be more the the goal
00:25:24
rather than the reason to act, what you're trying to accomplish? It's a semantic thing, but that's why it
00:25:31
depends what you mean by the word. I'm I'm with you. I'm I'm with you. So, so, so and I I don't know what I mean with the word purpose, which is part of
00:25:37
this challenge, but okay. So, so like I'm just wondering, so like when you So, a lot of people are motivated to act.
00:25:43
Everyone is motivated to act every day, right? I get out of bed, I need to take a dump. Like, but my guess
00:25:50
is that if we were to administer a scientifically validated instrument that
00:25:57
measures your subjective sense of purpose, direction in life that that would be north of five out of
00:26:03
10. Okay. Do you think that's fair or is is that something that you don't maybe? Yeah. I don't know what
00:26:10
like do you do you when you wake up, do you feel like you're know you know what you want to do and what's going on and you're like doing good work? Like I'm
00:26:16
asking about the subjective not on a grand sense. I'm quite agnostic. I mean I'm sort of I'm not talking about it. Okay. Maybe
00:26:21
it depend. I I really don't know what you mean. No. Perfect. Okay. So so so not on a grand sense but on some other sense.
00:26:28
Sure. Okay. Great. So I think that this is like this is I I think this is beautiful because I think
00:26:34
what we have here is like not on a grand sense. So I think on a grand sense you're there, right? But you're
00:26:40
absolutely motivated by particular things. So I think this is the first thing about purpose. Can I a
00:26:46
clarification real quickly? Yeah. On a grand sense, yes. But there are distinctions that you were referring to a few moments ago, right? There are a
00:26:52
lot of things that are dissatisfying my life. But in terms of being on the right course, that's part of what life is.
00:26:58
Being on the right course, lots of crazy stuff that's happening in between. Cool. So like like the first thing that
00:27:04
I've kind of noticed in my work is that I don't know whether a grander purpose
00:27:10
exists or not. I I think that's a lovely discussion that I want to continue to have with you, but I I I'm sort of here's where I'm sort of coming from in
00:27:16
this discussion. Stephen started this out with some really scary statistics that we're seeing, right? There's a mental health
00:27:21
crisis. I think a lot of what we're seeing is is while it may be perennial, I think it's like seems more acute right
00:27:28
now. Maybe that's because of the atheist materialism, whatever. I'm I'm not quite sure, but this is a problem. So, just
00:27:35
sharing where I'm coming from. My hope is that someone who is watching this will have moved forward some vague
00:27:42
percentage points. I'm shooting for about 20% in their personal quest for purpose.
00:27:47
And I think a big part of what I'm going to try to contribute here today is my understanding of like how to do that.
00:27:55
That this is a quantifiable thing that we can sort of see at this table. People are sort of like at different
00:28:01
places. And so the first thing that I kind of want to point out is I don't know
00:28:07
whether there's purpose or not, but as a human condition,
00:28:13
there is something that each of us feel or experience that gives us an answer,
00:28:19
right? So you're like at 10, but what that means is that you something is going on in your mind, something is
00:28:24
going on in your heart, something is going on in your body where you wake up and you feel like you have purpose.
00:28:30
Steven wakes up and he's like at a five out of 10. So, he's getting some signals in that area. Some signals are not in
00:28:35
that area. You have some signals in that direction, too. You know why you're showing up at this podcast. You you've
00:28:40
got a book that you're working on. Awesome. Can't wait to read it. And but on a grander sense, you're like, I don't know about this like objective
00:28:46
stuff or whatever. So, this is sort of like this quantifiable thing. And you um I'm going to let you all guess.
00:28:54
Where would you put me out? I don't like to psychize people. It's okay if you don't like to, will
00:29:00
you? I mean, I don't I just met you. I don't I don't know. I have no idea what what sense of meaning you you have in your
00:29:06
life. Mhm. Okay. I mean, for me, I I'm just motivated to try and find out.
00:29:12
So, I think I think the audience can guess, too. Yeah. I would say you're pretty high. That's why you're here. That's why
00:29:18
you're articulating your ideas. Probably probably closer to 10 than five. Mhm.
00:29:23
Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, so it's like it's okay if you don't want to do that because I'm guessing that there are certain things
00:29:29
in your intellect that tell you. So, do you have a subjective instinct? No, I just don't know you that well. I I
00:29:35
I mean, I don't know. Okay. And also, it depends what you mean, right? Because you'll say that you have a if you say that you're a 10, like we you have this
00:29:41
this there's this you use the phrase earlier sense a sense of meaning in life. because you're talking about this from an empirical standpoint of whether
00:29:48
people report having a sense of meaning. Whereas I think that Greg is probably talking about literally speaking whether
00:29:55
there is actually in fact a real meaning whether or not people sense it or not. You could say that you have a 10 out of
00:30:01
10 and Greg could say well that's it's great that you feel that way but it's misguided because the purpose that you
00:30:06
have identified in your life is the wrong one. And so to me the important question is not so much whether you
00:30:11
subjectively report feeling like you have purpose in life but whether that purpose is grounded in something real
00:30:16
and true. Yeah. So I think that your answer right now is the reason why you think some of
00:30:23
these questions are unanswerable. Mhm. So I think if you adopt that frame you'll never know. But
00:30:30
I don't think they're unanswerable. Okay. Let let me let me just finish. Okay. So my first uh experience of this
00:30:37
right is that first of all there is a subjective barometer like how do we know whether we have purpose maybe we listen
00:30:44
to other people but there is some sort of internal sense of this and this is where the science becomes really
00:30:49
important because if you look at people who have like a history of trauma or something what you tend to find is that there are certain like neurobiological
00:30:56
things that can happen to you that will literally affect the parts of your brain
00:31:01
that are able to detect purpose. So this is sort of like a subjective experience and I think the way that and
00:31:08
I I love your emphasis on mechanism and I think this is what in my opinion science and spirituality can really add
00:31:13
is they add the how right they they add like why is it that one person has purpose and another person doesn't have
00:31:19
purpose. So first thing is that in my experience in the way that I operate, I'm not saying it's correct. It's just
00:31:25
it's effective in terms of helping people move the needle on reducing
00:31:30
suicidality, uh improving resilience, giving them a reason to wake up in the morning. Like it tends to work. Um and it's not just
00:31:37
me, it's that there's a bunch of, you know, methodologies that we have in psychotherapy and stuff like that that accomplish these kinds of things that
00:31:44
there's some internal sense of purpose. Now what I think uh surprises a lot of people is that there are two ways that
00:31:50
you increase that sense of purpose. The first is a bucket of things that are kind of counter counterintuitive. And
00:31:57
this is where we also have to understand that purpose correlates with certain other things in
00:32:03
life. So if I feel like I am in control of my life
00:32:08
then my sense of purpose will increase. Those two things are correlated. It's not clear whether it's one thing that
00:32:14
manifests in two ways or it's probably two discreet things because there's some subtlety there. But just as a very
00:32:20
simple example, if you take someone who feels out of control in life and you help them get control of their life, and
00:32:27
there's a really great example of this, which is something called passive challenges versus active challenges. So, there's a fascinating research on
00:32:33
anxiety that shows that if you're someone in life whose life is happening to you, like you wake up one day and
00:32:39
then like your your boss wants you to come in for work and you have to pay rent at the end of the month and like you're you're logging on to Tinder and
00:32:46
people aren't responding to you. Life is controlling the direction that you move.
00:32:52
And people feel overwhelmed by this and they want freedom. They want control. What they end up doing is they they they
00:32:58
wish that they didn't have these things. So they run away from these problems. So passive challenges are challenges that
00:33:04
life imposes upon you that you didn't sign up for.
00:33:09
Then there's something really fascinating which is your sense of control in life does not correlate just
00:33:15
with the passive challenges. It correlates with the ratio of passive challenges to active challenges. Active
00:33:22
challenges are things that you choose to do that are difficult. So this is really fascinating. But if if you're getting
00:33:28
bodied by life in three different directions, the solution to that is not run away from those problems. It's
00:33:34
actually to wake up and start to push yourself in a particular direction. I
00:33:39
want to do this instead. If you want to learn how to like read uh, you know, learn philosophy, you know, start studying philosophical texts, you know,
00:33:46
like is you start to take on more, which is very counterintuitive because when most people feel feel overwhelmed, they
00:33:52
don't feel like they can do more. The exact solution is to take on more active challenges. then you have some sense of
00:33:58
control in life. And once your ratio of active challenges to passive challenges is more evened out, this does something
00:34:05
really cool. It gives you a sense that I'm no longer out of control. Mhm. Once you feel like you're no longer out
00:34:10
of control, this is the really cool thing. Then your capacity to deal with
00:34:16
the stuff that life throws at you actually improves. Mhm. So there's this, this is just one
00:34:21
example of like one scientific neurobiological principle that has some psychology associated with where you can
00:34:27
do particular things to give yourself a sense of direction in life.
00:34:33
Now some of the stuff around worship and spiritual practice that can do it too. Um but I think that usually what I tend
00:34:40
to see is that you know if someone is lost in life you can sort of answer it
00:34:45
by these big questions. you can sort of think about this sort of transcendental purpose which I'm I'm happy to talk
00:34:50
about. But I think there's a lot of like little stuff that you can do. Yeah. And as you implement these things, the
00:34:57
sense of purpose in your life, your internal lived experience of feeling out of out of control will change.
00:35:02
Let let me offer a few thoughts if I could. One I want to speak to something that you've said, Alex, um that I just
00:35:09
want to offer a caution about. When we talk about motivation, the motivation for something, we sometimes confuse that
00:35:15
with justification. So someone might say to me as an atheist, for example, well, you're a Christian because you were born
00:35:21
in America. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you wouldn't be a Christian. You'd be a Muslim. Of course, that's
00:35:27
irrelevant to the question whether Islam or Christianity or some other religion is true. It doesn't speak to that. It speaks to psychology. Okay? And the fact
00:35:34
is, if the atheist was born in Saudi Arabia, he wouldn't be an atheist either. likely the key question isn't
00:35:40
what motivates people for example to think about purpose death maybe a fear of death that might be a motivation the
00:35:47
question is whether the place they land in answering the question has any objective truth to it or not it could be
00:35:53
that there is a god and that there is an afterlife and facing death does give comfort to that uh I should say when
00:36:01
facing death you have comfort because there is a god and there's something that you're going to it's closer
00:36:07
communion with him Okay, just because you're motivated by death doesn't mean that your belief about the afterlife is
00:36:12
somehow an error. I just wanted to just to add something in here. So, I I think part of the
00:36:17
reason I've also convened um you guys to have this conversation today is because
00:36:23
I've got several people in my life that are I can I can literally lay out the personas, but I've got one particular
00:36:29
friend who's 35 between 35 and 40 years old, living in Dubai, living in a a
00:36:35
glass box um freelancer. So he wakes up in the morning, his bed is there, he then works there, then goes back to bed.
00:36:40
He's single, no kids in his life at the moment, he said to me that he can't get out of bed anymore, he feels stuck. And
00:36:47
then about 6 months after, out of the blue, it turns out, without telling any of us, and we're his best friends, he's
00:36:52
flown to America. He's been baptized. He's a Christian. Suddenly, his life has purpose and meaning again. He's a completely different person. And this
00:36:59
individual, never, ever, he would be the last person that you'd think would be religious. got another friend, female,
00:37:04
just over 30 years old, doesn't have kids, freelance, works at home. Um, when I asked her what her meaning and purpose
00:37:10
in life, she said to me she wants to get to having 200 plants, plants she can water. She names all of them.
00:37:16
She then told me a week after she's in therapy because she feels lost and stuck in life. And so much of the central
00:37:21
point why I've been motivated to have this conversation is it appears to me and I haven't nailed this hypothesis yet
00:37:27
that freedom, independence, be your own boss. The decline in people having
00:37:33
children, the glamorization of um as you said at the very beginning like you know
00:37:38
do it yourself, do it your way is failing people in some way and that actually the push for
00:37:43
independence was in some way some kind of light. I actually also went through the same new atheist
00:37:50
baptism that you went through and I read all those books at 18 years old and two years I was I was debating dog walkers
00:37:56
on the street about God. I was so such a staunch atheist but I now find myself in a position where
00:38:02
I'm almost back to being curious again because it feels like independence wasn't the answer.
00:38:07
Just wanted to refrain curious I think. Yeah. I mean I think people need tasks. I think that purpose is intimately tied
00:38:14
up with the idea of of task to fulfill. It's why people tend to find meaning in projects which are not completed yet. In
00:38:20
fact, Pascal writes quite compellingly about this when he writes about boredom and he imagines a a gambler, someone who
00:38:27
who enjoys gambling and says, well, why is this person gambling? Because they're doing this thing with the with the
00:38:33
chance of winning some money. Okay, so why don't you just give them the money? just take the gambler and give him all
00:38:38
the money that he could possibly receive without playing the game and he won't be very fulfilled even though he's getting
00:38:45
ostensibly what he was trying to get. No, no, that wouldn't be fulfilling because he enjoys the the gambling.
00:38:50
Okay, says Pascal. Then let him play the game, but make it such that he'll never
00:38:56
actually win the money, but he he gets to keep playing the game and he's not going to be very fulfilled by that either. That's also going to be
00:39:02
completely pointless. And so Pascal noticed that what you kind of need to avoid boredom and I suppose to to imbue
00:39:08
your life with with purpose at least in this analogy is some kind of task to fulfill
00:39:17
that you haven't fulfilled yet that you don't know if you're going to fulfill that you believe will bring you fulfillment when you get it but you
00:39:24
haven't got it yet. It's why I think religion does it really well because it's the definition of something which you don't have now which you can strive
00:39:29
for which when you get you believe will be uh will be fulfilling.
00:39:35
So so so I I love these examples because actually we know exactly what's going on
00:39:40
in that thought experiment. Right? So now there have been there's so many advances in neuroscience that we
00:39:46
understand why people gamble. Right? So, we understand that giving someone money
00:39:53
will satisfy a gambler in one of two cases. And I've seen this. I've worked with people who are professional poker
00:39:58
players. Some people there, what we describe motivation is actually like a dozen different things going on in your
00:40:04
brain. So, if you were a professional poker player and poker and I've literally worked with professional poker
00:40:09
players who had no meaning in life. It's so funny. I'm thinking about a particular person and then you know achieved a certain financial goal.
00:40:16
That's why they play poker. So if your motivation is that I'm playing poker because I'm I have a skill that I'm
00:40:22
using to get money. Yeah. If that is your internal motivation, that is going to come from certain
00:40:27
circuits in your brain. It's going to come from places like your frontal lobe. Now, as Pascal pointed out, if you give
00:40:33
the average person who gamles money, what are they going to do with it? They're going to gamble more, right? So
00:40:40
that means that the their motivation is coming from something more closer to the nucleus incumbent, a random
00:40:45
reinforcement schedule. Maybe they're trying to suppress amydala emotions. So we actually can like look at that
00:40:50
example and we can understand why each of those things happens. And then the
00:40:55
most beautiful thing is that there is absolutely a scenario where someone can gamble and
00:41:03
never win and they can absolutely have purpose. So this is where I know that sounds insane but if you look at some of
00:41:10
these things from the Zen tradition, right? So these are practices that have no purpose to act with no meaning
00:41:17
whatsoever. And the beautiful thing about that is as you explore that sort of angle and there's sort of a neuroscience
00:41:24
perspective to this as well is that if you really think about it you're saying okay so people invest in this purpose or
00:41:30
in this purpose-seeking thing like religion with the idea that I'll find payoff at the end. Is that what you were
00:41:35
saying earlier? I'm saying something a bit different. I what I was going to go on to say is to is to point out that and bear in mind
00:41:42
this comes from a part of of Pascal's pon which is titled man without god. You know he goes on to discuss man with god.
00:41:48
Um but I look at the development of the human species and our particular
00:41:53
proclivities. Lewis makes this argument from desire that you mentioned. Why do we have a desire for food? Well because
00:41:59
there is actually food to have. The evolutionary biologist says the reason that we develop hunger is because those
00:42:05
who didn't died. And if you don't have some sense of hunger, you're not going to seek out food and you will die. And
00:42:11
so it just so happens that those who develop this feeling of hunger will be more likely to survive. And therefore
00:42:16
hunger is a part of our human condition. Well, such is meaning. If you have two isolated communities, one of whom says,
00:42:23
"I just don't care. Whatever, man. No interest in having children, no interested in building societies, legal
00:42:30
systems, constitutions, whatever the case. Moral systems, none of they just don't care. nihilists, they're not even
00:42:36
gonna have children. That society will die out. Another society which just so happens to perhaps delusion like in a in
00:42:42
an exercise of delusion just develop this inexplicable feeling. And of course, this evolves over time
00:42:47
and starts with essentially the kind of random mutation of ideas that works on the genetic level in evolution. They
00:42:54
call it mmetics when it's ideas rather than genes. the society which just ends up developing this idea that actually I
00:43:00
can't quite explain why but I I just have this drive towards building a society and engaging in legal justice
00:43:07
and moral systems and kind of they're just more likely to survive. So we end up with this with this sense this this
00:43:14
drive within us that we can't explain and yet we have. So imagine for the majority of our evolutionary history
00:43:20
what it was like every single day you woke up and you did not know if you were going to have a roof over your head. You
00:43:25
didn't know if you were going to have food to eat. You had to go out and you had to hunt it. You had to go and find it. Every single day the game reset. And
00:43:32
so I would imagine that those lives were probably quite meaningful. At least in the sense that I don't think there would
00:43:38
have been many existential crisises on a dayto-day because the purpose was quite clear. And like Pascal's gambler, they
00:43:44
had a task that they think will fulfill them when they get it and they don't know whether it's going to be fulfilled. So what's happened today?
00:43:51
Well, now we've been given the money without the game. We've got houses, we've got food, we can go next door and
00:43:58
get some water, get some food from all over the all over the planet, you know, like that's that's it that you've got the money without the game. So what do
00:44:05
people do in the modern situation when they find that their life is a bit meaningless? They start intentionally
00:44:11
doing things which are difficult. They start doing ice baths. They start exercising. They start going into a room
00:44:17
just to physically exert themselves in order to sort of build muscle and whatnot like on purpose for its own
00:44:23
sake. Why? Because today we've got the money without the game. So people are
00:44:28
going out and seeking the game without the money. They're going and doing the ice baths in the gym. Whereas the truly meaningful life is one in which you are
00:44:34
playing the game in the service of getting the goal. That is why I think that you know literally just seeking out
00:44:42
those things I think that there's a reason why they have a psychological impact. It's not as simple as just like oh well if you go to the gym you know it
00:44:49
it releases endorphins and and makes you feel good. It's like let's think a bit deeper than that. what's actually going on. People are seeking out the game
00:44:55
without without the money. Crucially, I've talked about this as as a
00:45:00
deathdenying pursuit, right? The idea that the things that you engage in here, at least in terms of grand projects like
00:45:06
religion and society, are even if just subconsciously an exercise in the denial of death. What would that mean? It means
00:45:13
that if you encounter other communities, if you encounter other traditions who
00:45:19
just just by their mere existence threatens the truth of your claims,
00:45:24
those traditions subconsciously represent death. They represent nihilism. So what happens in a society
00:45:30
that develops the kind of telecommunication technology whereby every single day you open your phone and
00:45:36
you are addicted to a process of scrolling through every seven seconds a new person with new ideas with different
00:45:41
beliefs from all over the world. Do you think that might have something to do with the meaning crisis that we find
00:45:47
ourselves in? We're told that what's happened is that people stop believing in God and now they're all depressed and upset and nihilistic. That's far too
00:45:53
simple. You don't think it might have something to do with the fundamentally revolutionary
00:45:59
change to our society that has been brought about specifically by telecommunication by the ability to
00:46:06
oftenimes unintentionally and non-consensually be confronted with traditions and people from halfway
00:46:13
across the world that just remind you every single day zing zing zing every
00:46:18
single day that your truth is not the only truth. that the transcendence that you've placed your trust in is
00:46:25
completely subjective and personal and that someone over there believes something totally different and seems to be living just the same kind of
00:46:31
happy life. That I think is why people are struggling so much. It's not just
00:46:36
because they're atheists. Now I have a lot to say about this. I'll try to keep it compact. By the way, just
00:46:42
we're aware of all kinds of different options for us spiritually. Yes. um that
00:46:48
doesn't necessarily suggest that none of the options are actually accurate or that are okay. So making an implication
00:46:54
there and this is what creates kind of the angst because all we have is our own personal subjective point of view.
00:47:01
I think that's why people experience that. Now of course as a matter of truth you could say for example yourself you
00:47:06
could say yes I'm constantly confronted by different religious traditions but I believe that Christianity is true. who I think has the best evidence.
00:47:13
This is even true in even in the scientific realm. You're all kinds of different ideas, but no one wants to say
00:47:18
just because there are so many different ideas to explain things that nobody can be correct which is why what I'm saying is is
00:47:24
insensitive to the truth or falsity of any of the traditions. What I'm saying is okay that's good because I want to go to
00:47:29
that next as an explanation as for the the psychological phenomenon the the the literal feeling
00:47:36
that people have because likewise you would say that there is a meaning crisis maybe you would say that lots of people
00:47:41
the statistics we just heard you would say lots of people you know don't feel meaning in their life and you'd want to offer an explanation for why that's the
00:47:48
case you think their lives are meaningful right you think that all of those people who say my life has no meaning they're wrong their lives
00:47:53
actually do have meaning is that what you think well this was the subject objective response. They feel like they don't have
00:47:59
meaning, but they were made for a purpose. If they're not in in touch with that meaning and purpose, then they're going
00:48:05
to feel bereft. They believe there really is a purpose for their life, but subjectively they haven't either found it or they don't
00:48:10
feel it. What I'm doing is I'm offering a psychological explanation for why they don't feel it, which is completely
00:48:16
insensitive to whether or not there's a truth of the matter. I'm so glad you put it that way. Uh
00:48:21
because this is exactly my point. I don't want anybody to miss it. We're really offering two different pictures
00:48:26
of reality here. Okay. People have to ask themselves two questions, I think. One is they reflect on their own
00:48:32
personal awareness of the need for meaning and significance.
00:48:37
Does it seem to them that this is just a psychological thing that people can satisfy in all kinds of different ways
00:48:43
depending on the individual or does it seem to them I'm asking these questions because I suspect there is a truth about
00:48:50
life that might be discovered. Okay, that's the first question. And that and
00:48:55
I think most people's awareness of this is that there's something transcendent,
00:49:00
something bigger than them. Okay, and any kind of naturalistic explanation is not going to ultimately satisfy that.
00:49:07
The other thing is is there any reason to believe that there is a transcendent reality that God exists that souls exist
00:49:13
that that there is an objective morality that guides our life and if we're living
00:49:18
virtuously that's going to be satisfying even if we don't believe in God or not.
00:49:23
Those are the two things at stake here, you know. And now this description, the story of reality I just described that I
00:49:30
hold to it seems to me completely coherent. Maybe not true, but it certainly is coherent that if there is a
00:49:36
God who made us for himself and places eternity in our hearts, that we're going to yearn for that and made the way for
00:49:41
us to live and then we're going to find good ways to live as opposed to unsatisfying ways to live. That makes sense. Doesn't make any sense to me at
00:49:48
all to say that my molecules are moving in a certain way to create in my conscious mind, which Darwinism would
00:49:54
cannot offer an explanation for. It hasn't. That's why Daniel Dennett said consciousness is an illusion, you know,
00:50:01
because he couldn't do anything with it. Thomas Nagel wrote his book Mind the Cosmos. You're familiar with this, I'm sure. You know, why the Neodyarian
00:50:08
materialistic view of the world is almost certainly false. And he's an atheist for goodness sake, because he
00:50:13
can't explain consciousness, not in a Darwinian way. So how is it that this mystery of consciousness which contains
00:50:20
propositional thoughts, ideas and purposes, if consciousness can't be explained at
00:50:25
Darwinian way, how can some characterization of molecules in motion
00:50:31
accomplish that same end? That's my concern. This is why I'm not convinced about at all about the naturalist one
00:50:37
and this one seems so much more plausible. What you're raising is the is the problem of consciousness which is I
00:50:42
think a new question but an important one. I wanted to point out earlier that that when I gave an explanation as to
00:50:48
why people feel a lack of meaning and you said that has no bearing on truth. I
00:50:53
think that's you admitted that too at the end there. I appreciate that. I don't admit it. I I assert it. Of course that's the case. In
00:50:59
affirmed you weren't making the case in the same way that if somebody says that like if you're a Christian and you
00:51:05
say the reason everyone's so depressed is because society has become atheistic. Somebody could say well yeah I mean that
00:51:11
might be the case but that doesn't mean atheism is false. It might be that it is true and just depressing. Right? Of course, like the the question if we're
00:51:17
discussing there are alternate explanations. If you want to know why somebody feels a particular way psychologically, you can
00:51:23
offer an explanation which has absolutely nothing to do with the truth or falsity of a worldview. You can then separately discuss the truth or falsity
00:51:29
of a worldview which you've then gone on to do with specific reference to the problem of consciousness. It thinks it has absolutely nothing or
00:51:36
it can be experienced apart from the issue of worldview. I'm saying that if you're if you're literally just trying I
00:51:41
mean if the question I'm asked is why do people perceive a lack of meaning in their life that's just a question about
00:51:47
their psychological constitution that's just that's literally a question about why they feel a particular way so if a person was a total nealist
00:51:54
didn't believe in anything uh was important and then they were depressed and even suicidal would you say there
00:52:00
wasn't a link between that worldview and their feelings yes there is but what I'm saying is that the link between that worldview and
00:52:06
their feeling has nothing to do with the truth of the Okay, you see what I'm saying? It doesn't nihilism can be true. Nihilism can be false. Nihilism can be
00:52:14
an in unintelligible concept. It can still be the case that that person's conviction is making them depressed.
00:52:19
Right? In the same way that somebody could be be a Christian and that makes them really happy. That doesn't mean Christianity is true. Someone can become
00:52:25
a Christian and become really depressed. That doesn't mean that Christianity is false. What I'm trying to point out is it is just trivially true.
00:52:31
So So I I still want to try to understand a little bit about what you're saying. Okay.
00:52:36
Because I don't fully follow. Fine. Um, and I think that the reason I'm I feel way more confident in what
00:52:42
you're saying is because Christ is pulling at your 100%. Yeah.
00:52:47
So, so I think Christ we both talk to Christ. So, like we're good on that. Like I I know where he's coming from.
00:52:53
So, couple of things that I'm I talk to Christ too, you know. Awesome. Does he talk back? He does not talk back. And
00:52:58
yeah, that's that's tricky. We can talk about how how to get you there. One person said just read the gospels aloud.
00:53:04
So So I've done that a few times. So, a couple of things that I'm I'm curious about. One is so I'm noticing that you're I'm
00:53:11
trying to understand where so I I love the way you're sallying forth
00:53:17
to grapple with this problem of purpose. You do a beautiful job of sort of talking about like okay what's the truth
00:53:25
and then there's this psychological perspective and I I want to just try to understand this. So, are you of the mind
00:53:32
that from a psychological perspective, you can wake up one day and feel like you have purpose, but that doesn't
00:53:38
necessarily talk about purpose transcendentally. Capital P. I'm saying that doesn't talk about the
00:53:43
truth of your belief. The Okay. So, for example, you could you could you could believe that your children are
00:53:50
about to die and that suddenly your life feels really meaningless and and really purposeless.
00:53:55
It could be completely false. You could have been like misled. Someone could lie to you. But like what I'm saying is is the psychological explanation for why
00:54:01
you feel a particular way has nothing to do with the truth of the thing that you believe that's making you feel that way.
00:54:06
Gotcha. Okay. So what I'm curious about is when you are exploring purpose
00:54:12
are you exploring it from are you trying to find the answer at the top like what
00:54:17
is the truth of purpose or are you focused on the subjective
00:54:24
experience of purpose? Depends on the context. If you're asking I mean we were talking literally about a
00:54:29
psychological explanation for why people feel a particular way you know is it due to a decline in religion that kind of
00:54:34
stuff in that case it's subjective it's individuals yeah yeah so so
00:54:40
do you think that the top one can be answered what the top one is in like there being
00:54:46
they're being purpose right so that's not subjective at all so what does that mean there being purpose because for me that looks like
00:54:52
some kind of reason to act or to be that is not contingent on some other fact.
00:54:59
Just to be clear, to make it clear for the listener, I think you hear what I'm saying. But like suppose you woke up and
00:55:04
you were a Christian and that brought you meaning. What I'm saying is that subjective sense of meaning that you get from Christianity has no bearing on the
00:55:12
truth or falsity of Christianity. Gotcha. Right. Right. So, so what I'm curious about is in your opinion, and if
00:55:19
you don't have one, that's totally fine. um you know do you think that so sure
00:55:25
there's a subjective experience which doesn't speak to truth right it's just a subjective experience do you think that
00:55:32
there is some way to grapple with that truth well the truth of Christianity or something
00:55:37
the truth the truth of of purpose but we're shifting here right because what I'm saying is
00:55:42
let let me shift then I don't want to do that so then I'm gonna go back this is why I maybe I'm not understanding your question what all I
00:55:48
am saying yeah is that if you feel if you feel a subjective sense of purpose from proposition P
00:55:55
like the fact that you feel purpose from that does not have any proposition P and
00:56:00
then you just ask but but is there a way to discuss whether P is true well yeah like so if proposition P is
00:56:06
Christianity then yeah we can talk about the historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus or something gotcha gotcha okay I'm not I'm not
00:56:11
trying to reach into some yeah mystical capital P purpose realm gotcha so right so and I I think that's
00:56:18
so helpful thank you so Okay. Okay. So,
00:56:23
that's really helpful for me because then you I want to go back to something you said earlier about, you know, cell phones and we're scrolling on cell
00:56:30
phones and things like that and we have this like like this worldview and then if we encounter a worldview that is
00:56:35
different from ours that could put us into some form of crisis or difficulty and we're getting bombarded by all of
00:56:41
these things. And so what that means is that the individual when they wake up in the morning and they scroll through their
00:56:48
phone, right? We're not talking about whether the proposition P is true or not. Their subjective experiences like I
00:56:54
have no meaning and I have no purpose in life, right? And and so you posited one mechanism which I think is a completely
00:57:01
valid mechanism is a philosophical mechanism, but we have a lot of neuroscience mechanisms that support
00:57:06
what you're saying. So just and this is where I I I think that we kind of I'm going to sort of restate that what my
00:57:13
experience of this stuff has been because I'm I'm not a philosopher is I I don't really know too well how to
00:57:20
contend with whether proposition P is true or not. That's why I was asking and and it's not that you weren't being
00:57:25
clear, it's that I'm just ignorant of how philosophy works. Um and so that's why I was kind of
00:57:30
asking like you know can you do that? Mh. So that's where also where like I'm kind of coming from is that we have this
00:57:36
crisis that has high suicidality, high addiction rates. People left the church
00:57:41
in big ways. And then we're sort of left with like, okay, how do we navigate this? And that's where I think if we
00:57:48
look at a lot of this, the influences on society, we see that there's profound
00:57:55
neurological influences. And what I sort of found is when I was working especially with like patients with trauma that there is a set of things
00:58:02
that is happening in the world around them that induce certain changes to
00:58:07
their how they experience the world. So a really good example of this is if you
00:58:12
want to find your purpose in life you should reduce your level of alexathyia. So alexathyia is the inability to tell
00:58:19
what you you're emotionally feeling. Mhm. And if we look at the influence of things like cell phones, what they're
00:58:25
doing is they're suppressing the parts of our brain that have that experience negative emotions. Sometimes they
00:58:31
provoke negative emotions, sometimes they suppress negative emotions. And so if you start to
00:58:36
be able to feel more, right? So the this is literally shutting down the parts of
00:58:42
our brain that h that give us an internal sense of what we feel. And so
00:58:47
as you shut down your ability to detect what you are feeling on the inside that
00:58:53
correlates with your not having a detection of purpose on the inside. So I
00:58:59
think that you know this is you you asked the question why is this happening? I think we're disabling and I
00:59:04
was working with people with trauma and and sort of sort of figured out a sequence of things that is based on the
00:59:09
literature that involves things like reducing your alexathyia. Another big part is managing your ego. So I think
00:59:16
this relationship with God thing is a really really really great example of like if you ask what is the mechanism of
00:59:22
a relationship with God. So we as human beings tend to be like I'm here but then
00:59:27
as you relate to other people around you your sense of identity changes and when
00:59:33
you relate to something that is transcendent I know that that's a scary word and I don't know exactly what that
00:59:38
word means but as you relate to something that is really big up here that has noticeable effects on your
00:59:45
default mode network your sense of self. And as your default mode network longer
00:59:50
becomes hyperactive, the more hyperactive your default mode network is, the more likely I think you are to be like nihilistic, to have a
00:59:56
pessimistic worldview, as we start to make those changes, then people start to
01:00:02
feel a sense of purpose. They start to feel a sense of connection. And then the last kind of really interesting data
01:00:07
which we can go into is psychedelics which is really really fascinating because this allows us to test
01:00:13
subjective experience and the effect of subject subjective experience on a person. Is this an opportunity please?
01:00:19
I'm just concerned that you might have overstated something maybe reflecting back something you thought I was saying
01:00:24
and I was making the case about the genetic fallacy and just because a person has a motivation to believe something doesn't necessarily mean that
01:00:31
that thing is true or have a subjective experience. I think it goes a little further than that though. Uh if you went
01:00:36
to the doctor and you weren't feeling well and the doctor gave you a pill and then you went home and you took the pill then you felt better. I think it would
01:00:42
be appropriate for you to say, "Well, that pill, taking that pill, going to that doctor had something to do with my
01:00:47
experience that I'm having right now." Oh yeah. I think this is why I think it might have intent unintentionally been
01:00:54
an overstatement on your part because I think just like your friend Stephen who in
01:00:59
Dubai all of a sudden became a Christian and everything changed. Okay. Um,
01:01:05
well, the you you I guess you could say the change of life isn't maybe knockdown, dragged down proof that what
01:01:11
he believes now is actually true. Big P, big T. That like Jesus rose from the dead. It seems to be, pardon me,
01:01:17
that like Jesus rose from the dead. It's got no bearing on whether that's true or not. Well, I'm speaking of a different thing
01:01:23
right now. I'm thinking about the experience now with God that he's having. If you if he's having this changed life,
01:01:30
this this is evidential. This is this lends credibility to the belief system
01:01:35
that he's now adopted because it created this particular significant change in his life. It may not be proof and that
01:01:41
word is really an oozy goosey word how to pin down but
01:01:46
nevertheless it still seems to be evidential. It is it it speaks to the
01:01:52
legitimacy and accuracy and truthfulness of the belief system that produced this change life. That's what I'm saying.
01:01:58
It's only evidence that belief in that thing makes someone feel more fulfilled. That's the only thing it's evidence of.
01:02:03
Okay. So, this is where we differ. Just like I'm with him on this one. Okay. Just because uh just because a
01:02:11
certain you're saying just because they believe it, this makes them better. It doesn't mean that the belief is actually
01:02:17
sound. Greg, I've got a good way of coming at this then. So, this is where we differ. That's right. If I had five friends and they all
01:02:24
picked five different religions and they all felt the same thing that my friend did in Dubai where they all felt better
01:02:30
for it. Does is that evidential that all five religions are true? Well, see, I don't actually think it
01:02:36
works that way. You can speculate and say and offer that illustration. Um, but I don't think it actually works that
01:02:42
way. I I think that universally the experience of Christians is very very
01:02:47
uh quantifiable in terms of transformed lives and this is one of the reasons that these
01:02:54
transformed lives lend credibility to the belief system itself. So in that scenario where one of my
01:02:59
friends turns to Islam, one of my friends turns to Christianity etc etc.
01:03:05
The only experience that's evidential of truth is the Christians. Well, I think
01:03:10
you have to look at every individual thing. All right? And um here's my suspicion, and I haven't
01:03:16
quantified this across the board. All right? Different people have different experiences by engaging different religious uh belief traditions,
01:03:24
whatever. But in so far as anybody's life is significantly altered by that
01:03:31
thing, this to me is evidence that something is going on here than merely
01:03:36
the belief. If it's just the belief, you're back to uh to marks again and the opiate of the people, you know, that
01:03:42
would be Carl, not Groucho, although that's not anybody knows who those two people are anymore. It sounds as though,
01:03:49
you know, if if I if I lied to somebody in a cruel prank and I told them that
01:03:55
say say they're really struggling with money, they're really really suffering for it and they feel and they have these psychological effects of feeling that
01:04:01
life is meaningless. They want to kill themselves, whatever it is, cuz they just they cannot keep living and I tell
01:04:07
them, "Good news. Um, you've won the lottery. You've won a million pounds." And suddenly the weight is lifted. The
01:04:13
joy is brought. Of course, money isn't sufficient for bringing about meaning in life, but this person is
01:04:18
But I've lied to them. Like the the fact that they feel this immense sense of
01:04:24
meaning from a belief that they've adopted has it bears absolutely no evidence. No, in that case whether it's true that
01:04:30
they've won a million pounds. I'm just saying that to divorce all results from belief systems is a
01:04:36
mistake. There can be a there can be a connection there. Just because you can mislead somebody by telling them a lie
01:04:42
and they can experience something emotionally doesn't mean that the other person who's experiencing something
01:04:48
transcendent in their emotions. And by the way for Christians it's not just a high because Christianity is not a
01:04:54
continuous high. Even people who are suffering terribly as Christians in
01:05:00
persecution read Fox's books of martyrs book of martyrs still have this strong
01:05:05
sense of value, purpose and security. Even so, I'm just saying there's an evidential relationship between those.
01:05:11
It's not enough to just simply dismiss it because you can tell a lie and someone could have the same kind of feeling.
01:05:16
I'm even happy to say that like I don't know if this is true, but suppose it were just the case that only Christianity brought about this positive
01:05:23
effect. Suppose we just discovered that everybody who claimed to feel meaning, it would just didn't compare. That's not what I'm saying.
01:05:29
But suppose that were the case. Even if there was something really special about Christianity that gave some evidential
01:05:34
credence to something specific about Christianity that's true about Christianity that it particularly infuses life with meaning. I still think
01:05:41
it just has nothing to do with the truth of Christianity as a worldview. I mean, Christianity hinges on the
01:05:47
historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus. Right. Correct. And so the best way of explaining this is to say that if if your friend from Dubai starts going
01:05:54
to church and they start feeling really like meaning like start experiencing a lot of meaning in their life that has
01:06:00
absolutely no evidential bearing on whether Jesus rose from the dead. And if Christianity as a proposition
01:06:05
essentially is the resurrection of Jesus and this feeling that your friend had has no evidential bearing on the resurrection of Jesus then the feeling
01:06:12
that your friend had had no evidential bearing on Christianity. Well, it turns out that Christianity has multiple factors of of uh support and evidence.
01:06:20
Crucial obviously the crux one might say is the resurrection of Christ, the death and resurrection because of the
01:06:26
theological significance of that is in the whole system. All right? But there are lots of other things too that have
01:06:31
bearing and actually I think there are people who have become who have become Christians without having a robust
01:06:36
understanding even of the resurrection or that. So um it's even though theologically that is the crux I agree
01:06:44
um it doesn't mean that for subjectively every person who enters in a relationship with Christ has all of that
01:06:49
in place immediately. I'm really interested to understand for my friend in Dubai Yeah. If he came to you and he was your friend
01:06:55
in Dubai and he said my life is lacking meaning I can't get out of bed anymore.
01:07:02
What would you prescribe him? What would you recommend? What would you suggest as he's your friend?
01:07:10
It's hard to know without knowing that friend, but if it seemed to me like going to church or reading the gospels
01:07:16
might provide that for him, then I'd probably recommend that he did that. But I think that literally the subjective
01:07:22
feeling of meaning is is usually tied up in the identification of something that
01:07:27
transcends your individual self. Yeah. Why would you? I think any whatever is the most plausible course of
01:07:33
action for that person to engage in something like that would be what I would recommend for them. If they're
01:07:39
maybe that maybe they're not particularly interested in religion, I'd recommend that they read some philosophy of mind and try to understand the nature
01:07:44
of consciousness. And they might start I might recommend depending on who they are that they take a psychedelic drug
01:07:50
and try to experience something which cannot be put into words because a lot of the time when you experience something like an ego death and you
01:07:57
might realize that the the individuated self is an illusion and that these cliches that keep cropping up when
01:08:03
someone does psychedelics and I actually think that the problem of consciousness is absolutely crucial to this. uh if if
01:08:11
I mean I think the most plausible account of consciousness implies that
01:08:16
consciousness is something which is sort of received by the biological organism
01:08:22
rather than produced by it. Because I agree with you that you can't just put a bunch of molecules together and get consciousness. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. But it's interesting
01:08:28
that some of our best scientific evidence is is suggesting the fact not that the brain produces consciousness,
01:08:33
but that the brain inhibits and focuses and organizes consciousness. it does not produce it.
01:08:39
Yeah. So I I I I love your answer. So you you were saying, you know, depending on the person, you can do different things. You can read philosophy of
01:08:45
I would recommend them to do that. In other words, you know, look at that depending on who they are. You know, read the gospels. So I I think
01:08:51
what's what's interesting is that when you you know, when when Steven gives the concrete example of like if my friend
01:08:56
comes to you who's had this religious awakening or prior to religious awakening, what would you recommend to them? And I think what's really
01:09:03
interesting is basically all of the answers that you said I think
01:09:08
can map on to mechanism and I just love to talk about that for a second. So the first thing is you know you asked me at
01:09:13
the beginning am I religious? I I think here's my understanding of and we were talking a little bit about
01:09:20
you know people can have the subjective feeling of religion. What is the relationship to to that thing being true? So here's what I've sort of
01:09:26
observed. I don't know if y'all have ever been to like a really great cathedral. Oh yeah. But like you know uh if you go
01:09:33
to a great cathedral you don't have to be Christian to be awe inspired by what you see.
01:09:38
Sure. So when I look at the project of religion which is a little bit different from spirituality I I one of the things
01:09:45
that I've observed is that religion is a series of structures to evoke a personal
01:09:52
experience. So the whole point of reading the gospels is fingers crossed and we'll get to how to optimize that.
01:09:59
Fingers crossed if you read the gospels enough or you go to church enough or you pray enough, if you keep on talking to
01:10:05
Christ, one day he'll start talking back. But I think the really interesting thing is if you struggle with purpose,
01:10:12
you can read the gospels. If you go into religion and I think what's changed now is that we have so much science to
01:10:19
understand the mechanism through which religious practices evoke subjective
01:10:24
experience. So I can go to church until for my whole life but until I have that relationship with God that is a
01:10:31
subjective experience that is evoked by the sort of structure of the religious
01:10:36
practice. So that is absolutely one thing you can do. I think the cool thing is that the
01:10:42
problem with reading the gospels as as I can clearly see that you've done and and you know I I see the striving for
01:10:49
religion in you like you're like you you want to have that right like you want to know like what are these people actually
01:10:55
kind of talking about. I could be wrong there but I I see this beautiful striving that you're like you're trying
01:11:01
really hard to figure this stuff out which is just awesome to see. I think though that if we we kind of look at it
01:11:07
and you mentioned kind of psychedelics as well and I think psychedelics is is really interesting because
01:11:12
we know that so if you take someone who has treatment refractory depression or someone who has PTSD and you give them a
01:11:18
psychedelic the psychedelic is not healing what is healing is specifically whether they have an ego death
01:11:24
experience so if I see colors and things like that that doesn't solve things but the ego
01:11:30
death experience is what correlates with clinical improvement soy Psychedelics
01:11:35
are a good way to evoke um a subjective experience, right? So we
01:11:41
we know that there are a couple of pieces and when I worked with people so
01:11:46
one of the things that we know is that when you experience trauma, it shatters your meaning of life.
01:11:52
Yes. And so what so working a lot with people with trauma and and this is something that I kind of laid out uh in terms of
01:11:59
like making a guide about it. But what I realized is that there's a set of things that you can do relatively sequentially
01:12:06
to get your meaning back. And so I think the cool thing about like you know reading the gospels or psychedelics or
01:12:11
things like that is those each have some fingers crossed change in you.
01:12:16
But the cool thing is like if you start with something called alexathyia. So as long as you are like using a bunch of
01:12:22
substances um as long as you are not able to detect what is going on inside
01:12:27
you that is a fundamental prerequisite of the subjective experience of meaning.
01:12:33
The second step to that is to go through some stuff around ego. So this is like
01:12:38
the other like big thing that we try to focus on is like when your default mode network is hyperactive. This is the part
01:12:44
of your brain that gives you a sense of who you are. Hyperactive default mode networks lead to depression. Hyperactive
01:12:51
default mode networks also lead to some degree of like existential depression.
01:12:56
And this is where so many of my patients get tripped up when they start reading philosophy. And this isn't against
01:13:02
philosophy, but remember this is happening in a subjective mind. If you're not careful, what we know is that
01:13:07
philosophy can turn into intellectualizing. that there is a psychological defense where you start
01:13:14
looking at theoretical stuff and it sort of shapes the way that your mind functions and it starts to become
01:13:20
maladaptive. What does that mean in simple terms? So people if you have a problem in life,
01:13:28
you can think about it a lot. You can read about it a lot. There are a lot of people that I've worked with that just
01:13:33
go on watching podcasts like chain watching podcasts and reading books and things like that, right? But their life
01:13:40
never changes. Yes. So this is where so there's a certain amount of like you know learning how to
01:13:46
ground yourself in your experience which involves reducing alexia which involves
01:13:51
dis dissolving your ego and this is another really really important thing that I think we find in people who have
01:13:57
purpose because if we go back to the earlier example of the person who 30 days after they die the world ends
01:14:04
that person if they decide to still write the book I think that there is a
01:14:10
certain ego involved in that, right? I'm doing it for the sake of the work. It's not for the benefit of humanity. It's
01:14:16
not for some transcendent purpose. It's not for something that goes beyond my death. Actually, it's the opposite. I am
01:14:21
do this doing this thing here and now just for its own sake. Mhm.
01:14:26
And so, preparing for this podcast, I actually texted and called a couple of my former patients. These are people
01:14:32
that I haven't seen in 3 to 5 years. And I just asked them. I was like, "Hey, bro. Do you have purpose? Tell me what
01:14:39
it is." And I was stunned by how their answers are not about what happens after
01:14:44
they die. They're very like, I'm just here for the the flow of it, right? My purpose in life is to experience what life has to
01:14:51
offer. Mhm. That's it. It's not about something beyond you. And I think this is where
01:14:56
you're spot on, Alex, that a lot of people deal with the fear of death by
01:15:02
wanting to live past it. But that is actually that's the default mechanism that we use. But that is actually
01:15:09
ego-driven, right? I want to exist. Yes. Beyond when I die. And so that gives
01:15:15
people some sense of purpose. But I think the deepest sense of purpose actually comes without that comes from
01:15:22
being able to make paper clips every day and being content with that exercise.
01:15:27
You you're describing Seisphus being happy is what you're doing. Yeah. So Seisphus can be happy.
01:15:33
Yeah. I mean that that and and that's explains Cisphus for those that don't know about the guy pushing the rock up
01:15:38
the hill. Kimu who is an existentialist even though he doesn't call himself an existentialist. Um he founds this school
01:15:47
known as absurdism. Um which is a word I used earlier too. And he he tries to describe the
01:15:54
absurdest condition of one in which you have all of these desires about the world but the world literally just can't
01:16:00
fulfill them. You're looking for meaning. it's not there. It literally that your your desire and the real world
01:16:07
are in conflict. And he calls this the realization of this absurdity. And he writes this this short treaty called the
01:16:14
myth of Seisphus, which is based on an actual ancient myth of Seisphus who is
01:16:19
condemned by the gods as punishment to roll a boulder up a hill. And when it gets to the top, it rolls back down
01:16:26
again. And he goes back down and he pushes the boulder up to the top of the hill. And he does that over and over
01:16:32
again for eternity. The real torture of this is not so much the suffering of the pushing of the boulder. There's that,
01:16:38
but the suffering in the knowledge that it's meaningless. And that that describes the absurdest condition. Um,
01:16:44
and Alberu tries to respond to this by imagining Sophus being happy and
01:16:49
essentially as an act of rebellion against this condition, just getting on with it anyway and being okay with it.
01:16:55
I've never been fulfilled by this. I I've I've sort of always thought that this may literally and I I understand that there are people who could do that.
01:17:01
There are people who could write the book and I I thought of Cisphus when you said the person who writes the book
01:17:07
anyway because it almost feels like an act of rebellion because it's not you didn't just say they still write the book. You said they write the book
01:17:12
anyway. They do it despite they do it almost in protest of this condition. Some people can do that but I think that
01:17:18
that that is probably a sort of psychological cope. Um no it's it's not it's not a cope.
01:17:25
It's a mechanism. Well, I'm saying I think it's a cope. I think that I think that that it's not grounded in in anything rational.
01:17:32
I don't know if it's grounded in anything rational. It's absolutely grounded in something empirical. Sure. But like again, you can
01:17:38
empirically like explain exactly why somebody's brain is doing what it's doing, but that doesn't mean that that
01:17:45
there's any rationality or truth in the thing that their brain believes. Sure. Right. But but I think this goes
01:17:52
back to the issue of whether there's capital P. But I I think that you can you can observe the world
01:17:58
and you can make observations and you can I don't know what your relation to
01:18:03
scientific observations and truth is whether those things are connected or not. But I I think that we know actually
01:18:09
there there there are multiple psychological mechanisms some of which are copes and some of which are not copes.
01:18:16
I suppose I mean like a philosophical dope. I mean like it's it's not I think it's untrue. I think that the person who
01:18:22
um is content in such a condition is almost by definition delusory.
01:18:28
What does delusury mean? Uh like under the influence of a delusion. I think that it it is not a
01:18:33
happiness inducing condition to be sisphus rolling his boulder up the mountain.
01:18:38
Yeah. So so this is where I I I think the data is actually against that. So what the data shows is that it is your
01:18:44
attitude towards the circumstances of your life that determines your happiness
01:18:49
or your lack of happiness. Well, someone can be in a happy delusion. In fact, that's why most people suffer from delusions because it
01:18:54
makes them happy. That's not why most people suffer from delusions. So do but you understand what I'm saying
01:19:01
that like like Yeah, I understand what you're saying. I just I just think that it's you can't empirically show that
01:19:07
something is not a delusion because it makes people happy. Yeah. So, so you can absolutely
01:19:12
differentiate between a psychological cope and an attitude towards life that is not
01:19:18
a cope. And the reason you can differentiate that is because of what is underneath. And people can be
01:19:23
delusional, but they're not necessarily delusional to make themselves happy. In
01:19:28
fact, quite the opposite. So, we have diagnosis like schizophrenia of which
01:19:34
one of them is having delusions. And those delusions, generally speaking, the more schizophrenic and the stronger your
01:19:40
delusions are, the more that inversely correlates with your happiness. To be clear, I'm talking about like a
01:19:46
philosophical delusion. The question I want to get an answer to is this idea of the person who writes the book or pushes the boulder up the
01:19:52
hill and can that person be have a purposeful life? Absolutely. So, so this is where this is
01:19:58
what's so confusing for people is that people think so what Alex is saying I think is a really really common
01:20:04
representation of what people think about purpose. My purpose is to make something that is greater from than me.
01:20:11
My purpose is to have some meaning or impact in the world around me. What we know is there's a a a great example of
01:20:17
this called self-determination theory which is that if you ask people if you look at people who have purpose what you
01:20:23
find is it's not about anything transcendent have purpose or have a sense of purpose. have a sense of purpose.
01:20:28
Okay, we're asking them subjectively, right? So if you if we're like like you know and that's what I think
01:20:33
and these people are less likely to be addicted to things, are more resilient, tend to be subjectively happier as well.
01:20:38
So we're talking about subjective, right? What you find is that they have three things. The first is that they have some
01:20:44
degree of self-direction. So this is like I choose to do something. They're not just taking it
01:20:50
from life. They are making choices. And this is where people also get confused because they think like which choice is
01:20:56
right. That kind of thinking is actually irrelevant. There isn't a right choice or a wrong choice. What correlates with
01:21:02
your sense of direction is whether you make it or not. So you actually need to get away from the concept of right and
01:21:08
wrong. The second thing is that they need a stretching of their competence. So if you just take a bunch of people
01:21:13
who are not being pushed and finding themselves grow then their sense of
01:21:20
direction or purpose will decrease. And the third thing is a sense of relatedness. So there is something where
01:21:27
I have to know who I am and have other people see that part of me. And if you
01:21:34
cultivate these three variables, then your purpose will empirically
01:21:39
and by empirical what I mean is that we can measurably we can literally measure
01:21:45
people's subjective experience in an objective way. And so like these kinds
01:21:50
of things I think can end up improving your purpose. What are you measuring when when you're looking for
01:21:56
Alex just I just would love to get your answer to this idea. Can you do you think the person who is pushing the boulder up the hill or is writing the
01:22:02
book even though the world's about to end can still genuinely live a subjectively and by subjective I mean in
01:22:09
their in their opinion um purposefully purposeful life. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. I think Seisphus
01:22:16
can be happy but I think that's not the attitude that I would have and I don't
01:22:22
for myself find it satisfying any analogy which is sufficiently similar to
01:22:28
the sysphus condition that is and the attempted solution is well just imagine sisphus happy um that's how he literally
01:22:35
ends the myth of sophus one must imagine sisphus happy and I can imagine him and say you know good for him um but
01:22:42
do you think you would be happier if you believed in Greg's views of the world
01:22:47
almost certainly. Um, but not because of Greg's views, but because of the the confidence and satisfaction that they
01:22:52
bring. I think I'd feel just as much meaning in my life if I was a convicted Muslim or were I uh a Jane or something
01:23:00
like that, I think I would find that fulfillment. So, the content of the theology has no bearing in your mind on the way a person
01:23:08
experiences their life. Of course it does. Can you explain specific terms content of the theology?
01:23:14
Well, the content well you talk about different religions and there's these different religions are in they they
01:23:19
cannot all be true as Alex has pointed out. They have different content. They say different things about human human
01:23:25
beings. For example, um the the u
01:23:30
the view that human beings are just uh an illusion. The reality is illusion maya that kind of thing. Well, that
01:23:36
seems to me to convey a certain understanding to human beings. about themselves and about the world. If you
01:23:43
have a view that human beings are significant individuals, this is going to convey a whole different experience
01:23:49
that they have. So, in other words, the theology that they believe is true is
01:23:54
going to affect their feelings and their experience. This is what I was getting back at uh a little bit ago when I
01:24:00
talked about the person whose life has been changed by becoming a Christian. And uh these aren't just what you
01:24:06
explained to your friend. These are not things that just happen here and there, but there seems to be a very very broad experience of this. Um, and a change
01:24:13
that doesn't depend on circumstances, okay? It's because they adopt a
01:24:19
understanding of the the world that I think is an accurate understanding. And this is why their emotions and their
01:24:24
experience follows along because they're choosing an accurate understanding of the world. When you look at Jesus in the
01:24:30
Gospels, I I think it's so interesting to me that people read the Gospels to be uplifted by the reading of it. It seems
01:24:37
that misses the point that Jesus is talking about the way the world is. He's teaching about the nature of reality. He
01:24:44
was a Torah observant Jew. He wasn't a Hindu. He wasn't a Buddhist. He was a Jew. And he spoke in the context of
01:24:50
that. Okay. So, just to simply read the Gospels as if we're going to read the uh
01:24:56
some nice things that people said to make me feel better is missing Jesus' point when he's trying to describe the
01:25:01
nature of reality. I don't think that's how the gospel should be read. But I do think I mean I I have a question for you on that. This a personal question more
01:25:07
than anything. So I find myself in the same position as Alex where I think I'd be happier all things considered if I
01:25:13
had an anchoring in a religion. I think that's like a subjectively true that I'd
01:25:19
be happier. Mhm. Um probably just because it would close a gap of some sort. It would it would
01:25:25
anchor me in some way. Answer a question. It would answer a question and then with it would give me more of a structure to my decision
01:25:32
making and you know it would mean that when I have moments of suffering I'd have a solution
01:25:38
to that moment of suffering. So if my parents end up dying someday which I'm sure they will I will believe that they are still alive
01:25:45
and they are somewhere and they're fine which will ease my suffering. So I agree with Alex in that regard. The
01:25:51
problem I have is in order to adopt that view I need some kind of I need to believe it. It's true. like people can't
01:25:57
aren't very good at lying to themselves and also when you talk about my friend in Dubai has had
01:26:04
this experience he now feels better he could have well felt better I believe if he had you know believed that Islam was
01:26:13
true and become a Muslim so so it's the feeling itself people can
01:26:18
get in a lot of ways I know people that actually would tell you that they they feel better now that they're out of the cult and they're agnostic
01:26:24
and the cult the cult made them feel terrible now they're agnostic they feel better does that mean agnosticism
01:26:30
is truth so the the presumption that you made is a presumption we have to keep that in mind I mean the the people that I have
01:26:37
talked to who were former Muslims and are now Christians very devout Muslims they did not have the experience of
01:26:44
satisfaction and fullness and connection with God with in Islam that they do in Christianity okay we want to be careful
01:26:52
that we know there are people who do yeah there's people that would have gone the other way and they'll be in the comment section right now saying, "Well,
01:26:57
I went from Christianity to Islam." Okay. Well, sure. I'm just telling you what I what I know of those people.
01:27:03
Okay? And uh it I think it's a mistake to say, "Well, everybody has their own
01:27:08
religion. They have their so experience with their religion." Because I don't think that's the case. I'm not saying there aren't satisfied Muslims. That's
01:27:14
not what I'm saying. Or Buddhists or Hindus or whatever. I'm But what I'm saying is the the there is an evidential
01:27:20
element to the changed life. Okay? And it may not be decisive. There may be other things that are involved. Okay. Um
01:27:28
I do think that for many Christians, I think you've made this point in the past too. It's the experience with God that
01:27:33
makes the difference. But it's not that the other evidences for the existence of God, maybe philosophical type of
01:27:39
evidence haven't made a difference because I've talked to lots of people where they have made the difference moving them in that direction.
01:27:45
The point there that it's evidential, that's a presumption. What I mean by evidential is that there
01:27:52
is uh information that can be brought to bear that seems to be evidence
01:27:58
um indicating that the belief system is true. It's not is that a presumption?
01:28:04
I don't know why you would call it a presumption as in the the evidence that evidence that Christianity is true from the
01:28:10
increased sense of purpose that people get from becoming a Christian. I think that's one of the evidence. It's
01:28:16
a subjective evidence. Yeah. So it's evidence of the truth of Christianity. Well, I wouldn't build the whole thing,
01:28:22
but it's evidence. It's contributing evidence to the actual truth of think the story of reality is simply
01:28:28
that God made us to be with him and then we find the way that God
01:28:34
intends for us to connect with him principally through forgiveness and be restored to our relationship with the
01:28:39
father. And then that gives us when we do that a deep sense of satisfaction. I
01:28:45
do think that's evidential. You know, in Alex Field, he could explain that through neuroscience,
01:28:50
right? Serotonin, dopamine, endorphins. Yeah. So, can I go back to something real quick? So, you know, I was thinking
01:28:56
about the sisphus example. Yes. And I was just thinking to myself, you know, so many people go to the gym
01:29:02
to do futile physical activity, but not on its own for eternity with no
01:29:08
sense in which it's improving their life, right? Imagine going to the gym and not only is it not making you
01:29:13
healthier, it's actually just making you fatter and you have to do it forever for the rest of eternity for no reason with
01:29:20
no end. And then somebody says, "Well, all you've got to do is imagine that person being happy." Yeah. So, that's kind of interesting
01:29:26
because then that presumes that the attitude through which you approach the
01:29:32
action is what determines it. Determines what? Determines whether you're happy or not.
01:29:38
Right? So every time you eat, y you buy yourself a trip to the toilet. This is something you can never escape.
01:29:44
Sure. It is true for all time. And yet, how do you feel about going to the toilet?
01:29:50
I'm maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're getting. So So So I I I think it's it's interesting, right? Because you're the
01:29:55
problem of Seisphus is in the way that he views it. And this is exactly why I think the paperclip example is like
01:30:01
actually such a good one because I think what we find when we look at some of these things like radical acceptance,
01:30:07
dialectical behavioral therapy, sort of the ways in which people become happy
01:30:13
despite the fact that there are painful things in life. It is an attitudinal shift. Totally. I I think I think one of the
01:30:19
reasons why it might seem like we keep talking across purposes is because I think you're you are offering an
01:30:25
explanation for why people feel a particular way. And I'm trying to see whether those those feelings are, shall
01:30:31
we say, philosophically validated, whether they are those those feelings are are sensitive to truth. If the way
01:30:38
you feel about the world is accurate. So I can I can perfectly understand that
01:30:43
it's possible for Sephus to be happy. What I'm saying is that I think that the philosophical underpinning that would be
01:30:50
required for him to be content in that condition is
01:30:56
unsatisfying, at least to me. So as a as a what what so what is a what is a philosophical truth?
01:31:02
It doesn't have to I mean maybe I shouldn't say philosophical truth but I mean to say I mean to separate it from what you might describe as like a
01:31:07
neurological truth which is to say it could be true that your brain believes
01:31:12
this or believes that based on this or that condition. I'm saying that totally. But what I'm interested in is the thing
01:31:18
that it believes. Is it true or false? You know it could be in the same way that you know believing in Christianity
01:31:25
can make you happy. It can make you sad and you can you can scan someone's brain. You can put them in an MRI
01:31:30
scanner and scan their brain when they at the moment they convert to Christianity and see that it starts going haywire.
01:31:35
But the brain MRI is not going to show any beliefs. It's just nothing to do with the truth. Neurological activity beliefs aren't but
01:31:41
beliefs aren't in the brain. Yeah, we we're we're going to get to that in I kind of I kind of agree. So, Alex, I think this is what I I I thank you so
01:31:48
much for pointing out how we're kind of talking across each other because I I think this is the really weird thing and
01:31:53
I'm going to say something and then as we talk about consciousness and what we just talked about, I'm going to torpedo it.
01:31:59
But I I think what we sort of find is that from a practical sense and this could be where like philosophy I I don't
01:32:07
know what the how the word practical ties together with philosophy because I
01:32:12
tend to think of philosophy as sort of practical. We can go into that in a second. But I I think from the
01:32:18
perspective of finding purpose. Mhm. Now, I'm not talking about purpose as a
01:32:23
capital P truth, right? A capital T truth. Finding purpose.
01:32:30
What it may not be philosophically satisfying to you, but what we sort of know from
01:32:36
empirical evidence of people who are purposeless and people who are purposeful is that the the subjective
01:32:43
feeling of purpose is comes out of a number of different things like like I mentioned like kind of autonomy being
01:32:49
able to detect your emotions also a sense of like narrative identity. So having a purpose in life requires a you.
01:32:56
And one of the reasons that no one feels like they are going somewhere in life is because they don't really have a clear
01:33:02
sense of who they are. And so I think that it's a great kind of catch
01:33:08
that we're sort of talking across purposes because I I don't know the thing that you find philosophic not philosophically true maybe
01:33:14
neurologically true but isn't philosophically true. I don't know how to approach that. I
01:33:20
mean, I think I sort of do because if we talk about consciousness and subjective experience and how your friend was
01:33:25
transformed and by the way, he may not be transformed. So there's speaking of coping, there's a chance that when someone, you know, drastically joins a
01:33:32
religion and like this is great. That is like the mother of all copes, right? So sometimes they find they adopt they it's
01:33:38
not identity formation, it's actually identification where like I'm going to join this team and now I'm on this team and now that I have this team, now I
01:33:45
know who I am. Now I have a purpose. Like everything kind of gets laid out. But oftentimes, this is also why religion is not like 100% at giving
01:33:52
people happiness and and things like that because there is an internal subjective experience of a relationship
01:33:58
with God or something like that, which I think we can segue to consciousness. That's ultimately what determines whether you you feel really good about
01:34:05
it. And then the other really interesting thing is through some of those subjective experiences,
01:34:11
I think we the people who have these subjective experiences believe that it
01:34:17
gives them access to truth with a higher like the Gnostics and and and folks like that.
01:34:22
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Express. That's adobe. slashsteeen. Let me just bring it back down to um
01:35:29
some of the popular questions we had from our audience. One of the most popular questions we had is, "Do we each have a specific per purpose or is it
01:35:37
self-chosen?" Greg. Well, in my view, if God has made us for
01:35:42
a reason and he wants us to be in relationship with us, each individual person has different capabilities and
01:35:49
fulfilling those capabilities that God has given him, general ones and specific
01:35:55
ones. Like I have my own particular peculiar capabilities. Doing that is going to make me satisfied. Okay.
01:36:02
So, did God give me a purpose? Yes. And is it different from Alex's purpose? I would say in in the the in the kind of
01:36:09
the minutia, yes, you're a different individual than he is. And can I ask you a question that then springs to mind? Yeah. Again, I'm very
01:36:16
curious. If Steven Bartlett had gotten cancer at one years old and I died, I see. Yeah. Well, then you wouldn't be
01:36:22
fulfilling the particulars that God had intended for you. But that kind of thing
01:36:27
happens because we live in a broken world. It isn't the perfect world. It is not the good. It's it's not the totally good
01:36:34
moral that God made. Something happened that broke the world. Human rebellion.
01:36:39
Human rebellion. At what point in history? Well, early on with our first parents.
01:36:44
Okay. So, the first humans, the first humans, that's why all humans since then have the same proclivity
01:36:51
towards evil. It's pretty much quantifiable. Does that include other species of human homony?
01:36:56
Well, I know that's a question that a lot of people are discussing right now. Okay. Okay. And where exactly do you draw that line? And I'm not
01:37:02
that isn't an area that I go deep in. But I do think that there was a an original progenitor to the human race as
01:37:08
we understand it right now. Sure. That has the image of God in man
01:37:13
and violated God's commands, rebelled against God, and that had an impact on
01:37:18
the world. Okay. And that is why so therefore you're going to have some people aren't going to be,
01:37:24
you know, fulfilling all of their the ultimate purposes that God has for them in this world. Just to be clear,
01:37:30
children get cancer. Sure. Because say 2 million years ago roughly
01:37:37
the start of the human species. I'm not going to set a date on it. Somebody rebelled against God's
01:37:43
commands and that is the explanation for this is a fair question and you know some of these details I haven't worked
01:37:48
out. What about earthquakes and tsunamis and all those kinds of things? Okay. Um clearly there is an impact of human
01:37:54
rebellion upon the earth. Okay. what the extent of that impact is, I'm not entirely sure. But this is why I use the
01:38:01
word broken because it's a rather broad term rather than trying to identify every instance of things that seem
01:38:07
anomalous to a good world, not the way it should be, so to speak. Okay. I think that's an explanation for these things
01:38:14
even though we can't necessarily itemize each individual particular instance and
01:38:19
how it falls short. Alex, I want to put the same question to you, which is do you think that you were born with a
01:38:24
purpose that was endowed for your life? No, not not in the literal sense. I think that there are that I was born
01:38:30
with literal like proclivities built into my my consciousness and my DNA. Um
01:38:37
almost want to do tendencies. Yeah, tendency is a great word. Yeah. For example, my tendency to to eat food. I I
01:38:44
I don't think I learned that. I think I was born with it. But it's like I would use the language of when you say if you
01:38:50
said do you think that you were you know you were given hunger from birth I'd be like no in a poetic sense maybe but what
01:38:57
I mean say is I was born with this thing called hunger which I didn't learn which was just a part of my makeup. I think the same thing is true for many
01:39:03
motivations of life such as the sort of meaning that you that you might report feeling. I think it's there from from
01:39:09
child birth. Same question for you Alec. Do you think that we each have a specific purpose or is it self-chosen?
01:39:15
I think it's both. So I'm going to introduce two concepts that we haven't talked about yet. Dharma and karma. And
01:39:22
um I think these are concepts that are sometimes hard to understand. I'm going to do my best to kind of speedrun
01:39:28
them. So dharma is the Sanskrit word that kind of gets translated as duty. Uh
01:39:33
the way that I would describe dharma, the reason I think it's so important is right now if we look at the world,
01:39:38
people are like not having a good time. And often times what they do is they're
01:39:44
stuck between this choice of doing what they want and doing what they should. So doing what they want is maybe
01:39:50
dopamineergic is maybe fun in some way. Doing what they should is like painful
01:39:55
in some way. So for me what I think dharma is dharma is like sort of duty.
01:40:00
But I think the key thing that helps people once they find their dharma is it's what allows you to choose the
01:40:07
negative thing. It it's what allows you to choose the hard thing. So if someone points a gun at me and I look at that
01:40:14
gun, that gun means pain, suffering, death, you know, my life will will will end and then I will have nothing to
01:40:19
leave behind me. So my purpose will end. So I I try to move away from that thing.
01:40:25
But if someone points the gun at my child because I have this overwhelming sense of of love and joy or whatever, I
01:40:31
step into the path of that thing. So I think once we understand what our duty is, that gives us a sense of tethering.
01:40:39
It gives us a sense of direction. Um I think what confuses a lot of people is that they think duty is like some
01:40:45
transcendental that's like a big thing like duty with a capital D like I was born on this earth to do these like
01:40:51
particular big tasks like I need to say cure cancer or something like that. Oftentimes dharma is really small. So
01:40:57
the way duty is not transcendent and it's not tied to some moral transcendent thing. I I think I don't know about moral. So
01:41:05
this is where I think like I you said should. So that's usually a moral term, right?
01:41:10
In the west, right? So I think there's a whole different set of axioms. I'm using dharma and that's what people will like
01:41:15
put morality onto dharma where I I don't think that that's actually fair. So so I going back to I have a duty just
01:41:22
to give another example. Um and y'all can decide whether this is moral or not, but when I'm sort of working in the
01:41:29
emergency room and you know a patient walks in, I have a duty to that patient. So what a lot of people don't understand
01:41:34
about dharma is that it is very environmentally determined. So your dharma will depend somewhat on you know
01:41:41
the the family that you have the responsibilities that you have. If you have children you have a dharma to those people. So I think that's one part of
01:41:48
what we would call purpose. I think the other part of purpose and I think this gets really closer to the more western
01:41:54
conception is karma. So going back to your your question about you know if a
01:41:59
child with with cancer uh dies at the age of one is their purpose fulfilled
01:42:04
arguably yes because that could have been their purpose in this life right so their purpose could have been so there's
01:42:10
a really interesting story about you know many years ago there was a there were a group of angels this I'm just
01:42:16
going to use the western terminology devas who disturbed Shiva in his meditation and so he cursed them and he
01:42:23
said I'm going to the curse that you guys are going to do is y'all are going to be born on the earth for one lifetime
01:42:28
of a human. And then the day of us were like, "Oh my god, like this is terrible. Like we're going to be cursed to be born
01:42:34
on the earth and the earth is full of suffering and cisphus and there's no meaning with a capital M." So then they
01:42:40
go to Shiva's daughter and they ask her, "Hey, can you help us out?" Like, "Can you please go talk to your dad? Can you
01:42:48
please get him to change his sentence?" And she says that Shiva is never going to change his sentence. That's impossible to do. He's also kind of this
01:42:54
embodiment of karma and things like that. But so he says, "But I can help y'all out. What I can do is I'm going to
01:43:00
be born with y'all." And then there's this other story in the Mahabharat where basically she has seven children and
01:43:06
then she drowns them the day after they're born. And so she says, "The technical situation is you're going to
01:43:11
be born for one lifetime. I can make a lifetime happen in a moment." Now, I
01:43:17
don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's moral. I don't know if it's mythology but a potential explanation for why children get cancer.
01:43:23
It's a potential explanation for why children get cancer. Now I think the the karma thing is when you said is your
01:43:29
purpose in life predetermined. So I think that you inherit a certain amount of circumstances
01:43:37
and that part of your purpose will be in relation to the circumstances
01:43:42
that you inherit. But the other thing about karma which I think a lot of people misunderstand is they think that
01:43:47
it means destiny. I think all it means is Newton's third law which is every action has an equal and opposite
01:43:53
reaction. That while you may inherit a set of circumstances
01:43:58
the way that you act is sewing seeds for your future life.
01:44:04
So this is where like you know I I know I'm introducing a bunch of concepts and it's interesting. I you know we we
01:44:10
started a a membership program here at Healthy Gamer and part of the reason we did that is because a lot of these
01:44:16
concepts if you turn them into like 50-minute YouTube videos people just end up with more questions than answers. So
01:44:22
we go into a lot of depth and I think it requires some depth because I'm sure everybody who's listening has a ton of
01:44:27
questions. But in order to succinctly answer your question, I would say that yeah, you were born for I don't know
01:44:34
about a specific reason, but there's a set of different things which only you
01:44:39
can do like you are a unique set of genetics. You are a unique set of experiences. You are a unique set of
01:44:45
psychology. And this process it in psychiatry is something that we call meaning making helps a lot when people
01:44:52
have trauma. Right? So to help someone understand why did this terrible thing happen to you and once you make meaning
01:44:59
from it that helps you adaptively but I think that it's also not like predestined necessarily. You can
01:45:06
procrastinate on fulfilling your karmmas and then they'll just keep coming back. So Dr. K, I still have a question about
01:45:12
this. You you talk about duty and I'd asked about morality there and you you kind of begged off on that. Well, not
01:45:18
really. But then you use the word obligation in the emergency room. And it sounds to me when you talk about those
01:45:23
things, you are actually invoking moral categories. Things you ought to do. You have an obligation to do. You have a
01:45:29
duty to do. Maybe the right thing. You didn't use this phrase, but it sounds like you're saying this is the right thing to do, the virtuous thing to do as
01:45:37
opposed to the wrong thing to do. So, how how am I to understand those phrases if they are not really invoking genuine
01:45:44
moral categories? So when you say moral categories, are
01:45:50
you referring to a transcendental right and wrong? I'm talking about ethical principles,
01:45:56
ethical rights and wrong if you want. They are transcendent because they're not simply in the molecules as it were.
01:46:02
They're above us transcend. So yes, in that sense. Okay. Yeah. And uh has and there are
01:46:08
consequences to our behaviors one way or another. And the consequences it's not just you know utilitarian. It's not
01:46:15
just, well, I if I put toast in too long, it'll burn the toast, but you're you ought to do the things that you just
01:46:21
described. You ought to help that person. Okay. I think it's a fairly common sensible word, a moral category,
01:46:28
virtue, vice kind of thing. I I think whether it's common sensical depends on
01:46:33
what's common, right? So, I I think that this is where these concepts I don't think are onetoone. So I think doing
01:46:40
your dharma is basically the way I would describe your dharma is when I throw a
01:46:46
ball in the air, it comes down. Okay. Right. So dharma is kind of doing what
01:46:52
is the second part of what you've kind of signed up for. So when you say you ought to help the person in the emergency room, all you mean is you're
01:46:59
not morally compelled to do that in in terms of a virtue, but there is a a
01:47:05
consequence for you to do that as opposed to doing the opposite. Yes. And I think there is a layer of
01:47:12
morality, but that is not within dharma. So for example, there are yamas and nyamas, which are things like
01:47:17
truthfulness, a himsa, which means non-violence. So there's a set of different things that we would generally
01:47:23
speaking call morality. And doing those things is usually in accordance with dharma. But you know the mahabharat is a
01:47:30
great case of someone saying I don't want to kill my cousins and I don't want to kill my teacher and Krishna saying
01:47:37
you absolutely should because it is in accordance with dharma. So I think dharma often times gets like translated
01:47:44
over to morality but I think you lose something in translation. Greg, can I ask you do you think you have you can have a fulfilling life
01:47:49
without having a transcendent purpose in some measure? in some measure. What I
01:47:55
described earlier is if God made us for a purpose and made the world for human flourishing and I think we get a basic
01:48:01
description of that in the beginning of our story for example then people who don't even believe in God or even about
01:48:08
even anything religious at all if they if they fall within the pattern of the
01:48:14
things that God has created for flourishing they're going to flourish in some significant measure. You mentioned a few moments ago about having children
01:48:20
and this is somewhat of a universal experience. Now you made a kind of a naturalistic characterization of why we
01:48:25
feel that way. Um my sense is that God made us for that purpose. Be fruitful, multiply, subdue. And subdue doesn't
01:48:32
mean rape the earth. It means to work productively what God has given us to serve. Now somebody can get married and
01:48:40
stay married and have children and fulfill that purpose there and be very
01:48:46
satisfied in doing it as opposed to all kinds of other var variations that it's just going to mess up their life. and
01:48:52
they're going to experience satisfaction and fulfillment in it. But that's because they're in a certain sense
01:48:58
they're doing the things that God has made human beings to do so that they would flourish. It's just like you can
01:49:05
think of it in very mechanistic terms. You have a vehicle that meant to operate a certain way and if you do the things
01:49:10
properly for that vehicle, it's going to run well and do so. So, I can have a I can have a grand feeling of purpose if I do many of the
01:49:17
the things that are considered virtuous within scripture without needing to
01:49:22
believe. Yeah, you could still be virtuous. Certainly, you can do those things. My
01:49:28
argument, and this is what I was getting at a little earlier, uh Dr. Kay, is that if if there is no God establishing a
01:49:34
right and wrong, then there is no right and wrong because there is no law that we're we're we're conforming ourselves
01:49:40
to. We are just doing stuff. All right. Now, if you believe the sort of evolutionary perspective on this
01:49:47
taken as a whole, I don't not the way that uh Alex has taken. It's a grand explanation of pretty much everything.
01:49:53
It's not an explanation of everything. It's an explanation of the variance of life on Earth because evolution does I was thinking
01:49:58
about my dog. I was thinking about Pablo and I was thinking, why does he have sex with other dogs? Why does he why does he
01:50:03
protect his puppies? Yeah. You know, why does he do these things that somewhat in uh Dr. K's example
01:50:10
there, he he takes care of things. takes care of me when I'm not in the house. If someone comes in and my girlfriend's there, he takes care of my girlfriend.
01:50:17
He barks only when she's she's at home alone. So, he seems to be expressing some form of morality. He seems to
01:50:23
understand his own sort of idea of right and wrong. But I has that well, I wouldn't characterize it that
01:50:28
that way as if he's thinking I ought to do this and if I don't do that, then I'm doing something wrong. I think animals
01:50:35
have instincts that they're in imbued with that can be influenced by natural factors to some degree, I guess. Um, but
01:50:41
they are made for purposes. And this is the reason that many of the creatures act the way they do is because of these
01:50:48
very sophisticated instincts that allow them to get along in life and do well and survive and reproduce.
01:50:54
But I don't I don't have any reason to think that they're Yeah. survive and reproduce. Of course, but I don't have any reason to think
01:50:59
that they're thinking I'm doing the moral thing. And if they didn't do the thing that we
01:51:05
would be uh it would be appropriate to accuse them of doing something immoral, this or whatever. History's almost shown
01:51:11
that even in times where where we look back and go that was not the moral thing like you know Nazis in in World War II.
01:51:18
Yeah. Um they acted in a way that was helped them survive in the context they're in. So the Nazi that you know would go to
01:51:24
the concentration camp then come home and be really nice to his family. He thought he was doing the right thing. This is why one of the reasons I think
01:51:30
this is the evolutionary explanation is inadequate. Okay. because it seems that there are lots of things that people do
01:51:36
that seem to be good for them or for their tribe that characteristically we'll look at and we'll assess it and
01:51:42
the assessment would is that that is wrong it's evil it's wicked and I think that our assessments are reliable in
01:51:48
that regard okay that we have moral intuitions that allow us to see things that are real about that and these
01:51:55
things are relatively universal I mean it doesn't matter where you live or when you live people are asking the question about the problem of evil in the world
01:52:01
okay and I think it's because of of what evil was seems to change over time because me I mean I wouldn't be sat at
01:52:07
this table many a couple hundred years ago because I'm black and everybody at the time thought that that was the right
01:52:14
thing they didn't think that was an evil thing at the time well everybody at the time didn't think that you know there are going to be
01:52:19
social mores and have that and that are going to change over time and do people do respond in different ways but just
01:52:25
because you have variations in the way people believe about morality doesn't mean that there's there isn't a morality
01:52:31
that's a sound morality And Lewis's CS Lewis has done a study of this looked at the kinds of things that seem to
01:52:38
transcend culture in terms of assessments, moral assessments that seem to be true about every culture. A lot of
01:52:45
times the differences are not differences in moral facts, but they are
01:52:50
uh like the morality is actually changed, but a difference in perception. Okay. So what uh what counts as uh
01:52:58
heroism in some cases would not count as heroism in other cases even though heroism is considered a noble kind of
01:53:03
thing. I've been waiting for an opportunity to rewind to the fact that we just brushed over
01:53:09
two of what I think are the best available at least first that came to mind explanations as to why children get
01:53:16
cancer. And I just wondered as as a as a question whether you consider whether
01:53:23
whether your explanation sounds to you as your explanation sounds to you as I think both of them sound to me and I
01:53:28
don't know how they sound to you Stephen but the idea that the thing that we are most fundamentally
01:53:34
confronted with I think on an existential level is suffering
01:53:39
and there's our own suffering and then there's the suffering of others and the seemingly meaningless suffering of a child who's undergoing cancer and does
01:53:45
not survive And I'm told that in the face of such
01:53:54
existential tragedy, turn to religion to give us a sort of
01:54:00
sense of fulfillment and a sense of explanation. But when asked about the mechanism of how, I'm told it's because
01:54:06
at some undisclosed number of years ago, somebody commit a sin against God and that's why your child has now died of
01:54:12
cancer. There are millions of people who listen to this show. there will be people listening to this whose children have died of cancer. I wonder if that
01:54:18
brings them any kind of consolation. Similarly, the idea that, you know, maybe it's some disgruntled angels who
01:54:24
didn't want to come down to earth for too long and so if anything, you're actually doing them a favor by killing them of cancer. I don't know if that's
01:54:29
bringing the kind of they're looking for. What's your answer to that? I don't think I have one, but I don't like people professing that they do have
01:54:36
an answer, but when it comes down to it, actually saying something which I think will provide the opposite effect, which
01:54:42
and I don't mean this personally. I mean as as a point of religious explanation. The idea that this is going to bring
01:54:48
everyone's going to get a chance to respond to this. So the idea that this even approximates an
01:54:53
explanation as to why this happens. I would ask you to consider what you find more likely if we assume that we are
01:55:02
essentially existing here as accidental accidental organisms just competing in a
01:55:07
struggle for survival with no endowed meaning or supervision. What might we expect to find? And I would ask what you
01:55:13
would expect to find if we were created with purpose by a loving God who wants us all to come into communion with him. But for some reason thinks it's
01:55:18
necessary that we exist in this veil of tears in this material world first. What would you expect to find?
01:55:25
I don't think and then look at what you do find. Look at what you do find in the natural world. Even if you just take into
01:55:30
consideration nonhuman animal suffering just an unfathomable amount of negative
01:55:37
experience, right? There's seemingly no reason. Not to mention the fact that children are getting cancer as you say and as you've
01:55:43
already alluded to there are evils that humans commit like the Holocaust. But there are evils which they don't like earthquakes and tsunamis and the like.
01:55:51
I don't think we would expect to see any of this if we assume that hypothesis. But if we assume that we are just accidentally existing organisms in a in
01:55:58
a struggle for survival, not only do we explain this, but we also come to expect it. So I think it provides a much better
01:56:05
explanation. That is not to say justification. The idea we were talking about evolution. You said that the
01:56:11
problem that you have with the Darwinian worldview is that it seems to say that it seems to favor survival of the
01:56:16
fittest. And yet there are things which evolution seems to point to that we would morally condemn. Well, of course,
01:56:21
because evolution by natural selection is an explanation for how things got the way they were. It's in no way a
01:56:26
justification for behaviors. It it doesn't even function that way. No scientific theory of why things happen
01:56:32
are any kind of justification any more than Newton's laws of gravity are a justification a moral justification for
01:56:38
the motion of the planets. That's of course it's not the case. It's just an explanation. But but I just really want
01:56:43
to drive home this point. Mhm. That it has to do more. If you want religious traditions to do what you
01:56:49
claim that they do, which is provide existential comfort for people who are suffering, you have to do more in the face of children dying of cancer than
01:56:56
some reference to mythical human beings who existed or Well, in in a way that's completely
01:57:02
unintelligible. There's a lot there. Okay. I don't expect it's could be comfort to anybody
01:57:07
to say who's suffering from whatever to say that there was a fall. Okay. The fall is just the explanation for what
01:57:14
went wrong and why there is wrong in the world. Like I said earlier, doesn't matter where you live or when you live,
01:57:20
everybody knows something's wrong. And the way they express that concern about something wrong is in moral terms. The
01:57:26
world is not the way it ought to be. should be different there and then when you give examples of it sometimes
01:57:32
there's natural evil but generally it's examples of moral evil what we would call moral evil okay things that people
01:57:39
shouldn't do okay that's why I particularly avoided those
01:57:44
no right you didn't include any examples and but you the implication is and this
01:57:50
is where you know Richard Dawkins's famous statement that this is exactly the kind of world we'd expect
01:57:55
if there was at the basis you know no design no justice, no evil, no good,
01:58:00
nothing but blind, pitless, indifferent. So you Well, I actually think this isn't the world that we find, the one he just
01:58:06
described. Yes, it's a world filled with suffering, and there's a way of explaining that which you just did.
01:58:12
There's also another way of explaining it that has a solution. Okay. Um, what is that explanation?
01:58:18
Pardon me, that God is in the process of solving the problem of evil over time. I mean, the explanation for why the
01:58:23
evil's there in the first place. You said the fool, and I I don't mean to interrupt, but you said it. You've referenced the fool twice now and the
01:58:28
last time I tried this you it seemed like you sort of said that you don't really know but if the fool is I wasn't I wasn't giving particular
01:58:34
details about the ancestry of human evolution historically what is the fool the fall is when our first parents
01:58:42
characteristically known as Adam and Eve in the story and the account of reality um rebelled against God and when they
01:58:49
rebelled against God they disobeyed him is what's important uh he had given them a restriction they disobeyed that and
01:58:56
when they disob obeyed that they broke their relationship with God through rebellion. They broke their relationship
01:59:02
with each other. They broke their relationship with the environment. All of that had these kind of cosmic
01:59:07
effects. There's a solution though. That's just the first threeand finish the thought. Okay. The the
01:59:15
principal issue is rebellion or disobedience. Okay. There are different ways it's characterized, but that's the
01:59:20
point in my view. The disobedience. Okay. Of of what though? Pardon me. Disobedience of of what? Like what was
01:59:26
it? God told them not to do one thing. Don't eat from the the tree of the knowledge
01:59:31
of good and evil and they disobeyed. Do you interpret that literally? Pardon? Like an actual tree and an actual fruit.
01:59:37
I do take that as a straightforward account, but that's not the important part. I don't want to get So children get cancer because somebody
01:59:42
ate So children get cancer because a few million years ago someone ate a fruit. Let me just back up and give you the entire account. This would be this would
01:59:49
be I think more helpful. I'm not trying to be difficult by the way. I just really I don't want to just brush over these points when we
01:59:55
reference. I mean people listening might be like I've never heard of Adam and Eve and they they'll need to know what the point I'm making is that there was a
02:00:01
disobedience by human beings that had an impact on their relationship with God which they were created for and had an
02:00:07
impact on the rest of the world and since then pro that problem of evil
02:00:13
broadly grit since then the world's been broken and God has a plan for bringing
02:00:18
that back together not only for making the world whole again but also for bringing human beings back in proper
02:00:24
relationship with him when they're in rebellion with him. And this is where Jesus comes in. Now, I I I've written a
02:00:31
piece called the story of reality, a book that's meant to characterize that in fairly clear terms in more general
02:00:36
terms. It isn't meant to answer all of these questions because some of them frankly are imponderables, but the
02:00:42
larger picture can be understood and is in the story. It's in the account of reality in the scriptures, the Hebrew
02:00:48
scriptures and in the Christian scriptures. They form a unit. Okay? And these are the things that Jesus spoke to
02:00:54
and Jesus took these things seriously based on what he had to say about these particular things. Okay. So because we
02:01:01
broadly speaking now because we live in a broken world there is an answer that we have to that we have a poss possible
02:01:07
answer. You know it was uh Bertrren Russell who famously said how are you going to talk about God when you're kneeling at the bed of a dying child
02:01:14
which I think is very emotionally compelling. But I listened to philosopher William Craig who you also
02:01:21
know I think who said what is Bert and Russell the atheist going to say when he's kneeling at the bed of a dying child.
02:01:27
Tough luck too bad. That's just the way it goes. There is no answer that he has. Dr. K, can you come in with your
02:01:32
response as well? Sure. First of all, Alex, I want to thank you for
02:01:40
bringing up and being a bit bulldogish. I mean that in a good way. You grabbed
02:01:45
something. and you were like, "This is not okay." Well, we forget that people are listening to this whose children have died of cancer. I I I totally get that.
02:01:50
I think we just need to keep it in mind, you know, 100%. So, so I'm really glad you said that because I realize that I offered a
02:01:57
terrible example. And I say this as someone I can remember the day I was a third-year medical student on my first
02:02:04
pediatric rotation. I was working in the ICU overnight and there was a nine-year-old child who had I think
02:02:11
lymphoma and I watched and was with their parents as that child moved towards death. I
02:02:20
have worked in offices where people will come into my my uh office and they'll say, you know,
02:02:26
they'll they'll ask me about karma and they'll be like, I was 9 years old when I was sexually assaulted. Are you
02:02:33
telling me that this is like part of purpose or whatever? I also remember when I was in India, one of my best
02:02:42
friends, the first time I went to India, I spent about seven years studying to become a monk. I discovered a lot of
02:02:48
really cool stuff like meditation, had some transcendental experiences, altered my worldview. And one of my best friends
02:02:55
who is also a very accomplished meditator, I we kind of got to talking about religion and I was like, you know,
02:03:01
what do you think about like Hinduism and some of these concepts? And he said, I can't accept any religion that says
02:03:08
if you were raped, it's your fault. Yes. So that stuck with me. And so for a long
02:03:14
time, at the very beginning, Stephen asked me a question. Am I Hindu? I mean, am I religious? And I I guess I would say yes. So that thought really stuck
02:03:21
with me. I think for a long time I was an atheist. I think I'm still an atheist. I think there are a couple of
02:03:27
other things that are a little bit unusual. So like people think like in the west we think that atheism, polytheism and monotheism are
02:03:34
contradictions. We don't really think that in Hinduism like those things can coexist. Mhm.
02:03:40
So, and what I'm really grateful for you for is because I think when I'm so glad
02:03:46
you said that because I think when I offered the example that I offered,
02:03:51
it's so interesting because I was thinking about why I mentioned that we have a membership. And the reason I
02:03:57
mentioned it is because this is this is one of those things that I have lectured about for four to six hours. And if you
02:04:04
listen to that lecture, then you will understand the context that I'm coming from. But without that context and if
02:04:11
you sort of assume there's so many axioms about morality and deserving that that that example without the
02:04:19
appropriate context sounds awful. It's like your kid died at the age of one. Oh, there's some greater purpose. You
02:04:24
just don't know what it is. you. Yeah. Right. That is not comforting at all. So here's
02:04:30
where I am now. I I really think this is I think Garma is good in the sense that it it helps people. I I also think it's
02:04:37
true. But here's kind of where I am now. So that was sort of my journey. I realized it was out of order.
02:04:43
Transcendental experience. Garma seems awful. There's this concept of deserving. Then many years later through
02:04:52
practice with people who have been sexually assaulted and and watching children die in the pediatric ICU
02:04:57
grappling with these problems. Not just like there are people out there. It's like you're in the room with these people when their child is dying. What
02:05:03
do you say to them? And even more so now as a psychiatrist with end of life care and things like that. So I think the first thing to
02:05:11
understand or first question that I have for you is when I say the word karma, what does that mean
02:05:18
to you? I don't know. Okay. I don't know what you mean you mean by that. So So I I think the first thing to
02:05:24
understand about garma is it's just the principle of cause and effect. Yeah. So when a child dies of cancer, what would you say is the cause of their
02:05:31
death? Well, I I I don't know about the science of cancer very much, but I would suppose
02:05:37
it's the cancer. Perfect. Right. So that is in accordance with the law of Gharma. Now, what is the reason they got cancer?
02:05:44
I don't know. Okay. I mean, what pick any reason you like. There could be a genetic mutation,
02:05:50
random chance, things like that. So what I think that all karma is is
02:05:55
action and reaction. That's it. So if you understand the doctrine of karma, what it helps you do is see the
02:06:02
way that causes and effects link to each other. It does not have anything to do
02:06:07
with deserving more so than if I have a genetic mutation and I wind up with
02:06:12
cancer. That is an action that has an effect. Th this is why I was reluctant
02:06:18
to engage with moralities because I think there are certain assumptions that I think come from this kind of Abrahamic
02:06:25
or Judeo-Christian worldview that get injected into these concepts like karma and
02:06:31
dharma which is why I hate translating them because anytime I translate something it's going to be filled in. So
02:06:38
you really have to understand karma. But I would say all karma is devoid it of remove it denote it of all morality
02:06:45
remove it of all deserve beyond simple Newtonian mechanics and that actions
02:06:50
have consequences. Now the reason that this is helpful okay now I'm realize I'm making a functional
02:06:56
claim here not a claim about philosophical truth because I don't know what else to call it. I do think it's philosophically true but
02:07:03
that's not what I'm talking about right here. um is that when you're sitting with a human being because your your
02:07:09
your primary concern is when a child with cancer dies or is
02:07:17
dying, how do you deal? How do you There are people who are suffering. If we're
02:07:22
not careful, we're going to hurt them. Right. That's what you're saying. Um that's one thing I'm saying. Yeah.
02:07:28
Right. So, so I I think what I sort of there's how it makes people feel, but there's also the literal explanation for
02:07:34
why they suffer. You know, it's it's one thing to say that, you know, this this religious uh narrative will bring you
02:07:40
some comfort, but it's another thing as well. I think that's something you need to keep in mind. But you're saying more than that as a religious person, you're
02:07:46
not just saying that this narrative will bring you comfort. You're saying this is why it's happening. This is why your child has cancer. So, so what I would say, so here's my
02:07:53
kind of uh response to that. So the first is I think that when I sit with people who
02:08:00
were sexually used at the age of nine, didn't do anything to deserve it, you know, people will say like, oh, like you
02:08:05
have to be careful what you wear and stuff like that. I mean, I you know, I have patients that were in onesies and overalls and all kinds of stuff.
02:08:11
Nine. Huh. At the age of nine. Yeah. People will say all kinds of stuff. So um and and what I find with
02:08:19
working with them and there's plenty of data to back this up is that there's a certain amount of meaning making
02:08:24
that is necessary to comfort those people to heal from that thing. And the
02:08:31
meaning making if we're talking about empirically making meaning out of things that are
02:08:37
bad is one of the ways that you alleviate suffering. Mhm. So one of the things that I find is
02:08:42
helpful as an option for that meaning making is understanding the doctrine of
02:08:48
dharma. And when I share it with people doesn't work for everybody. So from a clinical standpoint I'm not saying you
02:08:54
should believe in the doctrine of karma. I'm just and I I'm not saying you should believe in Christianity or anything like that. The important thing is this is
02:09:00
what the science shows is you should make a concerted effort to make meaning.
02:09:05
And because of my background, because of my expertise, helping people understand things from a
02:09:11
karmic perspective, I would say is helpful about 80 to 90% of the time.
02:09:17
But there's a very important caveat there from a data standpoint is that there is a huge selection bias to who
02:09:23
comes into my office. There's a good chance that these people are already open to that concept and are interested
02:09:28
in learning more. So I make no claims about that concept being superior to
02:09:34
anything else. Mhm. But I think what we know from psychiatry is that it's not so clear which one is
02:09:42
the best, but that you just have some way of like making sense of what happens to you. Mhm.
02:09:47
And that's just one thing that I think is an option. And I happen to believe in
02:09:53
the principle of cause and effect, which is all karma is. There's no morality tied to it. It sounds like you're saying that it's
02:09:58
just something that it just happens. What do you mean it just happens? It just happens. No, absolutely not. I'm
02:10:05
saying the exact opposite. So, it just happens does not imply a cause.
02:10:10
No, it I mean it it just happens as the result of some series of causes. Like, why do children get cancer? It's just
02:10:16
the result of a series of causes. Yes, that's it. Yes. There's no redemption. There's no
02:10:21
meaning. There's no intention. It's just it just happens. And that's fine because I I I believe
02:10:26
that's the case. I think that's true. No. No. I I mean I I think that we have overwhelming evidence
02:10:33
overwhelming that if you have a BA negative mutation on both sides that you
02:10:39
have a 98 to 99% chance of getting breast cancer that having this mutation here warrants a prophylactic double
02:10:46
mastctomy which means removing both breasts before the cancer even shows up. But I think the reason why maybe I'm
02:10:53
wrong about this but I think the reason you brought this up Stephen was not because you were interested when you said like I don't think you worded it
02:10:58
like this but you know why does a child get cancer? Why would young Steven have gotten cancer? I don't think you mean in a scientific sense. I don't think you
02:11:04
mean literally explain to me the process by which cancer develops in my brain gives me leukemia. I think you mean why
02:11:12
does this happen if being supervised? I mean, you asked it to to Greg in the context of religious supervision of the
02:11:18
universe. And I think the irony is that we're in a
02:11:23
context of a discussion where usually the boots on the other foot and I'm sort of being told that as a as a
02:11:30
non-religious person, as an atheist agnostic, I don't have a satisfying explanation.
02:11:36
You know, what am I going to say at the at the foottool of of somebody who's who's dying of cancer? But it sounds to me at least today like we don't have a
02:11:44
very plausible alternative in Christianity. For example, I did have a few questions which maybe I'll be
02:11:49
permitted the time to to ask and I don't I don't want to bang on about this, but it's important because this is
02:11:55
ultimately you're here to represent your view and a worldview more broadly and this is to me the question is the
02:12:01
question of suffering and you've explained your your your views about the the fool and I wanted to let you put
02:12:08
them in full before I asked a few questions. But the first question that jumps out at me is the question of
02:12:15
prehuman suffering. We're not the first species to inhabit this planet. And before we existed,
02:12:22
billions of years, I don't know if you believe that the earth is 4 and a half billion years old, but but
02:12:27
billions of years, hundreds of millions of years at least of animal suffering. Yeah.
02:12:32
Like, and that is experienced. They they like if and and you could say that it somehow is less like relevant or doesn't
02:12:39
matter as much, but if if you saw me right now step on a dog's tail and watch it squeal, you'd tell me to stop because
02:12:45
you know that absent just the effect that that has on our human situation, that's bad for the dog.
02:12:50
That kind of stuff was going on for hundreds of million years before humans were around. That means before the fool. That's true. The second question, the second question
02:12:56
I have, let's do one at a time. Uh and I don't entirely know how to answer that. Um part of the problem
02:13:02
comes when you create a world in a certain way that has um certain cause
02:13:07
and effect kind of things. So pain is there for a reason. Pain is there so that you can avoid something that's
02:13:13
harmful to the body. When you start feeling pain, you withdraw from it. Okay? In a very simplistic sense. It
02:13:19
also has a downside and the downside is that pain is painful and sometimes dying
02:13:24
is very painful too. So there's a trade-off there. Now I haven't worked all those details out. Okay. Uh but what
02:13:31
I look at is a larger picture because I can't refine all of those things for my own thinking. The larger picture is we
02:13:38
both we all live in the same world that is filled with pain and suffering. So
02:13:43
then the question is who has the best explanation at large about how that
02:13:48
works? No explanation. Well, maybe some are are going to go very granular and
02:13:54
get the here's why your baby is suffering in this moment for this thing. We're not going to be able to do that.
02:13:59
But we can understand why the world is broken. Now, if you if you don't hold that the world was made for something
02:14:05
better, then the world we see right now is not broken. It's just the way it is. There is no moral assessment whatsoever
02:14:12
that we can make that would make any sense. But we constantly make moral assessments, which is why you're
02:14:17
bringing this issue up about suffering. I've been very careful to avoid moral language precisely this reason. Let me
02:14:23
explain how what I'm it seems to me that you are bringing kind of smuggling in moral categories with the suffering
02:14:29
issue because if I said I don't care about the suffering of millions of years of organisms that had experienced pain
02:14:37
that kind of casts me in a kind of a negative moral light. You don't have to say that. It does seem to me that you're
02:14:43
smuggling in the notion that suffering is bad morally. I know that people often do that. I'm
02:14:49
specifically avoiding that because I've had this conversation a hundred thousand times and that's that's the accusation that that gets brought up and some
02:14:55
people do do that but I'm specifically you can rewind the tape I make great pains I don't say the problem of evil
02:15:00
for example I say the problem of suffering okay if you said that you didn't care about suffering I would say that you're probably just being inconsistent with
02:15:06
your Christian worldview for example I wouldn't say that you're doing anything immoral in the context of accept the qualification what I'm saying
02:15:12
is that if Christianity were true we would not expect the kind of suffering that is present in the natural world I'm
02:15:18
Not saying that on my worldview that suffering is wrong and must be fixed and there's some moral element. I'm not
02:15:23
saying that at all. All I'm saying is that it is unexpected if Christianity were true that that suffering would be
02:15:29
as it is. Well, the way in particular the non-human animals. No, I understand that. Okay. And the way I'm the way I'm looking at it,
02:15:35
do you understand that I'm not smuggling in those moral moral because you said that I'm smuggling in moral terminology.
02:15:40
Can I buy that? It's okay. I'm not doing that. Did you have a second question? I did which is that if the fool is the
02:15:46
explanation for shall we say the the moral evils that people commit like the Holocaust the reason why people have a
02:15:52
proclivity to commit the Holocaust is because of the betrayal of God's trust
02:15:58
few million years ago whenever it was you think it was um if if Adam and Eve's transgression is the
02:16:06
explanation for why humans have a sinful nature and act upon sin then why did Eve act upon the sin before
02:16:13
the fall had happened. Mhm. Eve must have had a proclivity to sin in order to in order to betray God in the
02:16:20
first place. And so I don't think it suffices to say that the explanation for why we have human beings with a
02:16:25
proclivity to sin like Adolf Hitler is because of the fool if the fool is a result of a proclivity to sin from Eve.
02:16:33
Well, the nature of freedom in my understanding, my view is that it can initiate things. Okay? You don't have to
02:16:41
have in a certain sense deterministic element in your in your soul that forces
02:16:47
you to act a certain way. Why did Adam and Eve Eve in this case act the way she
02:16:52
did? Because she was capable of initiating a free action free action in
02:16:57
terms of rebellion. Okay, that's the nature of freedom. Okay, I can't get into her mind. And I think sometimes
02:17:03
asking questions like this, why did she under those circumstances do what she did? I can't answer that. Do you think
02:17:09
she she did something immoral? Yeah, she disobeyed God. And what did she eat from the tree
02:17:15
of the I'm not sure. She ate from the tree of the knowledge and good and evil. So, she ate from the
02:17:21
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Implying that before she ate of it, she didn't have a knowledge of good and evil. How could she have done something
02:17:26
immoral before she ate it? Can I ask you a question? Hold on. No, I this goes to a connection to my view.
02:17:32
So, I just need to clarify this. You understand what I'm saying? Right. Like, yeah, I understand. I'm entirely sure. If she hasn't eaten from the tree of the
02:17:38
knowledge of good and evil, she must have known good and evil. So how does she know that it's evil? If she hasn't yet eaten from the knowledge of good and
02:17:43
evil because the knowledge of good and the word knowledge often times in the Hebrew is talking about experience.
02:17:48
Okay, it is not talking about mental awareness. Okay, she wouldn't have been
02:17:54
she wouldn't have not been able to even understand the command not to do something if she didn't have those moral
02:18:01
categories. I think that's part of the image of God in man. Consequently, she
02:18:06
knew she'd ought not do it, but she still chose, for whatever reason, to do that. And that act of disobedience
02:18:13
created a big mess. What that means is that the fool does not explain the proclivity to sin because Eve already had it. It does not
02:18:20
explain the existence of evil because knowledge of that already existed before she committed the fool. It also doesn't
02:18:26
explain the origin of suffering because of course, Eve's punishment for eating from the tree of the Well, you're talking about suffering
02:18:31
prior to human beings in animals. Okay, I'm talking about suffering in human beings. It does it does explain the fall
02:18:38
of man because human beings made a choice that they could they they could have made differently but they didn't
02:18:44
and their rebellion against God it had a consequence I don't think it could be and this is why the rest of the world
02:18:51
has unfolded the way it has why there is suffering evil in the world uh a
02:18:57
naturalistic explanation can explain oh suffering before suffering a after but you've been very careful to make it
02:19:03
clear that there's no moral ramifications to this at all. It seems most people are pretty aware that there
02:19:08
are moral ramifications. So if your world view does not have a way of making sense or are moral intuitions about
02:19:15
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02:19:21
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02:21:21
Alex, you're how do you categorize your belief or lack of belief? Are you atheist, agnostic, religious?
02:21:28
Agnostic is probably the best the best term. And how do you define the word agnostic? It means that I I don't I don't know. I
02:21:34
think that a lot of religious language escapes us. And I'm also not entirely sure always what what people are exactly
02:21:41
talking about. So if I asked you the question, how did um how did life come to be on the earth? What would your answer to that be?
02:21:47
Oh, I have no idea. Of course, I have no idea. And how does someone who is agnostic create a really
02:21:53
meaningful life in your perspective? Well, I don't know how
02:21:59
how somebody else might do that because because crucially I mean we we talked about this earlier when we talked about like um
02:22:05
we have this brief interlude where you were sort of saying meaning for humans
02:22:10
and meaning for individuals. And the reason I make that distinction is because if you consider the way that
02:22:15
take like scientific progress right from Galileo's time to today the idea is that
02:22:20
there are some kind of scientific innovations and then you have a child and you teach that child the latest
02:22:26
science and then that child will build upon it and teach their children the latest and they'll build and so as
02:22:31
generations go on the starting point for each individual human is like further along right so you can have a child
02:22:37
who's like 12 now and knows calculus you know what I mean And with successive
02:22:43
generations, the starting point for each individual is like further along the path of discovery. With like meaning and existential
02:22:50
concerns, it doesn't work like that. It resets every single time. It's not something you can't figure out like how
02:22:56
to live a meaningful life and experience meaning and come to some kind of spiritual enlightenment and then teach that to your children and that's then
02:23:02
their starting point. For them, it resets. It's new. So I think that every
02:23:07
individual has to do it on their own for themselves, right? And we're all doing that together as it were going around
02:23:13
the world. So the way that I'm approaching this, we were going to talk about consciousness, which we didn't. And perhaps it's a good job that we
02:23:19
didn't because it's it's just such a big topic. But my views on consciousness are
02:23:25
crucial to my uh to my sense of sort of what it's all
02:23:31
about as it were because the greatest mystery that we are confronted with every single day if you just take a
02:23:37
moment to remember it is that we are conscious is that we are experiencing things from a first person perspective
02:23:43
that I have thoughts which are inaccessible to you and you have thoughts which are inaccessible to me. It's extremely strange. So there's a
02:23:51
view that I'm quite attracted to uh in the philosophy of mind called pansychism
02:23:56
which literally means sort of like the view that consciousness is everywhere or
02:24:01
in everything. It's not it doesn't mean that everything is conscious. It doesn't mean this pen is conscious. What it means is that the stuff that the
02:24:08
universe is made out of so the fundamental matter of the universe has at least mental properties or might be
02:24:14
mental properties. Because when you say for example, you know, we're in a world of like molecules in motion, right?
02:24:20
I understand that sentiment. But if you ask a scientist, what is stuff actually made out of? Ultimately speaking, they
02:24:27
will not be able to tell you. For you personally, what makes your life full of purpose and meaning? I can't just jump. I can just jump
02:24:32
there, but it won't make much sense because what I would say is something like a recognition of the of the
02:24:39
illusion of divisible selves, which doesn't make a ton of sense.
02:24:45
I can explain unless you unless you lay the groundwork, which can be can be explained in many different ways and in fact is something which most uh like the
02:24:52
Vic tradition, it's one of the reasons I'm so attracted to it and particularly the the Apananishads is because they seem to embody this idea. They they
02:25:00
they're constantly banging on about how the individual self, the individuated
02:25:05
person is an illusion and there is one ultimate self. They call it Ant-Man. Um,
02:25:10
but are you going to have kids? I don't know. Do you want to have kids? I hope so. Yeah. So, you do want to have kids? Oh, yeah.
02:25:16
Why? I'm not sure. I don't know.
02:25:23
I it just feels it feels as though I've got it's a bit like asking you know there's a there's a literal explanation
02:25:29
if if you ask me am I going to have dinner today I'll say yes if you say why I could say well because I'm hungry but if you ask me like but but like why like
02:25:35
why why do you care about being hungry why do you care about satisfying it well I would say I'm agnostic and I'll
02:25:41
say I want to have kids because I think it will bring a lot of joy to my life I think I'll enjoy the challenge it's proven to be for your sake
02:25:48
yes so it's not for their sake I think everything kind of immoral to
02:25:54
No, no, no, no, no, no. I think everything everyone does at some you can look at the neurological level is for
02:25:59
their sake. The reason why people why Dr. K works on that ward and saves the life. It's ultimately because it's
02:26:06
so then in a in a way I agree with you but if if it is true that there is this sort of
02:26:12
thing called consciousness that the universe is made out of and brains are kind of complex organizations of
02:26:17
consciousness then when you ask me like you know why what's wrong with harming another person on this on this worldview
02:26:24
on this materialistic worldview well I think the material of the universe is consciousness and I think that when I
02:26:29
harm someone else it could literally in a fundamental sense be a be a case of self harm by by the way Can I just say
02:26:35
because it sounds a little bit insane um without the space to explain the pansy worldview it sounds absolutely mental
02:26:40
but there are some there are some really interesting clues here can I give you one clue this is really really fascinating about the fact that the
02:26:46
brain as Aldis Huxley said it was a tool focusing the mind aldus Huxley writes in the in the doors of perception essential
02:26:52
reading to anybody interested in consciousness by the way um Aldis Huxley in the 20th century takes a psychedelic
02:26:59
drug and he writes about his experience and he writes about it beautifully and one of the things he realizes is that his mind has been opened and he thinks
02:27:07
okay well if my mind has been opened during this experience then that means that in normal waking hours something
02:27:14
must be closing my mind what could be closing my mind answer the brain he
02:27:22
concludes that the brain is a tool for focusing the mind so the psychedelic
02:27:28
experience this is before we've done any scientific experiments on this you can scan people's brains in like an M MRI
02:27:35
scanner, right? Okay. So, when you take a psychedelic drug, your experience just
02:27:40
blows up, right? You start seeing colors you didn't know existed. You start experiencing things as if they were new. It's like the experience is
02:27:46
unimaginable. So, we've taken people and we've measured their brain activity and their and their brain activity is at a
02:27:52
certain level. And then you give them a psychedelic drug and you put them in the MRI scanner and their brain activity goes
02:27:59
down. brain activity goes down as the mental experience expands and goes up which for
02:28:09
the person who experiences the psychedelic drug they will report this as a feeling that they just get from the
02:28:15
experience. the scientist who measures the brain activity, the sages writing, the the Apananishads, the Buddhist monk
02:28:24
after a series of long meditation will all say the same thing which is that in some inexplicable way. Consciousness is
02:28:32
more foundational than the brain is and the brain is focusing consciousness and in some sense that means that our
02:28:38
individuated selves are essentially illusory. I'm gonna do my best
02:28:43
in the same way the distinction between objects are a loser to support what you're saying. I I totally empathize with having fallen
02:28:49
into this mistake of invoking karma and not having the bandwidth to explain what I mean,
02:28:55
opening myself up to misinterpretation. That's also why I completely understand what you said a moment ago, which is so so I think the funny thing about this
02:29:00
is if we look at the quantification of meaning.
02:29:06
I think everything that I said about self-determination theory, you know, make choices in life doesn't matter what
02:29:12
they are. We get so caught up about making the right choice. Where does the concept of right or wrong come from? It comes from like the social conditioning
02:29:18
around us. When I was 9 years old, my grandmother's like, "Oh, you're going to be great doctor one day. Great doctor,
02:29:24
great doctor, great doctor." And so then I went to medical school. I was premed and I promptly failed out because the
02:29:30
reason I wanted to be a doctor is because I thought it was going to be cool and I was going to go to Harvard by the way. I was going to be the best doctor, not just a doctor. And that
02:29:37
didn't really align with my motivational system at all. It was coming from the ego. And so I kind of failed out and
02:29:43
then seven years later started med school a few years later at that. Wound up ironically training at Harvard and
02:29:49
being faculty there. And so going back to karma for a second, I I I share this
02:29:55
example because a lot of times when we look at things that we think are bad and I'm not saying that cancer applies here
02:30:01
clearly, but this is what the meaning making the practical functional work of when someone comes into my office who
02:30:07
was the result who was sexually abused or something like that. How do we help that person? We make meaning. So for me
02:30:13
this was I used to think that that there is no scenario in which a 2.5 GPA is
02:30:18
better than a 4.0 GPA. that in school getting Fs is in no way better than
02:30:24
getting A's. Now years later I realize that all of those experiences of
02:30:30
suffering, of struggling, of having no meaning in life, playing video games for 20 hours a day, joining a fraternity
02:30:37
when I was a freshman, which is lots of great times, you know, made me the person that I am. And though even if you
02:30:42
look at the brand of Dr. K, the whole point was I was a college dropout and then ended up as faculty at Harvard
02:30:48
Medical School. Amazing, right? So in this context that a lot of times that if
02:30:53
we sort of the more we are zoomed into our life, the less we will see this
02:30:58
broader perspective. And this is really fascinating if you look at the work of Victor Frankle because Vic Victor
02:31:04
Frankle was a neurologist, went through the Holocaust, became a psychologist and then he sort of
02:31:11
literally his work is something called logootherapy, which is how do we consistently help people make meaning in
02:31:16
life? And he designed a system of therapy. And the first part of it is de-individuation. Is the ability of
02:31:23
zooming out from your thing. When someone feels like my life is falling apart, there's no point anymore. Why?
02:31:29
Because I just got dumped and she's never going to talk to me again. Zoom out a little bit. This is not the
02:31:34
end of the world. Your life is bigger than this one thing. So the more that we zoom out from a mechanistic perspective,
02:31:41
the more meaning we find in life. And what is the ultimate zooming out? Relationship with God. because now we're
02:31:47
way out here, right? This isn't about you. This isn't about someone dying of cancer. This is about something that
02:31:52
goes way bigger than you. So, what I would say is you can do all the scientific stuff. It'll get you to 8 out
02:31:58
of 10, maybe nine out of 10. But, and this is what's so crazy, the scientific
02:32:04
stuff I am incredibly confident I can defend. I can point to studies. We can talk
02:32:09
about psychedelics, the default mode network, self-determination theory, logootherapy. There are tons of studies,
02:32:15
radical acceptance, dialectical behavioral therapy, all of these things, acceptance and commitment therapy, all
02:32:20
of these things have to do with making meaning in the world. But if you really want to find that meaning, you keep on
02:32:26
asking this question. I mean, you selected that question because you're looking for it, right? And you won't let
02:32:32
him get away with some philosophical explanation. You're like, "No, you tell me when you wake up. Where is it? Show
02:32:39
me where it is. Show me how to get it." because you don't understand his because you've never had a direct experience of mine. And so you're like,
02:32:45
"Bro, you don't know God. How do you find it?" The desperation of like, "No,
02:32:50
no, no slipping away, Alex. No random stories and ending up in a not random, sorry. No stories that end up in a
02:32:56
delightful way." Right? So, how do you find that that last chunk that last way
02:33:02
that last step of the way there is through the direct experience of Brahman.
02:33:08
So when he says pansychism in the Hindu system, we believe that
02:33:14
consciousness is the foundational element of the universe. Atman is Brahman.
02:33:19
Atman is not Brah well sort of yes and no. Atman is individual soul. Brahman is
02:33:24
the cosmic soul. The cosmic consciousness that the fundamental thing that is out there is transcendent.
02:33:31
And having a relationship that with that thing is how we get meaning. This is how
02:33:37
we get a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 meaning because this guy has done something where he had this experience
02:33:43
where he's been talking to God but one day someone answered the phone
02:33:48
and when you have that transcendent experience when you have this direct experience of the Brahman and this is
02:33:53
why I've been avoiding saying it because it's completely undefensible it is what I believe is philosophically
02:34:00
true it is what I believe is absolutely true and it is not transmissible it can only
02:34:06
be witnessed. Exactly. That's that's the most important point is that and it's why I say that this is something that
02:34:11
everybody has to start a fresh because if there is an answer to this question, it is something that you
02:34:17
that you cannot syllogize. By the way, this isn't just some like you know Hindu thing like Christians say the same thing
02:34:23
about their religious experiences. The the ineffable quality William James famously tried to identify the
02:34:30
characteristic aspects of religious experience and one of the most important was the ineffability. the inability to
02:34:36
explain is what that means. Like the inability to put into words and to explain and to say what it's like and
02:34:42
interestingly some of my favorite examples of this throughout history have been some of the most important
02:34:49
Christian thinkers of all time who've essentially abandoned the project of communicating ideas to other people. I
02:34:56
mentioned Bla1 Pascal earlier. He famously had his night of fire where he has a religious experience and he's one
02:35:02
of the greatest writers in Christian history and he has this experience of God and he writes in his diary and later
02:35:07
has it etched into his jacket fire he writes not the God of the philosophers the God
02:35:13
of Abraham the God of Isaac the God of Jacob because he realizes that he's experienced something which is not this
02:35:18
abstract first cause design of the universe it's not that it's something more deeply personal Thomas Aquinus
02:35:25
undoubtedly the greatest metaphysician of Christian history writes the Suma Theologica which is to this day one of
02:35:31
the most celebrated works of Christian metaphysics trying to you know explain
02:35:36
and analyze the nature of God. It's where we get his famous five ways of showing the existence of God and all of this kind of stuff and it's it's really
02:35:43
long and still still studied in depth to this day. He left it unfinished
02:35:48
when he died. Why? Because one day he was performing the Eucharist and he had
02:35:53
a religious experience. He believed that he experienced the presence of God and he stopped writing it and he was he was
02:36:01
practically begged by a friend and patron like Thomas you've you've you've
02:36:06
got to you've got to finish the book and he wrote back and said I can write no more after what I've seen it's like
02:36:12
straw compared to the experience I've had. But quite clearly when you look at people who actually report the stuff
02:36:18
that people want which is the certainty the experience where they say I've I've
02:36:23
met God and I know what that feels like. The number one characteristic of such experiences is that they are not
02:36:29
transmissible is that you cannot write it down and give that experience to somebody else. So here's the beautiful thing. You can't
02:36:35
down you can't write down the experience but you can absolutely write down the
02:36:40
process of finding that experience. Yes. So I'm with you. That is an
02:36:45
individual journey. And I think this is where something really interesting. I don't know if this is like accurate or not, but I sort of
02:36:52
noticed that all of our most common religions have spiritual traditions that are not necessarily the same as the
02:36:58
religion. Yeah. So in Hinduism, it's really interesting because we have priests and then we have swamies. A priest is not a yogi. So the
02:37:06
person who does the practice of the religion is not the same as the person who sits in the Himalayas and meditates
02:37:12
for 12 hours a day. And even if we look at like Christianity, you know, I I know. So I I read a Gnostic text for the
02:37:18
first time. Which one? Um, Thunder Perfect Mind. And what I realized is, oh, I know
02:37:24
exactly what this is. I I I read some stuff about it and people were like, oh, it's talking about this. I'm like, no,
02:37:29
it's not. Thunder Perfect Mind is a series of meditation techniques. That's what it is, right? That that's what it's
02:37:37
a series of meditations. And if you do these meditations and there's all kinds of stuff and I I think you know Sufiism
02:37:43
was there, Cabala is there in Judaism, there's the Gnostic tradition. Every religion has this spiritual component
02:37:52
which sometimes comes down to going to church, witnessing God. But you know, the whole thing is like you got to have
02:37:57
fingers crossed, which is part part of the way why why it's designed because there's no definitive way to do it. You have to have God's grace to get it.
02:38:05
There's a certain amount of surrender. There's a certain amount of ego that you have to get rid of in order to open
02:38:10
yourself up to God. But there are a series of practices that you can do that will cultivate
02:38:17
the right setting for God to pick up the phone. These are things that we will sort of
02:38:22
use psychedelics. It's a very good evidence for the use of psychedelics. I was about to say. Yeah. So psychedelics will do this kind
02:38:28
of thing where it it takes you to that state to a certain degree, but there's way way way further to go than what
02:38:34
psychedelics can do. I I would say psychedelics take you to a helicopter to about 6,000 ft. You can go to 20,000 ft,
02:38:40
30,000 ft. Have experiences of Brahman. And this is where all of these like weird esoteric practices from the the
02:38:46
science of yoga kind of like now that we have so much like mc mindfulness everywhere where everyone's got apps and
02:38:52
stuff like that. We've lost a lot of the most important stuff that if you want to have a transcendent experience, there
02:38:58
are things you have to do with your diet. There are things that you have to do with your respiratory rate. You have to set up your body's capacity to handle
02:39:05
metabolic acidosis because Yeah. And you've done this yourself.
02:39:12
I will not answer that question. You can you can answer the question whether you've done it or not. I can I will not.
02:39:18
Why? Uh the cost to my shaky is too high.
02:39:24
So I I asked you this question before. Do you remember? What did I say? You told me that you
02:39:29
have seen things and gone to a place. But when I asked you what you saw, you
02:39:35
told me you wouldn't tell me. Yeah. But you're happy to say that you have done this.
02:39:40
No, I didn't say that I have done this. That's what you said to me last time. Oh, yeah. Well, maybe I made a mistake. I mean, sort of. So, if that's what I
02:39:46
said last time, that's my answer then. My answer today is I will not talk. I will not answer that question.
02:39:52
And the reason you won't answer the question is because the depletion of the shaky is too high. And what does that mean?
02:39:58
Okay. So, okay. So, it sounds like I'm locked out the house
02:40:05
like I can't there are many reasons but okay. So, pansychism there's this idea that there's this weird collective
02:40:11
consciousness that's the basic unit. I think we can easily call it God a relationship with that thing. So, I'm
02:40:17
down here it's up there. So the key thing is if we look at psychedelic usage, if we look at dark night of the
02:40:24
soul, if we look at these moments of rapture where you go into church and one of two things is happening. Either your
02:40:30
psychological defense mechanisms are creating the ultimate cope and you're saying now I'm healed even though you're
02:40:35
not or you actually have a direct experience of God and you are transformed. What is the nature of that
02:40:41
transformation? It is the loss of ego. That is the most conserved thing. We surrender before God. Before God, we are
02:40:48
nothing. Right? Doesn't matter which religion you talk to. This is all this is where I think that there's like evidence of truth with a capital T
02:40:54
because human beings from all over the planet have done these explorations using the technology of our mind and our
02:41:01
consciousness and we arrive at very similar conclusions. So the beautiful thing is that when so when our ego is
02:41:08
active in the most powerful way, it becomes narcissism also becomes things
02:41:14
like depression. still actually a very ego. I'm terrible. I'm pathetic. I'm worthless. The world would be better off
02:41:21
without me. The focus is on me, me, me, me, me. It's hyperactive default mode network. Mhm.
02:41:26
So, in order to connect to the divine, you need to dissolve your ego as much as possible.
02:41:31
So, the reason you won't tell me is because if I say it, my ego will increase. You
02:41:39
also will not what what'll happen is you'll get an idea of it, right? The more I talk about it, the more that your
02:41:45
mind will create a map without experience. So I do not discuss my experiences in meditation. What I will
02:41:52
absolutely say though and this is what I love about it. Alex said this is the one thing we cannot stand on the shoulders
02:41:57
of giants. You have to walk this whole journey by yourself. No one else can walk it for you. So I won't tell you how
02:42:05
far I've gone. Maybe I'm a maybe I'm just, you know, talking Who knows? But what I will tell you is that you
02:42:12
don't need the answer from me. Why are you asking me? Because you want to know then you walk it. If you see the Buddha, kill him. That's
02:42:18
the meaning of this or the one interpretive meaning of this of this Buddhist Cohen is is stop looking for
02:42:24
gurus and start looking inside yourself. Do you think I could then sit here and say what your experience is not true?
02:42:29
And I absolutely. Yeah. Of course. And I could and I could pick it apart and stuff like that.
02:42:35
Absolutely. So So this is the thing that I Is there any value in that from what? for me doing that to you.
02:42:41
Of course, there's value for you if you wanted to. If you want to pick me apart, if you want to continue to live the life
02:42:47
that you you live, if you want to continue to get five out of 10 meaning cuz you've accomplished a lot, if accomp
02:42:53
you have a a lot of stuff, I mean, so many videos that you have left, so many people that you help, millions of people
02:42:58
across the globe, right? I say this because that's what's happening here. What
02:43:03
that Alex is picking apart. Fine. So, so I have no problem with picking things apart. If you want to
02:43:08
pick things apart, pick things apart. But be very clear about what picking things apart does. What does it do?
02:43:14
So, it's it's a great question. I have a different way of answering it. So, when I listen to philosophers like
02:43:20
these guys were just in it about evil and if if if evil was created when Eve ate the apple, was she evil when she
02:43:27
made the apple? Right? It's so great. It's picking things apart. So, it's so interesting because as a psychiatrist,
02:43:33
my training is actually the exact opposite. What I've trained myself to do
02:43:38
is to twist and turn in mental gymnastics to understand somebody else's view. When a patient walks into my
02:43:45
office and they say, "I'm suicidal," I don't want to pick their view apart. No, you have so much to live for. It doesn't work. I try to understand them. So,
02:43:53
there is value to picking things apart in terms of political debate, in terms of you're arguing with your wife whether
02:43:59
you should buy a car or lease a car. There are all kinds of values to picking things apart. But the question is, what
02:44:04
do you want? Now, I think if you take Alex's road, which I think is going to change real quick if it hasn't.
02:44:10
Why? Be honest. I think he he's going to go down the
02:44:17
road of nosis if he isn't already. Nosis. What What is Nosis?
02:44:23
Knowledge, Alex. Nosis is a it's a Greek term. Nosis means knowledge. Um but it's attached to
02:44:30
I guess a kind of an ancient school of philosophy which believes that uh truth is is obtained from looking inward.
02:44:38
Do you mean narcissism? Not not narcissism. So I I think if if you want to, Alex, it's not a
02:44:44
philosophy. It's a practice. But what what do you mean when you say I mean Stephen asked you said I'm going to go down a
02:44:50
I think you got to walk down the Gnostic road. Dude, would you tell us what you didn't just say? You said you thought I was going to
02:44:56
do that. What? What? What does it mean that I think you're going to do that? Or the the path of what is the thing that you think I'm
02:45:01
going to? Yeah. I think you're going to have to start practicing Gnostic stuff. What's Gnostic stuff? What does that mean?
02:45:07
So, Thunder Perfect Mind is a series of meditations. If you look at that and you do what it
02:45:13
tells you to do, you will understand what the Gnostics understood. You have to walk that path that they walked. But
02:45:20
doing so does not involve the philosophy of Nosis, right? that the part of Nosis I don't
02:45:26
know what the philos I mean I get what you're saying from a philosophical perspective but the gnostics were p practitioners as far as I understand I
02:45:32
read one gnostic text and I was like oh this is like a this is like a meditation as far as so what is it that makes you think why
02:45:38
do you look at me and say that's I mean you've read one gnostic text I have an intuition
02:45:44
so but I wonder what what you mean it's not explainable but but you have an intuition
02:45:51
based on pattern recognition sure that an individual like Alex, I don't know. No, not pattern
02:45:57
recognition. This is indefensible. Okay. I get told a lot by a lot of different
02:46:03
people that I'm quite clearly on a particular road. Christians Christians very often
02:46:09
say that it seems as though I'm on the verge of Christian conversion. And I think that's often just a result of having nice conversations with them
02:46:15
where I don't jump down their throat and say, "Actually, there's some uh there's some truth in this or actually there are
02:46:20
some good arguments of the resurrection of Jesus or this kind of stuff." And suddenly I have people saying, you know, he's so close.
02:46:25
Is that kind of annoying? Clearly a man searching for meaning. Something about tell us what Nosis is.
02:46:31
You said it's a series of practices, but like what? So is, you know, so is vegetarianism. So like
02:46:36
So I I think nosis from what reading one text, I'm not a gnostic expert. Okay. So there's a set of practices that if
02:46:43
you do them have a high probabilistic chance of having a direct experience of
02:46:49
God. Like what? So m chanting is a simple example but there are things that you
02:46:54
can do to increase the likelihood of having a transcendent experience of
02:47:00
chanting. So for example if you adopt siddhasan so siddhasan is a particular
02:47:05
yoga posture where um your left heel is placed against the perennium of your
02:47:11
body. So the perennium is the the taint the area between the anus and the scrotum. So if you also do certain bron
02:47:19
practices, so these will do things that induce a very very very low respiratory rate and one of the things that we know
02:47:26
about transcendental experiences is that high levels of CO2 tend to make actually
02:47:33
we don't know this but this is kind of the best hypothesis that I've read that I happen to think is true that if we
02:47:39
alter the neurons of our brain chemistry we can evoke transcendental experiences.
02:47:45
So if you look at some of these esoteric traditions, what'll happen is is you have all of these different practices
02:47:51
and as you do these practices, I think you are very clearly refining your physiology and your neurology to induce
02:47:58
certain states. And let's remember that psychedelics don't create anything. Yes,
02:48:03
psychedelics simply activate the circuitry that is already there or deactivate. Huh? Or deactivate
02:48:09
or deactivate, right? But yeah, that's that's a crucial point to make. I I'd love to understand why
02:48:15
you think he's going to go down that path. Let's call it intuition, but I I need something a little bit more
02:48:20
than that. So, you're saying Okay. So, I I'll give you more. So, in um the system of So, can I answer
02:48:27
truthfully or defensively? Truthfully, which ones do you guys want? Truthfully, truthfully. So, in the system of Kundalini yoga,
02:48:34
there are seven chakras. So 21 years ago 20 almost 22 I went to a teacher who
02:48:42
taught me the first of a kundalini practice which is based on the agna chakra. So the agna chakra is your third
02:48:47
eye chakra and gives you it is the chakra that governs understanding. So if
02:48:54
you want to understand things then agna chakra practices are the right
02:48:59
thing to do. So many years ago, back in a former life when I was uh still an
02:49:05
academic at at Harvard, I was trying to develop an evidence-based meditation program for different diagnosis. And
02:49:12
part of what I leaned into and initial results were good, but never really, you know, then I started doing this. But so
02:49:19
as one example, there's this chakra called the mooladhara chakra, which is our root chakra. So the muladhara chakra
02:49:24
governs our primal impulses in life. So I looked at my patients with addictions
02:49:30
and I was like okay these people have a problem with impulse control and they want something and they can't restrain
02:49:35
themselves from getting it. So I wondered can I teach them mooladharak chakra practices to sort of basically
02:49:42
like reduce their flow of wanting the basic things and I found that that was
02:49:48
efficacious. Now meditation works for addictions then but the question is can
02:49:53
we do a specific meditation for a specific mental illness. So there are there's one study for example that looks
02:49:59
at anahhat or heart chakra meditation specifically for depression because it cultivates like compassion and self-love
02:50:05
and stuff like that and they found it's a very small study hopefully the the
02:50:10
we'll do more research in this but they found that the effect was superior to other forms of meditation. So
02:50:17
hypothetically, theoretically, there are specific meditation practices which work
02:50:22
in different ways and I teach a lot of this stuff in in Dr. K's guide to meditation and stuff. But so there are
02:50:29
these specific practices. So I specifically did a a practice based on agnakra stuff like intuition, right? So
02:50:36
then like something weird happens which is when I sit with people, I have intuitions about them. Now is this real?
02:50:44
Is this fake? is a delusional I don't know. You could argue that I'm just a really good psychiatrist with really
02:50:50
good cold reading, right? But I this is a I I don't So if you want to know the
02:50:56
real answer, like I'm not a great psychiatrist. People think I'm so brilliant as I'm not. I'm cheating. I'm
02:51:01
using a a layer of information that I don't think most people have access to. Which I know is a completely
02:51:08
undefensible claim. Except if you do agna chakra practices too, you
02:51:14
will see what I'm talking about. Alex, if I were to ask you that if someone's listening now and they feel lost in their life, is there any advice
02:51:21
that you could give them or a simple action that they could take
02:51:27
that would help them to find to remove the feeling of feeling lost in
02:51:33
life. Hm. It's always difficult because it's such an individual thing that it's difficult
02:51:40
to give uh advice writ large. Um also because
02:51:48
I'm no paradigm of meaning and purpose in life and not some fountain of wisdom from which people can drink. Um so I
02:51:56
wouldn't presume to do so. But if a friend So if they came to me as I'm the guy on the camera with the microphones
02:52:02
and stuff, so what do I do? I would say probably the reason a lot of people click this video. Yeah. I I would say that firstly stop
02:52:08
doing that. Like don't stop clicking the video everybody. Like and subscribe. But stop thinking
02:52:15
you're going to find some kind of teacher or guru who is
02:52:21
going to give you the answer. Instead, the most valuable form of person to listen to, I think, and I found is
02:52:27
somebody who's quite clearly also trying to do the same thing. There are people out there who think they've achieved
02:52:32
certain things. They've they found meaning. They've understood the truth and you can learn a lot from them trying to explain their worldview to them. Um I
02:52:38
don't claim to be such a person. So the only thing I can do is say like I'm actually doing this at the same time as you. So I can't give you advice from
02:52:44
experience. I can't say here's what to do to find meaning. Here's what I did. What I can say is here are some things that I'm trying. For example, I'm really
02:52:51
interested by this question of consciousness and what it means to say that reality is fundamentally mental and
02:52:57
that we've made a mistake in thinking that complexity produces consciousness and rather complexity allows
02:53:03
consciousness to do particular things like memory and emotion and stuff like that. That's really exciting and there
02:53:09
are some implications of seeing the world in that way. Implications about the the unity of experience.
02:53:15
But you're saying pursue answers. Yes, pursue answers, but also try to try to try to experience it as you get like
02:53:22
I I kind of depends who it is and I don't like to say on camera exactly, but psychedelics can be really really useful
02:53:28
for a lot of people. They can if if you are not in the right mindset, as they say,
02:53:34
if you're a bit disintegrated, if if like it can the reason I don't like to advise it is because it can bring about
02:53:40
a very bad experience for a lot of people. But you're saying within the right certain setting, something like that might be what I'd recommend. It depends who I'm talking
02:53:46
to, but there are friends in my life, for example, who I would say don't take psychedelics. You know, I'd like I from
02:53:52
from from my experience, I just don't think it seems like the right thing to do. But there are other friends who I would say if you did in the right
02:53:58
circumstance, I think this could this could blow open. Would you categorize yourself as being lost and directionless?
02:54:05
To some degree, of course. Yeah. To to to some degree, everybody is. Um lost.
02:54:10
Lost is is quite a heavy word. Like when people say, "I'm lost." By volunteering that information, they they tend to be
02:54:16
implying that it's a strong enough feeling that they're troubled by it and want to make it.
02:54:21
Are you happy? That's why people say it. But when when you ask Well, there are different questions here, right? Like, am I happy right now?
02:54:29
Sure. Like tomorrow, maybe not across life. If you had to rate your contentment in life out of 10, I'll do the same.
02:54:36
It's not It's not a very easy thing to quantify. Yeah, but I give do you think but I asked I've asked hundreds of
02:54:42
people 400 people this question or everyone in the podcast has been I asked Dr. Okay, this question jump in and let
02:54:47
me just finish this train of thought. So I can say to you for example, yeah, I'm like a five out of 10 contentment.
02:54:53
Is that is that true? Like maybe. Yeah, let's I'll give you a simple way to quantify. I I literally can't quantify. And the
02:54:59
reason I'll give I'll give you a way to quantify. I'll give you the yard stick. So if you think about how old are you? 26. 26. So you think about this 26 years.
02:55:05
Mhm. Has there been months of your life where consistently you've felt really
02:55:12
fulfilled and positive for month, you know, weeks, months in a row?
02:55:17
Um, probably. Yeah, I think so. Memory memory's difficult to
02:55:23
When was the last time for a full month, for a full 30 days, you felt really good on average?
02:55:29
Out of 10, what what counts? Really good on average. I don't know. It might have been usually
02:55:34
when I have some kind of project. I as I said I think meaning is is intimately tied up to having a task to fulfill. So when I've been touring for the purpose
02:55:42
of filming podcasts and doing talks and stuff like I feel pretty content because I wake up and I know what my task is for
02:55:47
the day and I get it done. So on a on like a subjective psychological level those are probably the times when I wake
02:55:52
up with the most let's say drive the feeling that I've got a task to fulfill. And are there days where you feel are
02:55:58
there there weeks sometimes or months where you feel the opposite which might be characterized in a clinical context as depression? That's interesting.
02:56:05
Can I ask why you you were interested in my in in my answers to those questions? I was trying to see how similar we we
02:56:11
are. That's really it cuz we're both we both sit in the same agnostic camp, but actually we're we're very very
02:56:17
different um in terms of our I wake up in the morning and I wake up this morning and I'm very happy and I feel
02:56:23
very very driven and I couldn't wake I was actually the night before I couldn't wake up. I was annoyed I had to sleep because I couldn't wait to get up in the
02:56:28
morning. And that's typically my experience. I'm like, I can't wait to get the sleep done with because I can't wait to get back to life.
02:56:34
So, what's it all for? I don't really This sounds crazy. And it also somewhat links to what you're
02:56:39
saying about at the very beginning about people being really obsessed with not dying. I don't really care. I'm just having a
02:56:44
great time. But that's and I love having these conversations because I get to I get to learn more about different people's
02:56:50
strategies to having a great time and to making their lives more meaningful and more exciting on a daily basis. But is that that sounds quite nihilistic in a
02:56:58
way because it you sound like Cohellet in the book of Ecclesiastes who's sort of eating and drinking and being merry
02:57:04
who one day might look at it and realize that although you feel in the moment this is all very good it's it's all he
02:57:10
and realize that there needs to be something more and I wonder if the same thing will happen if the if the north star that you have for your life and
02:57:17
your projects and your career is that you just sort of feel good while you're doing it.
02:57:22
you. And why isn't that good enough reason? Because because in your presumption there, you're saying because someday I might get hit by this bus of
02:57:29
realizing that it was worth nothing. But for the for the 70 years up until I die, Yeah.
02:57:35
I'm going to wake up in the morning, feel good. I'm going to love spending time with my girlfriend and my dog.
02:57:41
Mhm. And whatever neurochemicals in my brain are going to reinforce me to keep doing that. And
02:57:47
does it bring meaning? Yeah. What does that mean to you? Cuz because
02:57:52
and the reason I asked that is because conceivably you can imagine someone who's happy but their life isn't
02:57:57
meaningful and you can imagine someone who's suffering but their life is meaningful like a victim of the Holocaust or something right
02:58:02
parents as well. And so you've got the happiness part but you also think that you've got sort of meaning and where's the what is that
02:58:09
meaning and where's that coming from? So meaning for me is something that I create by the decisions that I take. And this might go down to what you were
02:58:15
saying about having certain tendencies. I have certain tendencies. I have nature and nurture acting against me to make
02:58:20
certain things feel meaningful to me. Um, and one of those things is this
02:58:25
pursuit of more information. I do it when you go and I get some free time
02:58:31
tonight. I'll be on YouTube learning about humanoid robots or I might stumble
02:58:36
across a video, one of your videos, which I've watched many times and I've watched your videos many times and I've watched your videos many times. Not
02:58:42
because I necessarily believe I'm ever going to get to the final answer, because it's the the the doing itself
02:58:48
that I find so enjoyable. And actually, I could kind of relate to the guy that knows the world's going to end but
02:58:54
writes the book. Yeah. Because it's the it's the writing of the book that I love. So here here's what I think is
02:59:00
beautiful. So I think if you guys go back and you watch this, every scientific principle is what Steven is
02:59:06
doing. So self-determination theory, right? So he's self-directed. He stretches his capacities. He relates to
02:59:12
other people. And I think this is it's it's a really brilliant example of sort of like this problem of finding like
02:59:19
meaning with a capital M. And relates to this kind of idea of, you know, if you're feeling directionless in life, I
02:59:26
don't know that you need to figure it out with a capital M. And if we listen to some of your questions, right, is it
02:59:32
enough for you? And then Stephen's like, why wouldn't like, you know, why do you assume that you need? So there's sort of this very natural like reaction and then
02:59:38
he's kind of like no I'm actually pretty content. And I think that my favorite thing about your answer is that getting
02:59:43
as far as you have I think you've got your instinctual answer of five out of 10 is still correct
02:59:50
because this is as far as you go and I think you feel this hunger for like something else and that thing is going
02:59:56
to be big, right? And I I think that's that's what maybe Greg can help us out with, right? because and I think that's
03:00:02
that's it's it's a it's a beautiful way of embodying I think how we find meaning in life. There's a bunch of
03:00:07
psychological stuff that you can do, but it appears that doing some of this weird transcendental like you got to like find
03:00:14
it in sort of this big way. And I think you're a perfect embodiment of how far you can go. Let me offer a
03:00:22
clarification based on the questions you're asking Alex because I feel in many ways very sympathetic to Alex as he
03:00:27
described his subjective states. You know, are you happy? Are you fulfilled?
03:00:32
Do you have meaning in your life? And I guess it I think the tendency sometimes is to talk to somebody who is uh very
03:00:38
confident of their understanding of the big picture. Um and think that everything is going
03:00:44
wonderful for them. You know, you look at their life say well everything is just great. Are you happy? I'm happy all
03:00:49
the time. I have the truth kind of thing. But that's not exactly how it works. I'm fully convinced of the truth of the
03:00:56
Christian worldview, God's existence, Jesus, all the things that relate to that human beings made in the image of
03:01:01
God. I think it's the best explanation all things considered for the way things are. Nevertheless, I'm still a fallen
03:01:08
human being learning to be virtuous with God's help. I am still living in a world
03:01:13
that is fallen and broken, and I have to live with all the contingencies of a fallen world. So if you were to ask me
03:01:20
the question that you asked Alex, I would have the same difficulty answering that Alex did because it's so variated
03:01:26
one's life. When I wake up in the morning, do you feel good? Sometimes, sometimes not. Am I confident that no
03:01:33
matter what happens in my life, the good, the bad, whatever, that there is a foundation there that gives me
03:01:38
stability? Yes. Because I think that foundation, God, eternal mind exists and
03:01:44
I'm in proper relationship with him. But part of the reality is this is a veil of tears. You know, how did Job Job put it?
03:01:51
Something about the uh about the sparks flying upward. You know, it's like life is difficult. Uh actually, I like the
03:01:58
saying life is hard and then you die. You know, it gives me a perspective on things. Jesus himself said in this world
03:02:05
you'll have tribulation. Are you happy? That's the experience. But the underlying is be of good cheer. Jesus
03:02:10
said because I have overcome the world. Are you happy? Well, we're back to that question again. I don't know how you characterize it.
03:02:17
You said earlier on that you felt there was a certain path that Alex was going to go down, but Greg not going to go going to go down
03:02:24
should or something. It's ready for him. Okay. It's ready for him. But you didn't say that about Greg.
03:02:29
Yeah. And so when you look at these two individuals Yeah. and you think about contentment and happiness and whatever that word is,
03:02:37
can you can you feel with your intuition that sort of So first thing is this is where I know it's gonna sound insane.
03:02:43
tanking my brand right now because I used to be believable I guess but um so
03:02:50
first thing about intuition right if we look at intuition technically I can't activate it right when you have an
03:02:57
intuition it comes it happens it happens so that's what's so frustrating about this is everyone
03:03:02
thinks like okay if you do agna chakra sadena which is this weird third eye stuff then you can do this thing I can't
03:03:09
do anything I am before god and when god chooses to let me know something. That's when I
03:03:15
get it. Now, if I had to answer, I think I am not surprised about the difference
03:03:21
in baseline contentment between these two people. Right? So, if you were to ask why do I relate to Greg
03:03:29
in this way? Now, whether this is at a conscious level, neurological level,
03:03:34
whether those whether there's truly a spiritual level or not, right? So, am I just reading into him, doing pattern
03:03:41
recognition based on what he says and stuff like that? But that's not what my lived experience of of it is. I know
03:03:46
this man has seen God. And it's it's not is it his behavior, his body language, his No,
03:03:51
I mean, I don't think so. Right. So, so I I've met some people who have very unhappy lives who still have that
03:03:57
foundation of spiritual contentment and some people who have very unhappy I can have unhappy
03:04:05
life with spiritual contentment or spiritual contentment with a happy life
03:04:10
or be have a great life and have no spiritual contentment. I think all all of those variables. What about me?
03:04:16
Yeah. What's your intuition about me? I think you're getting there way faster. You've changed from the last time I
03:04:23
talked to you. I I think you're getting there and I I think you're going to get
03:04:28
there. Oh, thank God. Where am I going to go? There being contentment, there being what?
03:04:33
There. So, so this is this there is it's not something that can be put into
03:04:39
words. I'm just going to call it there. If someone's listening right now and they feel stuck in their life, which is
03:04:44
what I asked Alex, what is something that they can do tomorrow, a small step that they can take to become unstuck in
03:04:50
your worldview? Yeah. So I I would start by sort you know Alex offered a beautiful answer and
03:04:55
I I think he kind of mentioned that I wouldn't be arrogant enough to give people things because you know give
03:05:01
people an answer because everyone's an individual and stuff like that and and so the funny thing is I I have a super
03:05:07
concrete answer. I think the difference in sort of the way that I perceive it is I don't think you have to be someone
03:05:12
great to do that. And that's I think precisely what sort of science tells us, right? like is that you don't have to be
03:05:18
some enlightened being and I don't claim to be that I'm not a guru or anything like that you know so I I think it starts with
03:05:25
understanding first and foremost that purpose how do you know whether you have purpose
03:05:31
something within you tells you right you can have everyone in the rest of the world telling you oh you're doing great
03:05:37
you're going to get married in a month you know there's a baby on the way you have a career you have all this stuff you should feel fulfilled so the first
03:05:43
thing to understand is it is an internal feeling and then the question becomes how do we create how do we find that
03:05:49
feeling? So this is where things that get in the way at the top of the list right now which Alex alluded to is
03:05:56
technology. So unless you can feel what is going on inside you, you will never
03:06:02
feel purpose. What are the things that get in the way of feeling? So when you feel bad, what do you reach for? Right?
03:06:08
How do you manage those negative feelings? And it's not about making the feelings go away or not making them go away. It is simply about stopping the
03:06:15
process of severing yourself. That process is I I think alexathyia is what
03:06:20
what I kind of refer to it as. That's colorblindness of your internal emotional state. Like I have a whole lecture about it, you know. So first
03:06:27
thing you have to do is learn how to feel again. Because if you look at most people who are mean whose life has no
03:06:33
meaning, what they're actually doing is trying to create a life that is running away from bad feelings. So I don't like
03:06:39
the way I my boss yelled at me. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to pull out Reddit. I'm going to scroll on it. Whatever. Right? They're running
03:06:45
away from the way that they feel. And it's not about good or bad. Just you have to reconnect with yourself. Second thing is focus on your ego and as
03:06:53
best as possible probably for most people dissolving parts of your ego. And ego is anytime you say I am dot dot dot.
03:07:01
It is what's that dot dot dot. So if I say I'm a doctor, that's part of my ego. I'm a man, that's part of my ego. So a
03:07:08
lot of times what gets in the way of us finding purpose is what we believe we are. Right? So I I may think to myself,
03:07:15
I am a doctor, I am this or I'm all all those I'm a loser, I'm an incel, right? So it's all of these identifications
03:07:22
that get us away from purpose. Third thing to do is find your narrative
03:07:27
sense of identity. So there's some ego dissolution practices like shunya meditation and stuff. And then third thing is we want to develop a story for
03:07:34
ourselves. This is when people have purpose in life. What does that presume? That presumes that there's a temporal
03:07:41
quality, that there's a directional quality. Does that make sense? Like purpose or direction is like literally moving from A to Z. So there's time and
03:07:47
then there's like a particular distance that involves going through the most
03:07:53
important emotional experiences of your life and stringing them together as a sense of who you are. And then I think
03:08:00
the last most important step is recognizing that everything that has
03:08:05
happened to you, I don't know if it's karma, I don't know if it's the will of God, whatever it has
03:08:11
happened to you. It's made you in this way. But it does not determine your future. Your future is determined by how
03:08:17
you act in the now. And this is where I would lean into I would just go back and listen to the way that Steven talks
03:08:24
about his life and try to do the same thing. So try to decide what your make a
03:08:29
choice for today. Stretch your capacity and try to connect with another person. The last thing is if all of that stuff
03:08:38
doesn't isn't sufficient or you want more, I would say engage in some kind of
03:08:43
spiritual practice or go to church. Both work equally I don't know about
03:08:49
equally well, but I think they're both options. So do the thing that appeals to you more. And the same question for you, Greg. for
03:08:55
someone that's stuck, what do they do tomorrow to take an action to become unstuck in in your view?
03:09:02
Well, there's a lot of practical things that have already been shared that I think are helpful. So, I have a very
03:09:07
simple suggestion. Okay. Um, I have represented a particular view of the
03:09:14
Christian worldview. didn't get into a lot of detail, but a lot of people have
03:09:20
prayed a very simple prayer that has helped them at whatever junction they're at trying to figure things out. And this
03:09:26
kind of goes to a point that Alex made earlier and it was a prayer that I turns out I prayed in 1973. I was in the army
03:09:33
and I was in the middle of nowhere and I just prayed this prayer. And the prayer was very simple. God, if you're real, in
03:09:40
the way that my brother, the Christian, was explaining to me, if you're real,
03:09:45
I want to know it. Show yourself to me. That was it. There was no coconuts falling from the tree, no lightning or
03:09:52
anything like that. It was just a man praying. Maybe the first real prayer that I'd ever prayed. But I do know that
03:09:57
after that, things became more obvious to me. It's the best way I can explain
03:10:03
it. Though I'm a Christian apologist, I make the case for the truth of Christianity. It wasn't any particular
03:10:09
argument in that that persuaded me. It was more the experiential thing and not even a pizzazz thing just a deep
03:10:16
awareness that this was true and this has set my course. Uh since then I there
03:10:21
are a lot of people who prayed that simple prayer. It's a genuine prayer that people can pray and I've heard many people tell me that this is what
03:10:27
happened to them even apart from my suggestion to it. So if people are looking for ultimate purpose in their
03:10:33
life, if they're looking for to do meaningful things, lots of suggestions on the table. If they're looking to
03:10:38
integrate meaningful things into the ultimate purpose, I think that's the prayer they need to pray.
03:10:45
I want to give you an opportunity, Alex, to um to give us deliver your sort of closing thoughts and reflections and
03:10:53
and arguments. Well, um I want to re-emphasize that
03:11:01
this topic of meaning and and purpose is difficult to even define, let alone communicate to another person. I think
03:11:07
it's individual. Even if there is an objective meaning, even if God exists and Christianity is true, it's not going
03:11:14
to be enough to just tell somebody about Christianity. They're going to have to live it, right? So, it's not going to be enough to just sit around reading. I
03:11:20
also understand the sort of allergic reaction some people have to philosophy and you hinted at it earlier this idea
03:11:27
that philosophy is just mind games literally philosophical like mass
03:11:33
debating if you like you know we're just literally sat like throwing concepts at each other. Uh but on meaning and
03:11:39
purpose, you're unlikely to find the best advice from someone who's never gotten out of
03:11:45
that armchair. And even the person who has and claims to have experienced it for themselves and and knows what the
03:11:51
truth is. I think anybody who says to you with a straight face, I know what the meaning in life is, is either lying
03:11:58
or will instantly tell you that they're not going to be able to convey that information, at least not very easily.
03:12:04
So, it's going to be difficult. And don't trust anyone who says you can do it in five easy steps on a podcast or
03:12:09
something because I think we've got a bit of an endemic of that at the moment. People sort of just saying that they've sort of
03:12:16
discovered this this path or this truth. And if only people would understand that the Stoics were right all along. Even
03:12:21
though I don't care about any of their any of their philosophical views, just their ethical views. I don't even know what they thought about the nature of
03:12:27
matter and stuff. Doesn't matter that that's why they thought the way that they did ethically.
03:12:33
you know, just become a stoic and everything will get better. Um, but I do recognize some of that and people saying
03:12:38
do just become a Christian and it will get better too. Um, it's always got to be a bit more nuanced than that. So,
03:12:44
Dr. K, your closing thoughts and arguments on this today's discussion, you know, to to kind of push back a little bit against uh what Alex said.
03:12:51
So, I'm I'm with you that there's an endemic of five easy tips and and you
03:12:58
know, as someone who is guilty of doing that and what I'll do is I'll I'll see especially so I I saw a recent study
03:13:04
that showed that 95% of Tik Toks about ADHD are incorrect. And so there's there's absolutely an
03:13:11
oversimplification that's going on. I think at the same time though
03:13:17
we have such an amazing amount of knowledge as human beings. We
03:13:25
have such amazing access to knowledge that human beings have. So the human
03:13:30
race has so much knowledge and we have the greatest amount of access to it. And so while I don't think it is like as
03:13:36
simple as one of the most shocking things as a psychiatrist you know who works with people is how little it takes
03:13:44
to make a big change. Big questions and big changes don't always need big effort or big answers. It's it's such an
03:13:51
interesting thing like you know when I talk to people who struggle with addiction for 14 years it seems to be a
03:13:57
small thing that just clicks. And so I I I think the key thing for people is don't assume that just because
03:14:06
you have a big problem, it requires a lot of effort.
03:14:12
And and you know, I remember my daughter was trying to close a box, right? So there's like a box and she's trying to
03:14:19
slam the lid, but the lid is not like oriented correctly. Does that make sense? So it kind of gets tilted and then no matter how hard she pushes, it
03:14:26
doesn't close. And so in her mind, this is a problem that requires pounds and pounds. I need to be a full-g grown
03:14:32
adult. No, you're just not doing it in the right way. Right? If if you understand a little bit how it works, if
03:14:37
you sort of orient yourself properly and and I do think that I've seen time and time again, you know, that that in terms
03:14:43
of an individual perspective, if you feel purposelessness, there's a reason
03:14:48
for that, right? We know that there's systemic factors. People are going to church less, people are using technology
03:14:54
more. All of the way that the world has has been changed affects you once it crosses the barrier.
03:15:02
The world is out there and then it crosses the barrier into us and then affects us.
03:15:08
And that if you understand that process and if you change a couple of things and sometimes it's amazing how small they
03:15:14
are, right? Like just waking up and making a decision for yourself, pushing yourself a little bit more. relatedness
03:15:22
is the hard one because that requires another human being. But like it's amazing how much you can do with very
03:15:28
little. Thank you. And Greg to close off your closing thoughts and perspectives. I thought I'd just given them a few
03:15:34
moments ago, but um I guess the distinction that I I guess I want to emphasize is when it comes to purpose
03:15:40
and meaning, I think actually meaning precedes purpose. You have to know who
03:15:45
you are and why you're here. If you're here for any reason, before the purpose
03:15:51
matches. Now, it turns out that there is no big picture. It's just you, then the purpose is going to reflect your
03:15:57
individual desires at any given time and pursue that as long as you want. But if there is a grand purpose, that's the
03:16:04
thing to discover. I'm convinced there is. And I think this is why we have this hunger for answering these kinds of
03:16:10
questions. And uh there's a lot of variables that are involved here. But there and I mentioned before the things
03:16:16
that stand out for me is we have this internal sense that I think is there because we are a spiritual being. People
03:16:24
say, "Well, I'm a religious. I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious." And I said, "Of course you're spiritual. God
03:16:29
made you that way so that you could know him." There is that element. This is subjective. Okay? I think we're all
03:16:35
aware of it. And then there is objective things that we can appeal to. You
03:16:41
mentioned earlier the resurrection of Christ, the existence of the world, the order that the world is in, the existence of morality, the existence of
03:16:48
free will, all kinds of other things that are part of the package of the Christian worldview that are well
03:16:54
explained by that worldview. And one of the reasons that I'm a Christian is because I think it's the all things
03:16:59
considered, it's the best explanation for the way things are. Not because all of the questions are answered for me.
03:17:05
You embrace some issues that haven't thought about that. It's a mystery some of these things but life is filled with
03:17:10
mysteries. All right. And this seems to be one mystery the big picture that is resolved by Christianity by the
03:17:17
Christian understanding of reality. I call it the story of reality. Thank you so much for all being here
03:17:23
today. It's truly fascinating discussion and it's it has actually pushed me forward. I shan share how it's pushed me
03:17:29
forward but it's certainly pushed me forward in a number of ways and it's helped me to understand you all. I'm big fans of all of yours. Um, you all make a
03:17:35
lot of great content on YouTube in various ways. Alex, I've watched your channel so many times. I've watched so many of your videos for so long because
03:17:41
you help you kind of represent one part of my perspective and curiosity and you're a very um intelligent,
03:17:48
thoughtful, philosophical uh master of of playing with ideas and
03:17:54
you've really done your homework. So, it's fascinating to watch your YouTube channel. I highly recommend people That is quite the accolade. That's very
03:17:59
kind. No, but it is that'll go on the front of my book. Good. Yeah. Yeah. and your book is on the way, which we're very excited about.
03:18:05
One day, who knows? Who knows when, but it will come eventually. We'll keep doing what you're doing because, you know, you're you're a
03:18:10
vessel for for for people. And um who knows where that vessel ends up going, but it's a very we all hope.
03:18:18
And thank you, Dr. K. You're a master of what you do. And actually, when you talked about your your chakra, the one the one the intuition one, I was sat
03:18:24
here giggling because I've never felt so naked in front of someone in my entire life as I do in front of you. And I can
03:18:30
only attest to the the great work that you do as a result of that bizarre intuition. I think I told you the f I
03:18:36
think I told other people after the first time I met you that I think you have a magic power and it's quite unnerving to be around someone that I
03:18:42
feel like has a magic power. Um I highly recommend people go and check out your YouTube channel. Um you've been on the show a few times and um the response I
03:18:49
get out and out and about in public is profound. So thank you for coming back again. It's really really appreciated
03:18:54
and thank you Greg. Thank you for writing these incredible books. There's actually one here which is what you ended on called the story of reality
03:19:00
which I think is a great starting place for people that are trying to tease out some of the the the truths in their own
03:19:06
life. Actually we have a chapter that we would like to give to your listeners if I can give the landing page. I'll link all of that below. So I'll
03:19:12
link all of your book books below but also that free chapter. Thank you so much everybody. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.
03:19:19
Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a
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the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000
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people that join before it closes. So, if you want to join our private close community, head to the link in the description below or go to
03:20:05
daccircle.com. I will speak to you then.
03:20:12
This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the
03:20:19
show. So, could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just
03:20:25
that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my
03:20:30
power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback.
03:20:35
We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.
03:20:43
[Music] Heat. Heat. N. [Music]
