WEBVTT 00:18.212 --> 00:27.640 [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Imaginal Inspirations podcast with me, David Lorimer, where I talk to my guests about experience his people and books that have shaped their lives and work. 00:28.781 --> 00:36.547 [SPEAKER_01]: Imaginal cells play a key role in the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly, which is also the Greek symbol for the soul. 00:37.448 --> 00:45.935 [SPEAKER_01]: These cells are dormant in the caterpillar, but at a critical point of development, they create the new form and structure which becomes the butterfly. 00:53.970 --> 01:10.075 [SPEAKER_01]: My guest today is my old friend, Professor Max Velmanz, who is a meritist professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, and has been focusing on consciousness studies, psychology of consciousness, philosophy of consciousness, for many decades now. 01:10.175 --> 01:21.499 [SPEAKER_01]: His main book was Understanding Consciousness, and he has over a hundred and thirty publications in this area, and he's given over a hundred and twenty keynote addresses or plenary papers at conferences. 01:22.579 --> 01:29.703 [SPEAKER_01]: And in nineteen ninety seven max co-founded the consciousness and experiential psychology section of the British psychological association. 01:30.464 --> 01:43.051 [SPEAKER_01]: And as organised or helped to organise many conferences workshops and symposia on consciousness, including international ones sponsored by the seeper foundation, which I'm going to ask him about because that was a very early conference. 01:43.656 --> 01:46.917 [SPEAKER_01]: Fetzer and Templeton foundations. 01:46.957 --> 01:57.682 [SPEAKER_01]: He lives now in Totteness and he is the inaugurator and host of the Totteness Consciousness Cafe where I have spoken myself. 01:58.102 --> 02:01.424 [SPEAKER_01]: He's also on the editorial advisory board of a number of journals. 02:01.884 --> 02:05.287 [SPEAKER_01]: including the Journal of Consciousness Studies and the Journal of Parapsychology. 02:05.927 --> 02:13.834 [SPEAKER_01]: So Max, warm welcome to, imaginal inspirations on this very hot summer day of twenty twenty five. 02:14.194 --> 02:16.356 [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for inviting me David pleasure to be here. 02:17.719 --> 02:31.736 [SPEAKER_01]: So, I think you've been through a number of career transitions, but my first question is always about a shaping moment involving your choice of work, but maybe in your case it's how you became more interested in psychology and consciousness studies. 02:32.617 --> 02:36.923 [SPEAKER_00]: Sure, the origins really have to do with my teenage years. 02:37.743 --> 02:59.248 [SPEAKER_00]: where I found myself in a existentially difficult situation, which actually led me to want to answer big questions, because I'd been exposed to so many different systems of belief and thought and lived in so many places that I was in a sense unlawed in those years. 03:00.168 --> 03:15.278 [SPEAKER_00]: very much seeking wise teachers or anything of that kind that maybe could answer the big questions, you know, who am I, what's going on, what's reality and what should I believe and how do I live my life and so on. 03:15.999 --> 03:19.561 [SPEAKER_00]: And my main experience in those years is not being able to find one. 03:20.642 --> 03:21.643 [SPEAKER_00]: That isn't each other. 03:22.864 --> 03:24.785 [SPEAKER_00]: And that was difficult. 03:25.777 --> 03:42.049 [SPEAKER_00]: but it left me to just sit with the questions and in the end that became very interested in the nature of mind and the nature of consciousness even in those years when it was not a done thing for somebody entering into psychology. 03:42.069 --> 03:44.770 [SPEAKER_00]: I've done an engineering degree to begin with. 03:47.482 --> 03:57.644 [SPEAKER_00]: Then even when I was doing engineering, I was really reading books on philosophy, psychology, and that kind of thing, existential philosophy, that kind of thing. 03:58.544 --> 04:04.826 [SPEAKER_00]: From that PhD, I thought it would be interesting to combine those two skills. 04:06.166 --> 04:13.548 [SPEAKER_00]: So I was very struck by the fact that if I was asking myself the question, is this all there is? 04:15.129 --> 04:20.474 [SPEAKER_00]: and just not pay out to see past my sense organs and so on. 04:21.235 --> 04:33.987 [SPEAKER_00]: I remember I had this energy of being like a goldfish in a goldfish bowl, butting against the sides of the bowl and knew it was in the bowl and had a sense that was something they on but and I just couldn't see through it. 04:34.007 --> 04:40.413 [SPEAKER_00]: And I thought well for a PhD it would be interesting to build on the sheen that would actually 04:40.928 --> 05:07.941 [SPEAKER_00]: enable me to see the on the range of normal human option and there were various ways you could do that but so the machine I actually built which was in a way the easiest way to do it was one but allowed me to double the range of human hearing okay so there was a way I knew from a engineering of lowering the frequencies of energies that normally humans can't hear 05:09.151 --> 05:11.873 [SPEAKER_00]: and moving them within the hearing range. 05:13.414 --> 05:22.059 [SPEAKER_00]: And I thought for the PhD that would help me to answer the question, why are our senses tuned in the ranges that they actually are? 05:23.500 --> 05:29.022 [SPEAKER_01]: So the notion of frequency became quite important in your metaphorical landscape. 05:29.362 --> 05:30.022 [SPEAKER_00]: That's right. 05:30.182 --> 05:30.742 [SPEAKER_00]: That's right. 05:30.782 --> 05:40.265 [SPEAKER_00]: And the notion of there being a world full of energies, if you like, and our sense organs only being able to detect very narrow ranges of those. 05:41.065 --> 05:46.046 [SPEAKER_00]: And therefore, one answer to the question, is this all there is? 05:47.406 --> 05:48.207 [SPEAKER_00]: It isn't all there is. 05:48.847 --> 05:52.808 [SPEAKER_00]: And then the next question is, how do I access the bits I can? 05:54.181 --> 05:59.459 [SPEAKER_01]: How do you widen the frequency or deepen the deep and deep in me inside correspondingly? 06:01.263 --> 06:14.348 [SPEAKER_01]: I was just thinking that, you know, Ravi Rundra didn't engineering degree to begin with as well, but he obviously has a common interest in big questions, but it went a slightly different way. 06:15.109 --> 06:19.951 [SPEAKER_01]: And then what about influential mentors or teachers at that point? 06:20.071 --> 06:25.253 [SPEAKER_01]: Because I think we're trying to find your ways and mentors can be very important. 06:25.793 --> 06:29.335 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I totally agree with you and I would have loved to have had one. 06:30.212 --> 06:30.853 [SPEAKER_01]: But you didn't. 06:30.953 --> 06:38.917 [SPEAKER_00]: And so you sat by the questions and said, yeah, it was, I'm afraid, you know, of necessity I had to. 06:38.937 --> 06:54.887 [SPEAKER_00]: In a way, in the end, there were pluses to it as well, because when I eventually settled into academic life, in psychology now, I really wanted to return to this question of, you know, how do I understand consciousness and mind and 06:57.825 --> 06:59.067 [SPEAKER_00]: who am I and all that stuff. 06:59.747 --> 07:03.150 [SPEAKER_00]: I felt free in a way to come to the problem fresh. 07:04.612 --> 07:11.558 [SPEAKER_00]: And so to begin with, I deliberately didn't, I'd read a lot anyway, of course. 07:12.198 --> 07:15.942 [SPEAKER_00]: I didn't want to chase down everybody's theory of consciousness. 07:17.058 --> 07:30.901 [SPEAKER_00]: I thought it would be good to just start fresh just to see if there was something that I could say or something that occurred to me that might be interesting and so on without any certainty that that would happen. 07:32.604 --> 07:34.404 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's very, very interesting. 07:34.705 --> 07:41.706 [SPEAKER_01]: I was reviewing a book yesterday and I was struck by the sentence that we need to know less and think more. 07:42.426 --> 07:44.527 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm obviously going to try and know more and think more. 07:45.747 --> 07:50.308 [SPEAKER_01]: So you're very much a self-starting thinker in that sense. 07:50.388 --> 07:56.650 [SPEAKER_01]: And so you've used your own experience as your primary point of departure, I would say. 07:56.930 --> 07:58.150 [SPEAKER_00]: No, you're absolutely right. 07:58.610 --> 08:01.851 [SPEAKER_00]: It's just worth talking about that point of departure because 08:02.831 --> 08:17.257 [SPEAKER_00]: At the time I did know some basics about how people thought and I've been interested in perception as I said before anyway with this machine I built and saw and there were two basic ways that 08:18.005 --> 08:21.589 [SPEAKER_00]: people thought about conscious experiences in perception. 08:21.609 --> 08:28.736 [SPEAKER_00]: In some ways, they were all similar, so they all assumed there was a causal sequence in perception. 08:29.397 --> 08:37.686 [SPEAKER_00]: So in this moment, I can see you out there on the screen, you're a physical thing on the screen, as far as I'm concerned. 08:39.147 --> 08:52.672 [SPEAKER_00]: light rays reflected from the screen surface, stimulate my visual system, things happen in the brain, which you don't fully understand even now, which in some way support a visual experience in particular. 08:53.913 --> 09:03.917 [SPEAKER_00]: And then the classic way is that people thought about the experience itself was either dualists, so the experience is something else somewhere else. 09:04.877 --> 09:07.598 [SPEAKER_00]: Daycarts, rays, cognitans, or something like that. 09:08.596 --> 09:13.461 [SPEAKER_00]: versus the deteriorist who say there was the experience is nothing more than a state of brain. 09:13.481 --> 09:17.705 [SPEAKER_01]: I thought those seem satisfactory to you. 09:18.286 --> 09:20.508 [SPEAKER_01]: So you develop self-reflexive monism. 09:20.668 --> 09:24.632 [SPEAKER_00]: Oh yeah, and it's just worth saying how that happens. 09:24.712 --> 09:32.140 [SPEAKER_00]: So my first thought is that maybe consciousness is associated with a electromagnetic field around the brain. 09:33.924 --> 09:38.468 [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe consciousness is associated in some work with an electromagnetic field. 09:38.528 --> 09:44.654 [SPEAKER_00]: But then the field controls the brain's activities, something of that kind. 09:46.135 --> 09:53.162 [SPEAKER_00]: And then I thought that really won't work because I'm not even conscious of my brain's activities. 09:54.083 --> 09:56.665 [SPEAKER_00]: So how could my consciousness be controlling it? 09:57.371 --> 10:08.056 [SPEAKER_00]: It was also immediately apparent because I wasn't engineer, I was an electrical engineer, that any description of an electric magnetic field would never give you a description of the phenomenal experience. 10:08.556 --> 10:09.877 [SPEAKER_00]: Okay. 10:09.977 --> 10:12.118 [SPEAKER_00]: So that was kind of the first week. 10:12.138 --> 10:14.539 [SPEAKER_01]: Different version of the hard problem in a sense. 10:14.919 --> 10:15.400 [SPEAKER_00]: Indeed. 10:15.480 --> 10:23.904 [SPEAKER_00]: And then after about a week, I realized that there was something even worse in my own assumptions about what was going on. 10:25.043 --> 10:29.726 [SPEAKER_00]: to do with this basic question about, you know, what's the nature of the experience? 10:30.847 --> 10:40.893 [SPEAKER_00]: And that is that when I was, for instance, I'm looking at you on the screen and I ask myself, what's my actual visual experience of you on the screen? 10:40.913 --> 10:49.478 [SPEAKER_00]: And I kind of search internally and wherever in some extra day name, I can't find that experience. 10:49.518 --> 10:52.720 [SPEAKER_00]: The only visual experience I can find is you up there on the screen. 10:53.710 --> 10:55.990 [SPEAKER_00]: And that was something different. 10:56.010 --> 11:11.033 [SPEAKER_00]: That was actually walking down the road and literally and probably high street, asking myself that question and saying, well, basically, this three-dimensional world I'm walking in, as I see it, is my visual experience. 11:12.553 --> 11:15.654 [SPEAKER_00]: And it's not in the brain. 11:15.834 --> 11:17.334 [SPEAKER_00]: The experience isn't in the brain. 11:18.094 --> 11:21.075 [SPEAKER_00]: It's not somewhere in some other reality. 11:21.726 --> 11:26.130 [SPEAKER_00]: It's literally the phenomenal world which I take for granted as being the physical world. 11:27.531 --> 11:38.039 [SPEAKER_00]: And then I got back to saying, well, as a first step, how do I accommodate what's known about visual perception with this basic insight? 11:38.699 --> 11:40.221 [SPEAKER_00]: And the basic, where did it? 11:40.241 --> 11:42.863 [SPEAKER_00]: It was just the follow the actual experience. 11:42.923 --> 11:46.666 [SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, there's plenty of scientific evidence that 11:47.862 --> 11:55.968 [SPEAKER_00]: The really is an entity out here, which I see as a screen of really our energies, stimulating my visual system and so on. 11:56.789 --> 12:07.638 [SPEAKER_00]: But as a result of all that processing, I see this entity out here as a screen with our respective faces on it and so on. 12:08.478 --> 12:11.601 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the beginning of a reflexive process. 12:13.022 --> 12:14.543 [SPEAKER_00]: And then to go all the way through 12:15.082 --> 12:20.747 [SPEAKER_00]: the very beginning to where it went in the end with reflexive monos. 12:20.767 --> 12:38.705 [SPEAKER_00]: And if you extend that simple metaphor into a kind of broader vision of what's going on, then you can say, well, I'm an entity over here outside of me are other entities. 12:39.787 --> 12:48.231 [SPEAKER_00]: Physics would describe that all in a very different way to the way that I normally perceive it, but we could call it a sea of energy and information. 12:48.251 --> 12:58.356 [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm a particular arrangement of that mean information and the rest of the world around me as another kind of arrangement of that energy and information. 12:59.577 --> 13:07.921 [SPEAKER_00]: And as a result of my pre-conscious interaction with what's around me or even with my own body and so on, 13:09.652 --> 13:12.714 [SPEAKER_00]: That looks to me like a three-dimensional phenomenal world. 13:14.256 --> 13:17.218 [SPEAKER_01]: And some of the people experience that in the same way. 13:17.998 --> 13:23.803 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, if there are other human beings, we have quite a lot of commonality with other human beings. 13:24.464 --> 13:32.290 [SPEAKER_00]: And so we can, you know, through our shared language and so on, come to an agreement about whether we think we experience all this in the same way. 13:33.110 --> 13:35.872 [SPEAKER_00]: But the reflexive modern thing is that the 13:37.091 --> 13:54.922 [SPEAKER_00]: The sea of energy and information, if you like, differing sheets into specific configurations like you and me, each of which has the ability to experience both itself and the rest of what is out there from a particular viewpoint. 13:55.863 --> 14:05.589 [SPEAKER_00]: Insofar as we participate in this, we participate in a reflexive process whereby that which is experiences itself. 14:06.223 --> 14:07.644 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's reflexive onism. 14:08.465 --> 14:10.947 [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, well, two things struck me about that. 14:11.867 --> 14:23.556 [SPEAKER_01]: One is the idea of Thomas Traward, the new thought thinker, who says that where each of us is a center, and we experience ourselves as centers, and other people experience themselves as centers. 14:24.317 --> 14:31.062 [SPEAKER_01]: He said the divine mind, the universal mind, was the generating center, and that we were distributing centers. 14:31.802 --> 14:32.903 [SPEAKER_01]: in a funny kind of way. 14:33.624 --> 14:35.205 [SPEAKER_01]: It's a kind of nice analogy. 14:35.225 --> 14:41.170 [SPEAKER_01]: And then the other thing, I've always been very intrigued by this remark, which you'll probably know from myster Eckhart. 14:41.751 --> 14:49.457 [SPEAKER_01]: When he said that the I, which I see God, is the same I, with which God sees me slash in me. 14:50.699 --> 14:54.722 [SPEAKER_01]: And there's a, there's a reciprocity there as the word I would use. 14:54.742 --> 14:58.986 [SPEAKER_01]: But in fact, thinking about what you've just said, it's a reflexive process. 14:59.630 --> 15:03.176 [SPEAKER_00]: Sure, and I love that quick from my strike heart. 15:03.216 --> 15:05.000 [SPEAKER_00]: It's one of my favorite quotes actually. 15:05.140 --> 15:07.464 [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, it's really you have to kind of 15:08.040 --> 15:22.606 [SPEAKER_01]: enter into it somehow, in order to, you can't grasp it abstractly in a way, but you can, you can intuit what he's, what he's getting at, because it is, it's recursive, it's, it's reflexive. 15:24.387 --> 15:31.310 [SPEAKER_01]: And anyway, let's come on to books, because I'm sure there's no shortage of books that have been influential in, in your thinking. 15:31.330 --> 15:37.453 [SPEAKER_01]: And what was one or two of the earlier books that you were reading, there was a teenager initially. 15:38.166 --> 15:42.189 [SPEAKER_01]: Were you a colon Wilson fan, for instance, or that not come on your radar at all? 15:42.930 --> 15:43.591 [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I do. 15:43.631 --> 15:44.992 [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I do. 15:45.212 --> 15:46.453 [SPEAKER_00]: And so on. 15:46.673 --> 15:50.377 [SPEAKER_00]: And that kind of existential angst, if you like. 15:50.557 --> 15:50.917 [SPEAKER_01]: Yes. 15:51.457 --> 15:54.780 [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it was very much won with which I identified. 15:54.940 --> 16:00.745 [SPEAKER_00]: And at one time, I was really quite before I took to. 16:02.350 --> 16:14.633 [SPEAKER_00]: studying psychology at London, and that was quite tempted by the French intellectual left, if you may, maybe living in a garot in Paris or something. 16:14.653 --> 16:17.034 [SPEAKER_01]: OK, yes, I think we've all had some of those thoughts. 16:17.054 --> 16:17.114 [SPEAKER_00]: Yes. 16:18.034 --> 16:29.837 [SPEAKER_00]: A romantic notion of, you know, more than that, and perhaps studying on the Jean-Paul Sutre, Sutre, and you know, it was very, it was very, 16:30.967 --> 16:34.829 [SPEAKER_00]: intrigue by the work works of C-Lone to Beauvoir. 16:35.269 --> 16:35.829 [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely. 16:35.849 --> 16:43.713 [SPEAKER_00]: It's like sex, you know, I felt it was very mysterious and as always attracted by books which gave you a sense of mystery. 16:43.733 --> 16:48.716 [SPEAKER_01]: What are the specific books we're important to you when you're kind of formative development? 16:49.036 --> 16:52.998 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the work of Adam Watts. 16:54.239 --> 16:55.099 [SPEAKER_01]: Ah, yes. 16:55.279 --> 16:56.540 [SPEAKER_00]: No, it was really 16:58.419 --> 17:04.063 [SPEAKER_00]: Not only intriguing, but potentially in a particularly direction, the way of Zen. 17:04.544 --> 17:12.910 [SPEAKER_00]: And if I had to pick one book of his, which I think is a really good book, it's the Debug and Snow, knowing who you really are. 17:12.930 --> 17:13.331 [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yes. 17:13.351 --> 17:16.813 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I have a shelf of Alan Walton, Scotland. 17:17.254 --> 17:17.534 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. 17:18.054 --> 17:24.679 [SPEAKER_00]: And so he'd certainly be one I'd pick in the early development phase. 17:26.117 --> 17:41.116 [SPEAKER_00]: I was just interested in anything that would maybe cast a chunk of light on any of the multiple issues that really be set anyone who's interested in this kind of area. 17:42.595 --> 17:49.817 [SPEAKER_01]: And did you read any of the, I mean, one of the books that I read when I was twenty one was was a history Western philosophy. 17:50.858 --> 17:51.278 [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah. 17:51.598 --> 17:52.398 [SPEAKER_00]: That's Russell. 17:52.678 --> 17:52.818 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. 17:52.838 --> 17:52.938 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. 17:53.058 --> 18:00.521 [SPEAKER_00]: No, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, 18:02.288 --> 18:05.469 [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I have a very iconoclasm. 18:05.529 --> 18:12.691 [SPEAKER_00]: So I was very iconoclastic and argumentative and that sort of appeal to you. 18:12.711 --> 18:19.533 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, oddly enough, I just been rereading the impact of science on society, which is ninety fifty two. 18:19.593 --> 18:25.575 [SPEAKER_01]: And I get to write something about it because there he was quite prescient about the, you might call the texture of 18:26.378 --> 18:29.840 [SPEAKER_01]: of scientific society and how it might evolve. 18:30.880 --> 18:35.882 [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, let's go on to any other key moments of insight in your work. 18:35.922 --> 18:43.206 [SPEAKER_01]: And obviously you shared one already when you were walking down the street in Bromley and you suddenly had this moment of insight. 18:43.246 --> 18:50.869 [SPEAKER_01]: But any other thing else you'd like to mention, the relation to the nature of consciousness that gave you our heart moment. 18:50.889 --> 18:52.770 [SPEAKER_00]: I hope a bunch of things really. 18:53.882 --> 18:58.345 [SPEAKER_00]: What I want to say to begin with follows from that first step. 18:59.486 --> 19:12.854 [SPEAKER_00]: What I've said is easy enough to say, but to take in the full import of actually changing your perspective in such a radical way, takes a long time to assimilate. 19:13.335 --> 19:22.881 [SPEAKER_00]: And I had to go through a process where I had to, at least in rough, do that for myself before entering into any serious work 19:23.487 --> 19:28.469 [SPEAKER_00]: But should we say a publishable kind or theoretical kind and all that? 19:28.529 --> 19:44.716 [SPEAKER_00]: So as soon as you say, look, all this is part of my experience, then you immediately have to say, well, if that's so, what am I going to say about what's private and what's public? 19:46.017 --> 19:48.778 [SPEAKER_00]: What's subjective and what's objective? 19:49.899 --> 19:52.560 [SPEAKER_00]: How does my actual experience 19:53.183 --> 19:55.484 [SPEAKER_00]: relate to the world as described by physics. 19:56.424 --> 20:04.527 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the implications for this kind of more global starting point for the interaction between consciousness and the brain. 20:04.547 --> 20:07.969 [SPEAKER_00]: And this is just conventional stuff. 20:08.409 --> 20:21.974 [SPEAKER_00]: We're not yet talking about, you know, moving into the more extraordinary experiences and so on, but that, you know, are more deeply challenging to conventional scientific thinking 20:22.476 --> 20:43.530 [SPEAKER_00]: but even to have an internally consistent view, which made sense of all those distinctions, and nevertheless in a way, would accommodate the basics of science of empirical science, as well as the basics of all our shared experience. 20:44.330 --> 20:48.733 [SPEAKER_00]: I have to be sketched out right to do that before even really 20:49.775 --> 21:01.882 [SPEAKER_00]: beginning any formal work on all this because my expectation was that the starting point was so different from anything that I quite recognized that I'd probably made a basic error. 21:02.562 --> 21:02.842 [SPEAKER_01]: Yes. 21:03.402 --> 21:13.188 [SPEAKER_00]: No, I really did expect or had come to a dead end or a self-contradiction or an absurdity of some sort and my experience in those early days was it was 21:14.488 --> 21:22.111 [SPEAKER_00]: that it wasn't like that, it was a little bit like finding myself, you know, going a little bit underground or, you know, underneath the surface, not very deep yet. 21:23.111 --> 21:35.336 [SPEAKER_00]: But following a kind of such a passageways, I mean, kind of coming to a dead end or a road that something that didn't make sense. 21:35.956 --> 21:39.137 [SPEAKER_00]: In the end, it seemed to me that this labyrinth connected 21:40.090 --> 21:42.772 [SPEAKER_00]: in such a way that I found myself back at the beginning again. 21:42.792 --> 21:43.312 [SPEAKER_01]: Right. 21:43.352 --> 21:46.174 [SPEAKER_01]: So it was a laparist, rather than the maze in that sense. 21:46.494 --> 21:47.195 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly. 21:47.475 --> 21:47.995 [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly. 21:48.175 --> 21:48.635 [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly. 21:48.656 --> 21:50.056 [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't maze, really. 21:50.076 --> 21:54.039 [SPEAKER_00]: And so, and then I set out. 21:55.360 --> 22:07.968 [SPEAKER_00]: And then what I realized, and this honestly wasn't intentional, is that where I started arriving at the end was something really ancient 22:08.950 --> 22:19.412 [SPEAKER_00]: and that it converged with some very fundamental eastern positions about the nature reality in song, the self-reflecting universe. 22:20.633 --> 22:22.473 [SPEAKER_00]: That, for me, was a delight actually. 22:22.493 --> 22:25.094 [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, you were arrived by a different route. 22:25.314 --> 22:26.834 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, exactly. 22:27.114 --> 22:38.617 [SPEAKER_00]: And it was really, really assuring, feeling, well, you know, I'm not just trading a path that is if no used to an animal beast, you know, it's actually feeding into ancient stuff. 22:39.690 --> 22:47.535 [SPEAKER_00]: But from a different direction, that's been a real pleasure for me to participate in that in some sort of way. 22:47.555 --> 22:50.777 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it was sort of an ultimate validation in a way. 22:50.797 --> 22:51.738 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. 22:51.898 --> 22:54.380 [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, certainly how you must have felt about it. 22:54.840 --> 22:55.340 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. 22:55.921 --> 23:06.487 [SPEAKER_01]: And let me ask you, just want to ask you a different line of question now, because you've been involved in the serious, constant studies. 23:06.687 --> 23:08.489 [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, for very long time. 23:09.329 --> 23:14.871 [SPEAKER_01]: How do you see the evolution of the field, two-son conference started in nineteen ninety-four? 23:15.732 --> 23:17.993 [SPEAKER_01]: The C-ber conference was ninety-three, was it? 23:18.833 --> 23:20.354 [SPEAKER_01]: Or ninety-four somewhere around then? 23:20.374 --> 23:21.674 [SPEAKER_00]: ninety-two. 23:21.915 --> 23:22.535 [SPEAKER_01]: ninety-two. 23:22.555 --> 23:32.219 [SPEAKER_01]: So even earlier, when Peter Fennig was doing these three, these conferences on the science of consciousness in the mortally, and that's one of the first places I think. 23:33.059 --> 23:34.660 [SPEAKER_01]: I would have heard you, but 23:35.382 --> 23:36.263 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, what do you see? 23:36.363 --> 23:41.265 [SPEAKER_01]: What do you think is moved forward or is moving forward in the field? 23:41.765 --> 23:48.969 [SPEAKER_01]: Because you've got a kind of wide angle lens on it and you've been involved, you know, you know, intimately for for thirty plus years. 23:50.110 --> 23:51.711 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, yeah, fifty plus years. 23:51.751 --> 23:52.591 [SPEAKER_00]: Fifty plus years. 23:52.851 --> 23:58.614 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking for instance, the nineties when it all became, it's done more kind of respectable and vertical. 23:58.814 --> 23:59.735 [SPEAKER_00]: Twenty years before. 23:59.975 --> 24:00.315 [SPEAKER_00]: Yes. 24:00.695 --> 24:00.855 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. 24:00.875 --> 24:01.936 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. 24:02.316 --> 24:02.536 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. 24:02.716 --> 24:04.017 [SPEAKER_00]: No, I think it's changing. 24:05.069 --> 24:23.363 [SPEAKER_00]: One thing that's been central in, shall we say, more formal thinking about the whole area is that it's increasingly recognized that although there's an intimate relationship between the particular experiences we have and what's going on in the brain. 24:24.287 --> 24:29.769 [SPEAKER_00]: the notion that the brain is somehow just producing the experience like the liver produces bile. 24:29.789 --> 24:36.871 [SPEAKER_00]: I think the majority view, even in academia, is not for that view anymore. 24:37.652 --> 24:47.015 [SPEAKER_00]: And even within neuroscience, for example, very careful, shall we say neuroscientists, would now be 24:48.550 --> 24:51.513 [SPEAKER_00]: you know, claiming they're looking for the correlates of consciousness. 24:51.533 --> 24:59.361 [SPEAKER_00]: They're not acting able to find consciousness itself by any third person examination of the brain. 25:00.443 --> 25:11.053 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's a big change from much of the twentieth century where people just thought it was just over the corner around the corner or just over the next hill and so on. 25:11.133 --> 25:14.596 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it hasn't been, hasn't been. 25:14.856 --> 25:23.965 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think, you know, I mean, certainly from my own point of view, it never will be around the corner because it can't be done in principle. 25:24.005 --> 25:26.167 [SPEAKER_00]: There's something wrong with that basic position. 25:27.274 --> 25:33.511 [SPEAKER_00]: and so one of the main reactions to that with the inference is formal philosophy of mind. 25:34.777 --> 25:56.948 [SPEAKER_00]: has been this reinvigorated interest in pancycist views or and and since the this term was only introduced in two thousand and twelve in modern philosophy yes cosmo cyclism yes I was thinking of that yeah cosmo cyclism is reflexive monism is a cosmo cyclist theory 25:57.868 --> 26:07.218 [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, if I can swamp you with a few adjectives, it's psychophysical, dual aspect, and more or less form of Cosmo's psych isn't. 26:09.381 --> 26:10.842 [SPEAKER_01]: Got it, yeah. 26:11.683 --> 26:12.984 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's quite something. 26:14.226 --> 26:18.650 [SPEAKER_01]: And I think one of the other things that's significant over the last few years is the sort of 26:20.292 --> 26:24.877 [SPEAKER_01]: the resurgence of psychedelic research in an academic sense. 26:25.018 --> 26:26.719 [SPEAKER_01]: What overall effect do you think that's having? 26:27.220 --> 26:28.862 [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's having a negative effect. 26:29.082 --> 26:38.853 [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, our collision to a chapter on it, and you'll receive the chapter a few days ago, there's something I'm doing, which is for the British psychological society. 26:40.247 --> 26:46.289 [SPEAKER_00]: The House magazine is called the psychologist and I was asked to be the guest editor to do something unconsciousness. 26:47.089 --> 26:53.111 [SPEAKER_00]: And in this I've been featuring things that are on the edge and one of the chapters is some psychedelics. 26:54.431 --> 26:57.172 [SPEAKER_00]: It's breaking through in a lot of different ways. 26:57.712 --> 27:08.876 [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously the thing that's energizing it within mainstream science and medicine is the potential of some of the substances when used appropriately. 27:09.955 --> 27:21.640 [SPEAKER_00]: to address otherwise intractable mental issues, you know, deep depression, for example, the depression associated with the terminal cancer diagnosis or something of that kind. 27:22.480 --> 27:28.183 [SPEAKER_00]: Another thing that's really interesting and emerging in that field is the importance of the actual experience. 27:28.943 --> 27:49.323 [SPEAKER_00]: Even within that field there is a kind of debate about always that something happening in the brain, you know, increasing in plasticity or, you know, can we get the increasing plasticity without having to, you know, fiddle with all these, you know, weird phenomena that people experience and, you know, try to design drugs that do that. 27:50.257 --> 27:59.724 [SPEAKER_00]: But the truth is that those experiences are very powerful and important, and particularly the mystical type experiences, which are also a possibility. 28:00.165 --> 28:07.631 [SPEAKER_00]: There are no men's guaranteed, but many, many folk have had mystical type experiences with such substances. 28:07.791 --> 28:14.256 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I was going to mention the most recent book, which I just read and reviewed, which you may have as well, by Christoph Koch. 28:15.742 --> 28:22.497 [SPEAKER_01]: because his perspective has been narrowatically altered, I would say, by the experiences he said. 28:24.182 --> 28:40.333 [SPEAKER_01]: And there went it's a long way from, you know, the forty hertz with Francis Crick and his sense of being the cosmos and the default known networks, just disappearing offline. 28:42.134 --> 28:44.916 [SPEAKER_01]: But he can't deny that because he's actually experienced it. 28:44.956 --> 28:51.300 [SPEAKER_01]: And I find it a very encouraging book, even though he's still basically looking for the neurochemistry. 28:51.580 --> 28:51.980 [SPEAKER_00]: Of course. 28:52.420 --> 28:55.921 [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, Max, we're kind of coming to the end of our conversation. 28:55.941 --> 29:00.582 [SPEAKER_01]: I've got a couple of other questions I'd like to ask you. 29:01.582 --> 29:07.383 [SPEAKER_01]: One is in relation to how you're understanding of consciousness influences the way you live yourself. 29:07.943 --> 29:11.944 [SPEAKER_01]: Because I imagine there are implications there as well. 29:12.364 --> 29:12.804 [SPEAKER_00]: No, no, no. 29:12.944 --> 29:14.204 [SPEAKER_00]: It's very deep actually. 29:14.304 --> 29:19.445 [SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, I started with the conceptual framework and the intellectual framework. 29:21.683 --> 29:25.204 [SPEAKER_00]: quite a variety of extraordinary experiences as well. 29:26.177 --> 29:32.740 [SPEAKER_00]: And I did have a very early other stay experience when I was twenty-five, which was very powerful. 29:33.581 --> 29:46.427 [SPEAKER_00]: And then nothing, you know, for forty years, but then in more recent years, I've been looking again, you know, in my more aged years to just, you know, really have another look and and I've had many experiences. 29:46.567 --> 29:51.549 [SPEAKER_00]: Also experiences without, you know, such substances with Indian yogis and so on. 29:53.310 --> 29:59.412 [SPEAKER_00]: So I have personally, I have no doubt at all that something of the kind that I've been talking about is true. 30:00.652 --> 30:05.194 [SPEAKER_00]: There really is this, this sentient cosmos of which we are little bits. 30:06.234 --> 30:09.795 [SPEAKER_00]: And we're engaged in a kind of process and manifestations. 30:10.855 --> 30:11.976 [SPEAKER_00]: It's manifestations. 30:11.996 --> 30:13.516 [SPEAKER_00]: It's self-manifestations. 30:14.396 --> 30:16.877 [SPEAKER_00]: You know, involved in this journey of life. 30:17.917 --> 30:22.319 [SPEAKER_00]: But I suppose trans is poses for me as a kind of feeling. 30:23.229 --> 30:25.570 [SPEAKER_00]: a kind of feeling of grounding. 30:25.590 --> 30:27.371 [SPEAKER_01]: Mm-hmm. 30:27.412 --> 30:28.672 [SPEAKER_01]: Kinship would that be? 30:29.032 --> 30:30.333 [SPEAKER_01]: Whoa, yeah. 30:30.393 --> 30:37.758 [SPEAKER_01]: Young used that word in the last few pages of his autobiography called being a kinship for life. 30:38.218 --> 30:38.598 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. 30:39.239 --> 30:40.319 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we're part of it. 30:40.679 --> 30:41.720 [SPEAKER_00]: This is very much it. 30:42.380 --> 30:43.541 [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I have a metaphor. 30:43.581 --> 30:49.665 [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, in this introduction to this special issue that I've just mentioned a little bit for the psychologist. 30:49.705 --> 30:51.426 [SPEAKER_00]: I talk about the feeling a little bit. 30:52.526 --> 31:02.350 [SPEAKER_00]: And the phrase I use at the end of it is that as opposed to the universe being, you know, this lonely place, you know, incentive, meaningless and so on. 31:02.370 --> 31:06.352 [SPEAKER_00]: It then becomes a place that feels like home. 31:07.612 --> 31:07.992 [SPEAKER_01]: Lovely. 31:08.692 --> 31:09.053 [SPEAKER_01]: Lovely. 31:09.673 --> 31:10.333 [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, thank you. 31:10.873 --> 31:13.534 [SPEAKER_01]: And what about Proverbs and quotes? 31:13.734 --> 31:15.815 [SPEAKER_01]: Do you have anything you'd like to share with us? 31:17.316 --> 31:18.636 [SPEAKER_00]: To that own self-betrue. 31:19.697 --> 31:20.157 [SPEAKER_01]: Very good. 31:20.810 --> 31:27.194 [SPEAKER_01]: Yep, I think that's one that's very encouraging, and any advice you'd give to your younger self? 31:28.234 --> 31:29.075 [SPEAKER_00]: Don't despair. 31:29.095 --> 31:31.516 [SPEAKER_01]: No, that's Miranda. 31:32.277 --> 31:32.317 [SPEAKER_01]: No. 31:33.398 --> 31:41.622 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's, I think, because you, you very much stuck with your own existential thinking process. 31:42.963 --> 31:46.025 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, you hung in there, as it were, I would say. 31:46.045 --> 31:48.967 [SPEAKER_01]: And that's made you into who you are now. 31:50.382 --> 31:50.742 [SPEAKER_00]: I guess. 31:51.343 --> 31:51.543 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah. 31:52.964 --> 31:57.226 [SPEAKER_01]: Max, thank you very much indeed for joining me on Immaginal Inspirations. 31:57.246 --> 31:58.287 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, my pleasure David. 31:58.307 --> 31:59.167 [SPEAKER_00]: Nice to talk to you.