Top-down or Bottom-up?

BOTH / AND !!!

I am currently following 107 accounts on Substack so there is always a flood of articles in my inbox. I do lots of skimming and each morning I need to decide which articles to read and perhaps write about. That was an easy decision this morning.

Wealth and Wisdom: An Interview With John Vervaeke - A short conversation with a wisdom expert by Tom Morgan resonated for many reasons. Vervaeke is a great teacher with a brilliant mind, one of the galaxy brains in the SPACE. And the theme of wisdom is also something I want to focus on.

I agree with Morgan who writes,

I have yet to find someone more expert on the theory and practice of wisdom than John Vervaeke.

John: So what I would do is I would look to emerging communities that are already creating what I call ecologies of practices and that have certain design features in it. I would look for how they were concerned about how we view the world, how we care about the world and how we act in the world, those three dimensions. I would be concerned that they had practices that covered sort of four domains. They are doing dialogical practices, they're doing imaginal practices, mindfulness practices, embodied practices…

I view the world primarily through the lens of metamodernism. I care about finding solutions to the metacrisis. I aspire to act more effectively. I am weak in the practices Vervaeke advocates and I particularly want to do better at dialogos. As a retiree, I am somewhat envious of those who are much younger and already further along on this path.

And so I would want a community that is clearly addressing self-deception, clearly pursuing enhanced meaning in life, and gets that they have to hold this creative tension… between finitude and transcendence.

And I have a sort of a hunch, I can't make a stronger epistemic claim for that, but that it's some combination of bottom-up and top-down that allows you to get the optimal inception, and that we might now have the kind of tools that can track the dynamics of that and the complexity that we're in, in order to get us, it's probably with some A.I. help, at what would be the optimal, you know, 10% of people that we could influence in order to flip the society towards wisdom.

It seems to me that we have numerous excellent top-down initiatives from people like John Vervaeke, Gregg Henriques, Jonathan Rowson, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Peter Limberg, to name just a few. And it seems to me that we need more bottom-up initiatives. To reach a tipping point in society, a lot of us need to be doing a lot more than watching videos and reading articles.

Tom: What for you would be the “minimum viable woo” and message that if you could, not exactly tweet format, but if you could get Taylor Swift or Elon Musk or any of these people to start moving towards an idea that you think could create that kind of ideological tipping point?

This is an interesting question, but I much prefer Taylor Swift over Elon Musk as an ambassador for making wisdom more common. It is my hope that some celebrity will discover the SPACE and become as energized by it as Tom Morgan himself is. For example, someone who already seems to have the right vibe is the British actress and activist Emma Watson.

And Vervaeke introduces me to a new term.

John: I think that's right. I think, building on that, I think relevance realization is a very sped up version of what's called niche construction. The organism shapes the environment as the environment is shaping the organism so that the organism has a home range, it has a place where it belongs. And by the way, your sense of belonging, which really matters to your psychological well-being, your physical well-being, even your financial well-being…

So I ask myself, what niche have I been shaped by my environment to help construct?

What Vervaeke had to say about the work of Iain McGilchrist was very interesting.

John: I mean, I like it in one sense, but this is something that he and I disagree on. Insight actually isn't in the right hemisphere. It's between the left and the right hemisphere. So an insight is when the left hemisphere treats the problem as a well-defined problem and then impasses can't solve it. And then activity switches to the right. The right looks for a new way to formulate the problem, passes the new formulation back, and if it takes, because it doesn't always take. Then you have an insight. And so this is what I talk about when I talk about opponent processing. And there's all kinds of opponent processing going on. And so I think that's right. And I think there's ways, I think there's reasons why we have both hemispheres and they are organized this way, because I think the right hemisphere is also capable of its own kinds of illusion.

I would also add that our brains are in bodies that are female, male or nonbinary and that this factor is significant.

And below is one more bit of excitement form this interview that is dense with wisdom on both sides of the conversation.

And so the Vervaeke Foundation is also trying to afford that for people. And that finally is about trying to rebuild the torn bridge between spirituality and science. So instead of them being antagonistic, they can return to what they were…