Value is Real: From Mathematical to Mystical Value – Part 2 (with Ken Wilber)

About the podcast:These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press.About this episode: In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Dr. Zak Stein explore the profound assertion that "Value is Real," tracing its presence through five dimensions: mathematical, musical, molecular, moral, and mystical. They also analyze the modern tendency to interpret spiritual experiences through materialist and computational prisms, arguing that the experience of awakening can never be value-neutral. They discuss how the deep realization that "I am", is always "I am Value", always revealing inherent value and meaning.If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference:Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, August 2026, Episode: “Value is Real: From Mathematical to Mystical Value – Part 2”Get the book:First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple:David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence.The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day self-study course with Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month.Chapters:0:00 — Introduction0:42 — Context Setting: The Five Ms as an Opening Frame1:40 — It’s a Mathematical Cosmos, and Mathematics Is This Unimaginably Complex Set of Meanings6:02 — Musical Value: Music Has an Ought in Terms of the Beautiful8:06 — Molecular Value Is Mathematics Coded to Generate a Reality that Creates Larger Wholes9:05 — Wholeness Is Moral Value; It Is the Right Relationship Between Parts9:46 — Mystical Value Is the Realization that the Human Being Is a Part of the Largest Whole, But Is a Discrete Expression of It10:25 — Value Has Weight and Gravitas, and that Weight Weigh on Us as a Measure of the Value11:54 — Gravity Is Allurement and Autonomy, All the Way Down12:33 — The Phenomenology of Discovery in Music and Math Are Actually Similar16:44 — About First Principles and First Values17:31 — My Identity Is Value: My Unique Perspective Is a Unique Configuration of Value, Intimacy and Desire19:46 — There’s A New Nihilism: When Awakening Gets Split from Value23:51 — An Insight from Semiotics: Awakening Is Coded with the Good25:05 — Awakening Means Awakening to Meaning per se, to Value per se, to Gravitas as gravitas27:18 — The Revelation of Satori Is that Meaning Is Everywhere, Not an Absence of Meaning31:12 — Waking Up Is Always Interpreted Through Growing Up, and a Materialist Will Interpret Awakening Through a Materialist Lens33:58 — We Need to Take Away, In a Sacred Way, This Hijacking of the Authority of Meditation for Nihilism, Materialism and Computationalism39:04 — About Who We Must BecomeEnd — Mentioned SourcesEnd — Mentioned PeopleEpisode Transcript:Context Setting: The Five Ms as an Opening FrameMarc: We were thinking, in our little convocation here, that we would riff a little bit on: Value is Real, and the relationship of value and meaning.And I thought, to kick us off—you guys have assigned to me that job as the kicker offer, so I want to be good about that. Everyone has to have a job in the football team.I want to go back to something that we raised, that came up spontaneously right before one of our calls. We talked about it maybe three or four David J. Temple conversations ago. That was what we could call the five Ms:* Mathematical value* Musical value* Molecular value* Moral value* Mystical valueZak and Ken, I’m going to riff for a few minutes, to unpack it a little, and it’ll be at least a good place to start.It’s a Mathematical Cosmos, and Mathematics Is Nothing but MeaningMarc: When we talk about mathematical value, one of the great things about mathematical value is that it lives at the very inception of the manifest universe.At the very inception of the manifest universe, we clearly have mathematical value; the laws of physics are at play.What we mean by mathematical value is that it’s not a tabula rasa Cosmos. It’s not a blank cosmos. It’s a Cosmos with vectors.Ken: It’s mathematical.Marc: It’s a mathematical Cosmos. And mathematics is nothing but meaning.Ken: Right.Marc: Mathematics is not a blank slate. It’s this very unimaginably complex set of meanings.Ken: And it’s astonishing that it describes the universe with mathematical precision. It’s just mind-boggling.Marc: Right. What was that Wigner’s phrase, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics? It’s astonishing.And you could almost have, in the beginning of a book, one of those pictures of some theoretical physicist writing all the mathematical equations, and then right on top: “no meaning in the universe.”[Laughs]It’s actually a great New Yorker cartoon. Oh, that’s no meaning. Got it.It’s a very dramatic New Yorker-cartoon, inspired by what you said before we flipped the switch on, in terms of responding to some of the nihilism of Harari’s children’s book writings with a kind of childish response.We could almost have, in this new book, some New Yorker-cartoon kind of things.Zak: [Laughs]Marc: You have the physicists writing all the mathematical equations and then, you know, “conception of cosmos”, no meaning. Right?It’s not a bad cartoon. So that’s mathematical value.And again, there are mathematicians who should be in this conversation—it’s clearly, obviously true when I read, for example, Morphogenesis, I specifically did not do the mathematics. I don’t know mathematics. I can play in mathematics, but unlike a page of Talmud, I don’t have a feel for it, I can’t tell if it’s wrong.But having said that, if you look at even something like Cantor, who committed suicide, and Hilbert, who were trying to complete mathematical sets, and essentially what Gödel is saying is: well, actually there’s an infinitely unfolding field. Mathematical sets unfold into infinity, and you can’t create complete mathematical sets around infinity, or you’ll kill yourself.And Tarski takes Gödel and formalizes it across knowledge fields.So in some sense, our notion that the eternal Tao is the evolving Tao, or that eternal value is evolving value, actually is very, very tightly interlinked with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, in a very beautiful way.And also with constructor theory.When I was at Oxford, I was at Wolfson College. There were two good things about Wolfson College. One is that Isaiah Berlin was there before me, and I sat in his row — that’s where I did my writing, which was fun. But the second thing is there’s this guy, David Deutsch, who’s the head of the physics department there.I know you guys are both into Peirce, which I’m not—I just say things, and Zak tells me it was in Peirce already, so I’m annoyed. But if I would try to say clearly what Deutsch is saying, he comes up with something that’s almost a Peircean kind of move, where he says:“There are no a priori constants or laws in the classical sense. The laws are always evolving as nodes in an interconnected network of underlying physical properties. And because of that, it’s not just that there are new higher-order things coming out of the base without changing the base layer, because there is top-down causation, it is always changing as the higher-order ones are emerging and affecting it.”So what he’s basically saying is that he’s trying to develop this ontology of physics that evolves with time—and he’s actually happening in physics in a big way.So in all of this, we have at play both value and evolving value.That’s my point: that we not only have value at play, we have evolving value at play, which is quite interesting.That’s one.Musical Value: Music Has an Ought in Terms of the BeautifulMarc: So then, briefly, we move to musical value—and these are the ones that take a little time; the rest are pretty fast.When we talk about musical value: first off, we’d have to write, Zak, a few paragraphs about the relationship between music and mathematics.Zak: Well, they’re all deeply — all the Ms are deeply connected.Marc: Yeah, all the Ms are completely interconnected.We have the Pythagorean realization of the musical-mathematical nexus. Music is a particular expression based on interval and rhythm, because music also only appears with the manifest universe. Music is an expression of the manifest.And now we have these musical values, which mean a very particular quality in Cosmos, which has a rightness to it. A quality that has a rightness, and you hear it, as we said last time—da da da da—and you’re moved by it. It lives in us.Ken: Right, and music is sung mathematics.Marc: That’s a sentence. That’s a gorgeous sentence, my friend. I guess you can keep the jacket.Music is sung mathematics.That’s exactly right. And it’s very clear there’s musical value, and the musical value is interesting. It doesn’t have an “ought” in the sense of the should, the good: thou shalt save a person from drowning. It has an ought in terms of the beautiful. We should.And it’s very clear that the value of beauty discloses, in some sense, the sanity of Cosmos.In the tree of life, and the interior sciences of the Solomonic tradition, each of the illuminations in the tree of life has a particular color — quite a bit more sophisticated than certain color charts that exist in developmental thought, at a certain time. And in each color, you go deep into the color and you explode into a certain dimension of Cosmos.So we have musical value.Molecular Value Is Mathematics Coded to Generate a Reality that Creates Larger WholesMarc: And then from there, essentially, molecular value is precisely what we’ve talked about many times, this notion that the proton and the neutron come together with the electron, or three quarks come together, but not every three quarks come together.There’s already a code that defines the nature of allurement between different parts that form larger wholes.It’s clear as day as atomic numbers, chemical structures, all of the elements in the chemical tables, all the way down, all the way up. It’s very clear we’re talking about particular values that are all coded for life.In other words, mathematics is coded to generate a reality that creates larger wholes.Ken: Right.Marc: And the same thing is true, obviously, about the molecular world. So you clearly have molecular value.And then once you have that, you just naturally move up the evolutionary chain. You have cellular value and value naturally evolves with the rest of evolution.Wholeness Is Moral Value; It Is the Right Relationship Between PartsMarc: So moral value is simply the relationship, the right relationship between parts.And this is where our Eros equation plays. Because the way we’re defining Eros in our interior science equation is: Eros equals the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness.Wholeness is moral value. It’s right relationship between parts. It’s how Whitehead defines it in Process and Reality.Beauty is that all the contradictions create a larger whole, and the more contradiction creating the more whole, the more beauty you have.It’s stunning.Then, finally, we have mystical value.Mystical Value Is the Realization that the Human Being Is a Part of the Largest Whole, But Is a Discrete Expression of ItMarc: Mystical value is, again, simply disclosing the true nature of reality.What it’s saying is that the nature of a human being is that a human being is not a part—the human being is actually a part of the largest whole, but is a discrete expression of it. And the relationship of that part to the larger whole is the nature of mystical value.It’s quite compelling.I just want to throw that out. Any thoughts on any one of the Ms, or on what do we mean by “Value is Real”?And Ken, when we finished last time you were talking a little bit about weight and gravitas.Value Has Weight and Gravitas, And that Weight Weigh on Us as a Measure of the ValueKen: Right. We introduced the notion that value has weight. It has a gravitas, and that also connected it with the material world, because the metaphor was a material metaphor.And so, “The Meaning Crisis, Value Is Real,” is to say that meaning and the crisis itself have a weight. That’s a very important part of what we’re saying.And frankly, I like the order—“The Meaning Crisis, Value Is Real”—because “Value Is Real” seems educational, whereas “The Meaning Crisis” points to, well, you have a meaning crisis, you better read this book.Marc: It’s a problem and a solution. That’s very good.So weight and gravitas is a very big deal. Value has gravitas.Ken: Right. And that is the weight that it has on us.That means the weight to alter us, to persuade us, to push us in certain directions and not in certain directions.All of that is due to the weight that is weighing on us as a measure of the value.Gravity Is Allurement and Autonomy, All the Way DownMarc: And Zak, I’ll pass to you, love, but just one sentence as a transition, Ken, from you to Zak, which is: underneath gravity is absolutely nothing.In other words, underneath gravity is allurement.Ken: Right.Marc: So gravitas, the gravitational nature of something, means that it is a quality of actually allurement and autonomy.Gravity is actually allurement and autonomy, all the way down.Our friend Howard, has done very good physics on the claim that there’s allurement and autonomy all the way down, in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang. So there’s gravitas all the way down.Beautiful.The Phenomenology of Discovery in Music and Math Are Actually SimilarZak: I just love the frame of the different Ms — math, music, molecular. And then up and through the things that are normally associated with value.They’re all related. Pythagoras comes to mind.But then also, when I was studying music—I was a musician before. Actually, it was Ken’s writing that messed up my music career.Ken: [Laughs]Zak: I was going to be a musician, and I started reading Ken, and one thing led to another. That’s a true story.I was reading Hazrat Inayat Khan, who was a Sufi who played Indian classical music. And he basically spoke about all these Ms. Specifically the ability for the right music to rearrange your molecular intimacy, meaning the healing power of music at the biological level, which is also something Pythagoras said.The idea that when you’re striking the right chord, it actually reverberates in your body to the extent that you’ll be healed. That’s well documented in many healing practices, but then also the mathematics of it.The point that connects them all is this weird phenomenological perception of the rightness of it.That’s where math gets really weird philosophically. If you get into the phenomenology of doing math, how does one do math? Marc, you said you can kind of get math, but you can’t tell if it’s right.That’s like, the whole point of math. Saying it’s right. [Laughs]Now the question is: how do you know if it’s right?And this was where Charles Sanders Peirce was actually corresponding with Cantor, and he was doing phenomenology of mathematics. He was trying to figure out what’s the feeling of correctness, of obligated correctness. It’s a weird thing to think about.So there’s this deep point where discernment, phenomenologically, becomes super important in mathematics.One of the reasons they suppressed the William James–Charles Sanders Peirce correspondences was because they were both talking about using stimulants in order to be able to do math.The focus required to be a calculator in those days was so great that they had to use caffeine and tobacco. So they suppressed those letters.Not to get into the drug question, the point was the attention it required. And similar with music, the attention and focus required to be engaged with music.There’s something profound about that ability to know when you’re seeing what’s right, and to feel the weight of it.So I’m closing with: mathematics is valuable.Why is mathematics valuable? Because it gears into the universe.When you have a mathematician stumble upon an obscure theory that no one will understand, the weight of the discovery is such—the implied value of it. There’s just this discovery that’s at the core of mathematics, and discovery at the core of music. In the Indian classical tradition, you discover a raga, you don’t write it, you discover it.That sense of discovery, through clarified perception, through clarified anthro-ontology of Value across all of these domains, was resonating for me.And I’m not going to get into what we did to music in the West, with its production and its moving to the well-tempered scale—these things moved it out of the Pythagorean universe and into something that’s less healing, and actually feels less right. It can actually be bad for you.Certain rhythms and sounds, dystonic, atonal, arrhythmic, can mess up your heart. This has been shown by the HeartMath people. It’s a deep thing.The integration between all those Ms, to me, was profound. And the mysticism of doing math. The mysticism of having the discovery of math.I’m not a math guy, so I’ve never had that experience, but I have had music—a feeling like I’ve discovered a melody, or made precisely the right move in an improvisation. I know that feeling. I imagine that’s similar to what the mathematician feels.That’s our broadest claim: Value is across all these domains, and the human can operate in and know truth in all of these domains.Get the book:First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination.My Identity Is Value: My Unique Perspective Is a Unique Configuration of Value, Intimacy and DesireMarc: That’s great. Let me transition to you, Ken, and comment in two ways.First, Value is identity.Let’s bring identity into the conversation. My identity is Value.Back in the day, Ken, when we were young—I think it was 2004 or 2005—we were hanging out in the loft, and formulating Unique Self equations. An early formulation was, of course, True Self plus perspective equals Unique Self.Ken: Right.Marc: And over the years, though the core equation remains, that equation has evolved in a number of ways.In some sense, we began to realize that my Unique Self is my unique perspective. But another way of talking about unique perspective is my:* unique configuration of value,* unique configuration of intimacy,* unique configuration of desire.And desire, intimacy, and value are deeply related.Clarified desire and clarified need disclose value.Intimacy—the intimate—means there’s a shared identity between two parts which creates a larger value.And intimacy requires, if we remember the Intimacy equation: intimacy equals shared identity, in the context of relative and otherness, times mutuality of recognition, times mutuality of pathos-feeling, times mutuality of value.There is no intimacy without a shared structure of value.So my identity is: I am Value. I’m an irreducibly unique incarnation of Value.I’m going to bring it back to what you were saying, Zak, about how the five Ms are inter-included.The mystical disclosure is always some version of “I am.” But it’s “I am Value.” And “I am” means Value, that’s what “I am” means.There’s A New Nihilism: When Awakening Gets Split from ValueMarc: Paradoxically—and I want to point to the strangeness of this—we have this new phenomenon of serious figures who are not idiots, who are doing serious thinking within their best vector, who are doing practice, like Sam— our friend Sam is doing waking up, a guy like Yuval, whose calling card is that he meditates two hours a day.Or there’s a whole world—that Maria Popova, who’s also friends with Sam and that gang—a Bulgarian, math-and-science writer who writes this thing called Brain Pickings.They’re doing practice, and yet they’re splitting between the experience of I am and the experience of inherent value. Of course you can do that—but it’s a very, very shattering and violent disintermediation, because the experience of “I am” is “I am value.” So the mystical disclosure is a disclosure of identity.And of course, just like:* Mystical value means that “I am” lives in me;* Moral value means that, anthro-ontologically, I have an eye of value—value lives in me.* Molecular value lives in me, obviously.* Musical value lives in me—which is why I’m moved by, or healed by, music, Zak.* And the reason the mathematician can wrap their mind and heart around the Cosmos through mathematics is because, in some sense, mathematics is also an interior. It’s an interior and an exterior at the same time.So all of these, all five M’s disclose identity. They all disclose identity.It’s all an identity of value.I think we need to address though, this new phenomena. I mean, the truth is, this phenomena existed in the pre-Socratics as well. We’d have to trace it through history. The phenomena where a person can have an experience of some version of Kensho, some version of Satori, and then misunderstand it.For example, Harari, who’s our foil, says consistently that the contribution of Buddhism is to liberate us from meaning.That’s the contribution of Buddhism, according to Harari.And what I basically said in this talk I gave yesterday is: if you read Buddhism carefully, the Buddhist point is not that you’re liberated from meaning.It is: stop searching for meaning. But what it means is, stop searching for meaning because everything’s meaningful.Ken: It’s the discovery of a higher meaning, a deeper meaning, a very profound meaning, and that liberates you from trivial meaning.Marc: Right! And it’s all meaning. There’s nothing that’s not meaning.So there’s this new phenomenon that’s very strong in intellectual circles adjacent to us—and, by the way, the metamodern gang manages to do this just as well—where there’s this movement to neutralize the implication of the direct experience of an awakening.And again, it’s not by accident, culturally, that a dude who views himself as a materialist, who writes a book called The End of Faith, correctly attacking pre-modern religion, but then claims a kind of materialism, spends half his time doing stuff on waking up.And then another guy, his friend Yuval, actually becomes a Silicon Valley kind of guru because he’s meditating, and yet makes the claim that the meditation is value-neutral.And I would say, Ken, the reason you particularly are threatening to that world is because you’re expressing—as I am, as Zak is—but you’re more adjacent to that world, this realization that in the waking up, there is a value structure.An Insight from Semiotics: Awakening Is Coded with the GoodMarc: I’ll go to semiotics for a second, because language is code. In Hebrew, when you play with language, people think it’s sleight of hand—it’s not. You’re moving the code around.So the word for awakening ”er”—ayin-resh—would be, in English, “er,” awake. It means to be awakened, or to be aroused. Same word, but it’s always the way Hebrew codes: it’s the word evil, “ra”, spelled backwards. So “ra”—resh, ayin—evil, you flip the letters around, and it becomes “er,” awake, awakening.Meaning, awakening has the good. That’s the point. Awakening is coded with the good.So I think we need to respond in some way, even without mentioning the people, to this claim that you can have an awakening that’s actually value-neutral, and that you can talk about consciousness as this epiphenomenon.It’s a strange phenomenon that we’re seeing today that needs to be addressed.And the metamodern gang is a perfect example of a gang who is, kind of— well, yeah, we’re practicing, but. Value-neutral. Huh.Awakening Means Awakening to Meaning per se, to Value per se, to Gravitas as gravitasKen: That’s ridiculous. That’s the most ridiculous of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard.Marc: Right?Ken: Why on earth would you strive for something that has no value and no meaning whatsoever? Explain that one to me. And particularly when we remember that value has weight, it has gravitas, it has meaning.Remember when God was asked, “Who are you?”—He said, “I AMness.” And that was the correct answer.“Who shall I say sent me to them?”—“Tell them ‘I am’ sent you.” And so Moses is like, okay.Zak: [Laughs]Ken: But that’s the important part about I am: it has weight. It has, in a sense, the weight of the universe, because it has the gravitas, the value of the whole universe. And that’s why God is “I am.”God taught universal value and universal gravitas and universal weight.And that’s why you have to pay attention to it, because it has purpose and meaning and value.Those are going to replace all the trivial meanings and trivial values and inconsequential weight that you have throughout your life. Those are all a waste of your time, and—more importantly—a waste of your identity. You don’t want to identify with any of those, but most people do.And that’s why you want to meditate and get a real awakening—and that doesn’t mean an awakening to nothing of value or nothing of meaning.It means awakening to meaning per se, to value per se, to gravitas as gravitas. And that’s worth desiring; it’s worth working for.The Revelation of Satori Is that Meaning Is Everywhere, Not an Absence of MeaningZak: Yeah, I would say:* There’s a difference between sitting there.* There’s a difference between sitting there and meditating.* And there’s a difference between sitting there meditating and having insight as a result of meditating.So that would be one argument—that they’re not actually having satoris.Ken: Right.Zak: Because the revelation of satori is that meaning is everywhere, you can’t escape it. There’s maybe too much meaning, not an absence of meaning—and actually that it’s ultimately valuable, and that you should desperately try to have that experience again, that there was something so important about the absolute, and being the unique expression, and the experience.Marc: Right. It’s a plenitude of meaning.Zak: So that’s one response: that in fact, it’s that view of meditation that’s a sign you’re not doing it well, or haven’t practiced in a tradition such that you’ve had enough experience of Value per se.And that’s been my experience with a lot—I’ve been around a lot of people who’ve meditated a ton, and seem to have gained nothing from it.In fact, they’ve gained a sense of nihilism, almost, because they’ve studied a lot of postmodernism, which conspires with bad interpretations of Buddhism—which is something you pointed out in the nineties, Ken.That there’s this weird agreement between bad interpretations of Buddhism and Derrida’s sliding signifiers and endless contexts revealing everything’s meaningless.“That’s what the Buddha said, everything’s meaningless”—you’re like, no, actually that’s the opposite of what the Buddha said.So it’s a deep confusion. There’s also the issue of “really enlightened people” being complete f**k-ups. So there is that issue…Marc: That’s a different issue.Zak: Right. But it’s similar, in the fact that there was something that wasn’t transmitted in the state experience, that wasn’t held by the vehicle, or something like that.Marc: That’s the state-stage issue.Zak: Right.Marc: Which is obviously, Ken, you’ve talked about it a lot. You and I talked about it also in the whole wake-up, grow-up thing. Welwood talked about it in his particular way, not in terms of levels of consciousness, but in terms of psychological maturity.And Ken, back in 2003, 2004, or 2005, we talked about, in the lineage tradition, you would have Isaiah and Ezekiel, who would both have realized state experiences, but they would be mediated through their prisms of culture, psychology, and so on,—which is an early proto-form for this beautiful wake-up, grow-up idea that you’ve unpacked, Ken, at great length, in multiple volumes.But I’m going to bracket that one for a second, Zak, and go back to the other one, which is this “neutral” thing. This neutral thing is a very big deal.It could be they’re not having realized experiences, or—Zak: —that their experience of meditation has bored them.The experience of a valueless, meaningless thing is actually just the experience of “I’m bored.”Marc: I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think actually that the two sides are related, meaning, the same way that a satori or a kensho can be mediated through an ethnocentric prism, it can also be mediated through a materialist prism.In other words, the same way you have a wake-up and grow-up—Zak: —that’s the same as a state thing. Because a materialist would be a certain stage of consciousness.Marc: No, but, in other words, if I have an a priori materialism, which is my prism, and then I have a classical kensho experience, or a rapturous, mystical, second-person experience, whatever it is—I’m going to interpret it through my materialism.Zak: That’s state-stages. Exactly.Marc: Well, I’m saying that the state-stage thing—although materialism is not a structure-stage of developmental consciousness—Zak: It’s close, though.Waking Up Is Always Interpreted Through Growing Up, and a Materialist Will Interpret Awakening Through a Materialist LensKen: It occurs in a structure of growing up. And what we have to remember is: when anybody has a fairly authentic waking up experience, mostly what they notice is, “My God, I am. And I’ve always known I am. I’ve always been enlightened.”That’s why Buddhism correctly maintains you can never gain enlightenment, any more than you can gain your lungs or acquire your feet. It can’t be done. You can realize you have them, and that’s a real reality.But this I-am-ness is an identity which carries value. And your value, your waking up experience, is always interpreted through your growing up experience.That’s why you can interpret it in a very materialistic way, or a very naturalistic way, or—particularly depending on how deep the realization is—you can interpret it through a Christian way, a fundamentalist way. That just comes with the territory. Waking up is always interpreted through growing up. And depending on what stage of growing up you’re at, and what your worldview is at that stage, that will tend to be the way you interpret your experience.If you’re a Christian, and you’re going to name a god, it’ll be Christ.St. Paul said, “Let this consciousness be in you, which was in Christ Jesus, that we all may be one.” That’s a very good expression of his enlightenment, oneness experience—“Not I, but Christ liveth in me.”He’s going to talk in those terms.He’s not going to say, “Well, I discovered my Buddha mind,” or, “I discovered my Advaita Vedanta self.” He’s going to talk in Christian terms, because that’s his interpretive, growing-up context.Zak: So a Yuval Harari materialist would speak in material terms.Marc: That’s right—that’s exactly the thing I’m saying. That a materialist will then do that same thing.So those two separate sides you were talking about, Zak, we’re bringing them together—Zak: Totally.Marc: —and we’re saying that just like my prism of interpretation which is invisible to me, as Christian, or Hebrew wisdom, or et cetera—if my prism of interpretation is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the mind, therefore I have this experience which is very calming to me, and I experience Buddhism as teaching that I’m liberated from all meaning.Ken: Right.Marc: It’s actually a shock.We Need to Take Away, In a Sacred Way, This Hijacking of the Authority of Meditation for Nihilism, Materialism and ComputationalismMarc: So I think we need to point to this, because we need to take away, in a sacred way, from Sam and Yuval and our friends, this hijacking of the authority of meditation for nihilism.Zak: Right.Marc: And it’s nihilism, even if Sam’s claiming—because Sam claims to be, the ultimate moral position, he’s taking a moral high ground—but it’s like C.S. Lewis, in the beginning of The Abolition of Man.Remember, Zak, when we were reading, and he says: in the first or second generation, those people who claim these kind of, out-of-the-Tao realizations, they’ll be good and moral for a generation, for two generations, but then it’s gone.It’s what Will Herberg, that sociologist, called in the late fifties “cut-flower ethics.”You cut a rose from its root, and for one generation, for two generations, it still looks like a rose, because it’s still actually holding the roots of the Field of Value. By the third generation, the fourth, it’s dead. There’s a cut-flower ethics here that’s at play.And maybe in the Meaning Crisis book—and I think we’re agreed that “The Meaning Crisis” is the beginning of the title, the colon, and “Value Is Real” is on the other side — maybe we should actually cite some primary texts of Buddhism.Ken: Well, what we can say is: establish that waking up is always interpreted by growing up, because that allows us to take away their inherent identification of waking up with nihilism. It’s a particular form of growing up. It’s a particular worldview.And once we’ve established that connection, we’ve won. We can shoot down anything that they try to propose.Marc: That’s right. We can actually show, it’s a slightly different version of states and stages. And as a developmentalist, you know this, because you can be a materialist in any developmental stage, obviously.Zak: Yep. And there’s also types. I would argue some of the materialists, it’s a type. They’re very complex, but they’re actually this kind of weird, neurotic, control-oriented type or something.Marc: That’s our friend McGilchrist’s argument that you’ve pointed out to me.Zak: That’s McGilchrist’s argument. He’s basically saying that.Marc: I’d be more hesitant to make that move, frankly.Ken: [Laughs]Zak: But it’s a similar move.No matter how good the revelation is, from Reality, from Source, you’re going to have to put it into language. And if the only language you have is materialist language, that’s what you’re stuck with.Ken: That’s right.And we can establish that connection between waking up and growing up just by giving a handful of examples. I already gave the example of Paul, and he’s talking Christ terms, and Buddha is talking Buddha-mind terms, and Shankara is talking Advaita Vedanta terms.And you can just point out two, or three, or even four of them, and nobody would disagree with you. St. Paul’s using Christ terms, and Buddha’s using Buddha terms. We can’t expect Buddha to use Christ terms, or St. Paul to use Buddha terms.So I think that’s a fairly easy point we can make.Marc: Yeah. Adding materialism to the grow up prism is a cool move.Ken: Right.Zak: Yeah. And I would also say materialism, and what I would call computationalism.Marc: Yeah.Ken: That’s right.Zak: I met a woman by chance who leads medicine ceremonies, and she does it with Silicon Valley dudes, and she says they mostly have the experience that they are in a simulation, or that they are somehow in a game, or otherwise interpret their experience through this computational lens.Marc: We’ve added two good examples today to the grow up structure.This is very cool and very important, because in a certain sense those are the examples that play in culture that haven’t been addressed.Ken: That’s right.And that’s why people in our culture, in the materialistic culture, if they have a spontaneous awakening, they’ll tend to interpret it in materialistic terms.Certainly if they get a chance to think about it—they might be overwhelmed by the godliness of their experience at first, but give them a week or two, and they’ll be interpreting that through materialistic terms, because that’s what the worldview tells them is real.Marc: Yeah, that’s great. Let’s hold here. Guys, what a crazy pleasure.Zak: Yeah.Ken: Okay. Bye-bye.Mentioned Sources:* A. M. Turing, The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis (1952; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, vol. 237, no. 641, pp. 37–72)* Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (originally published 1929; Free Press edition, 1979)* Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (founded 2006; renamed The Marginalian in 2021)Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004; W. W. Norton & Company)* C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (1943; Oxford University Press)Mentioned People:* Eugene Wigner (1902—1995)* Yuval Noah Harari (1976—)* Georg Cantor (1845—1918)* David Hilbert (1862—1943)* Kurt Gödel (1906—1978)* Alfred Tarski (1901—1983)* Isaiah Berlin (1909—1997)* David Deutsch (1953—)* Charles Sanders Peirce (1839—1914)* Alfred North Whitehead (1861—1947)* Pythagoras (c. 570—c. 495 BCE)* Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882—1927)* William James (1842—1910)* Sam Harris (1967—)* Maria Popova (1983/84—)* Socrates (c. 470—399 BCE)* Jacques Derrida (1930—2004)* John Welwood (1943—2019)* Isaiah (The Bible) (c. 8th century BCE)* Ezekiel (The Bible) (c. 6th century BCE)* C. S. Lewis (1898—1963)* Will Herberg (1901—1977)* Iain McGilchrist (1953—)Go Deeper:If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey.Join us at the Who We Must Become community, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis.With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already comitted to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. Get full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe