Original subtitles

Let's speak about vision a bit.

Okay, so we can start by thinking about vision technically.

Vision is what occurs when you look out at the

world, and so you see the world array itself in front

of you, and you think that's vision.

But vision has another sense too, and that's the sense of

visionary, and so a visionary is someone who

can envision not actuality, but possibility.

Now, we should start by assessing the relationship

between vision in the narrow technical sense what

happens when you orient your eyes towards

the world, and vision in the visionary sense.

So, you need to use your vision to weave your way through life.

You look at the world so that you can move forward two desirable goals through the

world, and your vision specifies something like

pathways and tools and obstacles. And you might

say, well, the world consists of what is, and so you

can derive sufficient vision by observing what

is. Now, it's obvious that you can derive a fair bit of vision by observing what is.

If you walk up the stairs, you should match your steps

to the stairs that you see. But the problem with

the idea that you can derive sufficient direction.

from seeing what is, is that what is changes,

and that's really the problem of the future.

So, you might say the past is fixed, and you might

say that the present is stable, but the future is.

indeterminate, and it's technically indeterminate.

And what I mean by that is that you cannot compute

your way through the present into the future by

using an algorithm. What you already know is not

sufficient to guide you into the future, because

the future is actually different from the past.

Not only are we not clockwork machines, we

can't be, because a clockwork machine, which

operates according to principles that have already

been established, cannot compute its way forward

into an indeterminate reality. And the future isn't

entirely indeterminate because it's constrained

by the past, but it's indeterminate in many ways.

It's a branching, the future is something like the

possibility of multiple pathways forward.

That's one way of looking at it. So, if you're walking

across a field, there are an infinite number

of directions you can take across the field.

And the future is the space in which those

possibilities is latent before it becomes manifest.

And what you confront in the world, you could

say is when you look at the world, you might say,

well, I'm confronting the actuality of the present

world, but your apprehension doesn't really work that way.

What you apprehend are the possibilities

that make themselves manifest in that determinate

space in the present. You grapple with the possibility, you grapple with the future.

And I think you could say in some sense that

the past and the present are finite and bounded.

And the future is the infinity that surrounds

us. And the horizon of the future that we make

contact with our consciousness is the point where the infinite meets the finite for us.

And so, and the infinite has to be somewhere,

and well, it makes its presence known in the

form of the future. And the future is what we envision.

And then you can think about that.

neurophysiologically. We use vision to orient

ourselves in relationship to the territory that

currently exists. But there's a new territory

constantly manifesting itself, and that's the future.

And so then the question is, well, how do you orient

yourself to the world of possibility? And that

might really be what your consciousness is doing. Because your consciousness doesn't

have to attend to things that are already fixed.

You ignore everything that's already fixed and predictable.

You actually attend consciously.

So this is your reality to that which is transforming or is most likely to transform.

Because why otherwise pay attention to it? You've already

got it mastered. You don't have to pay attention

to the floor unless there's an earthquake, which is a transformation of the future.

You can ignore the floor as you walk towards the door.

In fact, the concept floor is predicated on the ignoreability of solid surfaces.

It's an axiomatic assumption, the solidity of the floor.

And most of the time, it's true,

although not always. And so everything that's predictable, you can make unconscious.

And so it disappears out of reality itself in some real sense.

It's this horizon of transformation that

you're contending with. That's what your consciousness does.

That's the essence of the human being,

the spirit that confronts the possibility or

possibility itself, and then endeavors to transform

that into habitable actuality, the habitable

actuality that is good. That's the logos.

That's the image of God in which human beings are created.

And that's real. And so far as anything is real, that's real.

It might be the most real thing.

And so then the question is, well, how do you conduct

yourself as an entity existing on the horizon

between the present and the future or between order

and chaos? That's another way of thinking about

it. That's where you exist. And the answer is,

by envisioning the future. And so the way human

beings have evolved is that we can see what's

there, but we can also see what isn't there.

We have an imagination and an imagination is a

visionary capacity. We have the ability to generate possible worlds in a psychological

meta space that's dissociated from the real world.

And so, look, most animals manage adaptation to

the transforming horizon of the future by producing

variants of their physical self. So mosquitoes are like that.

Mosquito will lay thousands and thousands of eggs.

And each of those eggs, if fertilized,

will turn into a mosquito that's a tiny bit different

than the original mosquito, partly because of the

mixing of genes from two different organisms

that sex enables, but also because of mutations.

So a mosquito pair will produce a whole bunch of

variant mosquitoes. And each of those mosquitoes

is slightly differently adapted to the changing environment.

And most of them die, almost all of them.

In fact, more or less all die, but two.

Otherwise, we'd be knee deep in mosquitoes in no time flat.

And so the mosquitoes allow all their

children to die, except two. And that's how they

deal with the encroaching chaos of the future.

Now human beings also do that, to some degree,

because we produce children and they vary from us

because of sexual reasons and because of mutations.

But we don't produce tens of thousands of variants.

We've taken a different tack, which is all our eggs

are in one basket, so to speak. But inside each

person is that capacity to generate variation.

And so as our prefrontal cortex emerged out

of our motor cortex, we were able to generate

variant sub personalities of our future selves.

So their imaginary avatars, we're able to evaluate

how that imaginary avatar might perform in the

world to envision that before implementing it.

corporally before actually acting it out.

And so when you're sitting there thinking about,

well, what might I do today? You generate variant

selves, you think, well, I could go to the drug store.

That's how this would work. I could go mow the lawn.

I could go have a fight with my wife.

I could go have an affair. I could go down to the

bar and then you lay out your character traversing

this imaginary space and you evaluate the various

options that present themselves for their suitability

given your goals. And then you collapse that space

of apprehension into a single actuality and you implement that.

And so what you're doing is you're performing the equivalent of.

variant generation and death. It's the Darwinian

selection process conducted abstractly.

So you generate these variant selves and you evaluate them.

Now you can do that in imagination.

And that's with vision, right? Because you play

it out like you imagine the characters in a book.

You play it out on the internal visionary landscape.

And you think, oh, that's a stupid idea.

It's like, well, I'd like to do that.

But I don't think it'll turn out very well.

And then you might think too, well, my wife and my kids

wouldn't be very happy if I did that.

And then you might think, well, that would be fun.

But man, I'm going to pay for it tomorrow. And so you just

dispense with those avatars and worlds until

you narrow it down to the one thing that you can implement.

You embody that. And then you walk forward with that. Or you do it in conversation

with someone else, because maybe you're sitting

with your wife at the breakfast table and you say,

well, what should we do today? Which is what should

our vision of the day be? What game are we going

to jointly play? And what outcome do we both expect

and desire from that? It's more important to think

about it as desire, right? Because you play a game

in relationship to a desired end. And that also

means that you select the game you play according

to your hierarchy of desire. And that's bloody well

worth thinking about. What do you really want?

Well, that's part of developing a vision in the

more fundamental sense. What do you want? So there's

a gospel saying, knock, and the door will open,

seek and you will find, ask and you will receive.

And you think, well, no, it can't be that way.

It's like, well, it's that way a lot more than you

think, because you transform the chaotic potential

of the future into actuality with vision.

And you might say, well, I don't really make plans.

It's like, no, what you're saying is you just make bad plans,

because someone who doesn't make a plan, it isn't

that they don't make plans. It's that they make

unconscious plans. So they're ruled by their own

whims or their plans are so short term that they

don't really count as plans. If you're going to the.

pantry to get some bread to make a peanut butter

sandwich, that's a plan. Now, it's not the sort

of plan you might write down. It's not a medium to

long term strategy encompassing all the different

aspects of your being. But it's still a plan.

And the truth of the matter is, is that you can't do

anything without at least a micro plan.

And then you might say, well, I'm nothing but an aggregate

of micro plans, although no one ever says that,

but you get the point. And that's a pretty confused person.

They just move from one short term, unconscious

attention orientation to another. And the problem

with that is there's no coherence to their actions.

And the problem with that is the actions

then contradict, or they're so multiplicitous

that the person is anxious. And because there's no

long term goal or vision, they don't have any

hope because hope is experienced in relationship

to a superordinate goal. You know, you might

hope that you make the peanut butter sandwich.

properly. And fair enough, that's important in

that tiny frame of time and space. But it's not the

sort of thing, because it's so short term, it's not

the sort of thing that can give deep and abiding

meaning to your life. And you need that deep and

abiding meaning to orient you so you're not terrified

by the multiplicity of possibilities.

And you need it to have you aim towards something that's

high enough so that you feel hope and enthusiasm

as you observe yourself moving towards the goal.

So you might well ask yourself, this is the

whole point of humanity's education in real.

in the real sense, or any education worth its salt,

because education isn't about how you describe

the world of facts. That's a narrow scientific

education that might be useful for a particular

subspecialty, for the reason of advancement

of a certain brand of knowledge. But education

overall is something like the development of vision.

It's like, well, if you could have what

you wanted, what would it be? The question then

is, well, what should you want? And what should

what should you want in a manner that also grants

you what you necessarily need? And then what should

you have that you want and need that you could

have with other people? And now you're starting

to come up with something like a philosophical vision.

It's like, well, how are you going to conduct yourself optimally so your marriage

is as positive as it can be? Well, obviously,

you're going to have to take your wife into account.

So then you have that shared vision, that necessity of shared vision, which is part

of shared identity. And so you might think, well,

little play would be nice. Some love would be all right.

Some mutual respect. Hey, we could throw that in there.

Some genuine caring for each other

through times of trouble, because those times will come.

Something stable enough so we can rely on it

and trust each other, because that's a lot easier

than not trusting each other, even though it might not be that easy to establish.

You can think vision, what do you want? And the more deeply you take that.

necessity, the more your vision integrates and

the longer term it becomes. And so that's like the

development of a monotheism in some real sense,

because you're hammering all your micro visions.

into some unified macro vision that has the

highest possible mode of being at the pinnacle.

And you need to shape that. Now, the alternative

to not shaping that is that you don't shape it.

So then you're incoherent. And if you're incoherent,

you're anxious because anxiety marks incoherency technically.

And you're hopeless because if you're

not climbing up to a pinnacle that's worth climbing

to, then you're not doing anything worthwhile.

And if you're not doing anything worthwhile,

you don't have any positive emotion because

positive emotion marks doing something worthwhile.

And so there's no alternative. The only alternative

to developing a vision is having a very bad vision.

That's all there is. And so you want to have a

noble vision of intent and purpose. And you have to

have one that's of sufficient staying power and

profundity so that it doesn't fragment in response

to the inevitable catastrophic challenges of life.

And that's the fundamental religious question in

some sense is that is there a manner of is there

a mode of vision that enables resilience in the

face of catastrophe? That's a perfectly reasonable

way of looking at it in the face of the ultimate catastrophe of mortality and death.

And maybe even more than that, the ultimate catastrophe of

atrocity, mortality, and death, is there a

vision that can sustain you in the face of that?

And that is the fundamental religious question.

And we even know the answer to that to some degree,

interestingly enough, one of the ways that you

fortify yourself against catastrophe is by facing

the possibility of that catastrophe voluntarily. All of the psychological,

neurophysiological, cognitive, behavioral data, all stack up, pharmacological data,

all stack up on that point. If you, if your goal is

to develop a vision that will sustain you through

catastrophe and the reality of atrocity, then

you can develop that vision. And you develop that

vision in part by being willing to undertake

exposing yourself to the worst possible catastrophes of life.

I just walked down the Via de la Rosa the

other day, Jonathan Pazio, a good friend of mine,

and the cross, the crucifixion, is in some sense

the instantiation of the suffering of mortality.

That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

Now that's not all it is, but that'll do for the time being.

The stations of the cross, which are part of a story, part of a vision of being,

are then opportunities to expose yourself voluntarily

to the, to the range of terrible things that

might happen to you in your life, to prepare yourself for that.

So you might have the vision of yourself

and you'd say, well, I could never stand up to

the mob demanding my blood, where I could never

stand up to the tyrant who's willing to throw me to the mob.

It's like, well, that's on you because.

you're going to face tyrants and you're going to face mobs.

And if you're not constituted well enough, if your vision doesn't encompass a self

that's you that cannot prevail against the tyrant and

the mob, then you're going to become the victim of

the mob and a slave. Period. That's going to happen in your life.

Now, it might not happen in the same dramatic manner that's played out, let's say,

in the story of the Passion. It might not happen

the way it happens to a superhero in a movie.

It might happen to you by micro degrees across

decades, but doesn't matter. That's even worse in some sense.

You know, maybe you, you have a tyrant at work, petty tyrant, and you're enslaved by

your inability to stand up to his petty tyranny

over the process of 15 years, or that happens in your marriage.

That happens to people all the time.

It's still very useful to know that what you were

confronting was a pharaonic tyrant and that you failed to free yourself from slavery,

just because it took 10,000 micro iterations

of that process before it was fully manifest,

doesn't make it any less real. And so then when you apprehend a challenge like, well,

I might have to face the mob, it's like, yeah, well,

are you put together well enough to face the mob?

Could you proclaim your own innocence in a manner

that would be compelling? Could you make a case

for yourself? And if the answer is no, it's like,

well, it's time to generate a better vision then,

and time to act it out. And you might as well do

that before the flood comes. It's no time to build

an arc after the floods here. You want to be

prepared for that. One of the things we know from the

psychotherapeutic literature, every brand of

psychotherapy, regardless of its scientific,

fundamental, or its philosophical orientation

has converged on the idea that voluntary exposure

to challenge is curative. And so to what challenge,

well, I don't know what the extent of that is,

it's like, to all the challenges of life.

And so you have to develop a vision of yourself that's

capable of withstanding all the challenges of life.

One of the things that many people have said

to me is I gave out a proposition, delivered a

proposition a few years ago that while you know

your parents are going to die, and of course

that's a terrible thing. And so then, well,

one question might be, well, who do you want to be

at the funeral? And you better think that through

because you're going to be someone at the funeral.

And then you might think, well, who could you be

optimally? You could be the person that gathers

together your grieving family so that they're

born strengthened as a consequence of the loss.

That'd be pretty good. Be better than the alternative,

and maybe it's something to aim for.

And that's a terrifying thing to apprehend. It's like, well,

how are you going to pull yourself together when

the catastrophe comes? And you might think about

that in relationship to your own death.

And you certainly could think about that in relationship to.

your treatment at the hands of the vicious

mob, which has become a more germane issue.

And in modern times, who do you have to be in order

to withstand all the vicissitudes of life? And

we know the answer to that to some degree is like,

what should your identity be predicated on in

the fundamental analysis? It's like, well, it's the

open attention that you devote, even to the worst

of all possible outcomes. And you could easily

say that the more capable you are, how could it.

be? Eyes fully open. The better you're going to be in a situation of catastrophe.

Obviously, how could it be any different? And so you think,

well, that's all self-evidence, like, yeah, it is,

but it's taken a very long time to figure out.

Because you can't ask yourself, for example,

what's the core principle of a healthy identity?

And it's something like the willingness and ability

to adopt the stance of optimal challenge in the face of the catastrophe of life.

And the reality of atrocity. That's what it is.

It's a stance. It's like a dancing stance in some sense.

It's a playful stance. If it's optimized

particularly, but it's eyes wide open, full front,

man, no matter what comes at you, you're going to face it.

And that's the ultimate challenge.

But why would you be able to face the ultimate

barriers in life? If you weren't willing to face

otherwise, if it comes upon you unawares, you're

just going to collapse. And then the catastrophe

is going to be far worse than it might have otherwise been.

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