Zen Neoplatonism: Healing the Meaning Crisis Between East and West

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:17][music] >> Welcome everybody.

[00:00:20]Welcome again to another episode of Lectern. Um I'm really excited today because I think we're we're on the precipice of like a a real like flow into something.

[00:00:31]Um at the time of recording, Mark Miller's course Generations of Joy started yesterday and it is phenomenal.

[00:00:39]He's He's just such a firecracker as a lecturer.

[00:00:41]>> Oh, I love Mark. That's why I I was so keen to get him on the Lectern. As you know, I've been trying to get him to replace me at UFT and I and I want him to teach as one as long as he wants to teach on the Lectern.

[00:00:55]Yeah, and you know, the that man has a knack for it. Like he he really brought in a lot of like the the hard science, but also um especially in the Q&A when folks were asking questions, really bringing the philosophy um and kind of what it is to think of predictive processing within a more contemplative kind of perspective.

[00:01:16]>> Yeah. And I think to that end, um it really sets us up nicely for the purposes of our call because today is really just talk about between East and West, which is uh your course that's coming out following Mark's, which is an introduction to Zen Neoplatonism. Um Yes. And this is something which I think if you guys have been following uh John for a number of years, have heard Zen Neoplatonism being dropped in.

[00:01:40]Um I've tried to make it an official thing. Like when I got my new um like national identity card, they asked me what my religion was and I hit others and they didn't let me fill in the field. I know it was I would have put Zen Neoplatonism. Um I guess it just hasn't hit that bureaucratic level yet. So, instead what we're going to be doing, maybe this course will help, is to actually kind of talk through like what is Zen Neoplatonism?

[00:02:07]Um what do you see its position, nature, and function being in our times? Um what separates it or distinguishes it, sorry, distinguishes it is a better word, not separates, right? Because it's properly dialogical. Um what really distinguishes it from a legacy traditions, wisdom traditions, um organized religion as we understand it. And um yeah, a few things to kind of parse out. This is actually quite a big thing and I know before we hit the red button, you were telling me that this probably isn't the full um piece. It's the start of something.

[00:02:44]What do you think, John?

[00:02:47]It is definitely the start of something.

[00:02:49]Um and um I I again, I'm not starting a religion or anything like that. What I'm trying to do is to share as best I can what is coming out of continues to come out of the philosophical Silk Road pilgrimage. Um Zen represents one of the big synoptic integrations from Asia, East Asia, and Neoplatonism is as you know, it is and some of the first episodes are going to be coming out soon, represents the you know, the spiritual backbone of the Abrahamic West, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Paganism, Neoplatonism was a thread running through them all.

[00:03:30]And so if we could get these two uh the two opposite ends of the Silk Road to talk to each other in a profound way, I think that would help uh help orient people most appropriately to apprehend and appreciate um the advent of the sacred that I believe we're getting increasing evidence is the Weltgeist, the spirit of the world's response to the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time of the meaning crisis. So, I want to be clear that that's what I I'm trying to do. I'm trying to I'm trying to give people a framework um that will afford them interacting with the advent of the sacred. I don't know what that is going to bring.

[00:04:16]Um and so, but I I'm This is my best attempt and it'll it'll be it'll it'll be filled with flaws, of course, but this is my best attempt to try and transmute what I saw and underwent and is still germinating in me into a framework that people can put into practice.

[00:04:42]So, in addition to doing the meta practice of pilgrimage, how would they integrate such pilgrimage back into their lives and their their everyday ecology of practices. So, that's the intent of Zen Neoplatonism. Yeah. Yes, it's like you're not you're not found you're not founding a new religion in a building, but you're you're kind of threading together what has historically already been there because I think that's part of the case you were making in Seeing God Again for the First Time, eh?

[00:05:14]Yes, and and part of what I'm doing, we won't be reading it per se at least in the first course we do on Zen Neoplatonism, but I'm reading a lot about Pyrrho.

[00:05:24]Pyrrho actually, we have good documented history, went to India um he's just after Plato. He's around the time of Aristotle. He goes to India, he comes back and he creates Pyrrhonism and there's there's a growing body of literature. I have three scholastic texts, academic texts on Pyrrho. What Pyrrho basically did was figure out how to bring Buddhism into Greek philosophical culture. Huh. And so we have a we have a historical precedent for this. One of the books is in fact written by a Zen practitioner, a Zen Roshi.

[00:06:01]And he's basically making the argument that Pyrrho is a complementary way of getting at what Zen does through meditation.

[00:06:11]Um and Pyrrho was and so we already have a historical example of this. Great.

[00:06:21]Um and the Silk Road bringing to fruition this kind of meeting. Now, Zen didn't exist Pyrrho was before Zen takes shape and of course Neoplatonism wasn't fully in flower and so Pyrrho is helpful, but he's not to my mind, he's not sufficient. But what I'm saying is that we have clear historical precedents and provenance for doing this project. There's like a genealogy. Almost.

[00:06:49]>> Yes. Yes. Yes.

[00:06:51]>> Great. So, I it was something that I'm kind of always aware of this this question of like, okay, well, where are where are people now?

[00:07:00]And what are the I suppose like gateways or what are the tributaries that come into the the river, right? So, Yeah. um particularly when I was younger, I was very interested in mysticism, right? More more interested in mysticism. Um as I kind of, you know, went deeper a little bit, it started to morph for me into a kind of spirituality. I started to see spirituality as a as an idea or as like an umbrella term for certain, let's say, disciplines or books or interests. Um you helped pull me into the philosophy of it. Um and then of course there are folks who are born in religion. So, I'm wondering like what is the what can you give us a kind of like distinctions, not dichotomies because they they have to be a relationship with each other, but as distinctions between mysticism, philosophy, spirituality, and religion. What would you what would you offer?

[00:07:54]>> Yeah.

[00:07:56]And so they do they do bleed into each other. I want to talk a lot about that somewhere on our talk today. I just gave a talk at UTism at the University of Toronto about um we need to include religion in our studying of of human cognition, but we have to pay more attention to religious studies, comparative theology, interreligious dialogue because we carry an inappropriate European Enlightenment uh colonialist, imperialist, ultimately racist model of what religion is as we try to understand it. So, we have to be really, really careful. And you and I probably get back to that. So, if people will just trust me for now that um I'm not speaking of these term I'm trying to speak in a way that addresses that that critique what we will come to. Um so I think what mysticism emphasizes is the proposal that altered states of consciousness, that there are altered states of consciousness that are unlike most of our altered states of consciousness.

[00:08:56]Most of our alternate states of consciousness fail in comparison to the intelligibility of our everyday consciousness and cognition. And for many people, that's simply what mysticism means. It just means woolly, blurry, vague stuff that is not that fails by comparison to how clear and intelligible and how much sense we can make in our everyday state of consciousness and cognition and conscience.

[00:09:22]Mysticism says, no, there are alternative states of consciousness is alternative states of consciousness that surpass our everyday state of consciousness and cognition and conscience for their clarity and their ability to give us insight into a more fundamental the more fundamental nature of reality or at least a realization of how we can realize reality is perhaps a better way of putting it where realization has that double meaning that I like to play with in an In Des Mondian fashion.

[00:09:58]So, um uh that's mysticism. Philosophy tends to instead propose and it doesn't have to be analytic philosophy. Philosophy generally tends to propose I'm going to talk about philosophy in the sense in which it can bear on spirituality, religion, mysticism. So, this is philosophy as a way of life.

[00:10:23]This is Pierre Hadot's fundamental notion. And this is the idea that dialogical practices, imaginational practices, reflective practices, argumentative practices um can can enhance what it is to be reasonable. Where reasonable doesn't just mean being logical, but it means seeing through illusion and into reality. And so, philosophy emphasizes those elements as a way of So, philosophy is very concerned with us being irrational.

[00:10:57]Um in a way that mysticism is typically not does not as typically emphasize. Now, you can cleanly get the two together.

[00:11:05]Spinoza is a clear example of somebody who's deeply concerned with improving reason and affording a mystical realization, fancy intuitive Um and so, they don't have to be opposed to each other. So, again, we're just giving a distinction here, not a dichotomy. Um so, that I would say is the fundamental difference. Now, spirituality and religion um the those are more problematic for us.

[00:11:32]Um and here's where I'll say a little bit about the critique. Um what all that research shows, the ethnography the ethnography uh that comes out of religious studies uh uh the anthropology of religion especially more recent stuff uh interreligious studies, comparative theology um all of that. What it basically shows is there is no pure religion. Religions are not homogeneous, autonomous, self-enclosed entities. They are dynamical systems that are ecological in nature. They are constantly developing. They're constantly interlocking and interpenetrating with each other in very complex ways, often across significant different distances. Um There the people within a religion don't form a homogeneity. There really isn't a Christianity. There is a family resemblance network of Christianities.

[00:12:27]Same thing with Buddhism. Um again, so it's an ecology of ecologies. And they're all interpenetrating and then what we might call the meta-ecology of Christianity in scare quotes, just to give it a label. Right? Is also interpenetrating and interlocking.

[00:12:43]Um It's not pristine. Religions are always born out of the syncretism of other things around them. And they continue to be so. Um uh uh and so, thinking of religion as pristine or pure is just significantly undermined uh by uh the data. The genealogy that comes out of that research shows that the idea of religion as a construct, which most cultures don't even have as a construct. Construct is a category is a concept that picks out a determinate category in the world. Mhm. Um that most cultures don't have the construct of religion at all. Um they have something like sacredness, but uh religion's not there.

[00:13:32]Many of them don't have anything that cleanly or easily maps onto the Western notion of the supernatural.

[00:13:39]And and and and and by the way, just having a relationship to the supernatural the if you believe in ghosts or crystals, does that make you religious?

[00:13:48]Um uh that uh uh and and and like there doesn't seem to be a significant role for the supernatural in something like Zen. Um uh and so, uh you have to you have to give up the idea that um there's this clean category.

[00:14:08]Um the category emerged out of European colonialism. Um I usually don't run this kind of argument, but in this case, it just operates so cleanly and clearly. Um So, the idea was and it you know, that and this is sort of a Hegelian proposal that uh uh Protestant Christianity is the ultimate form of religion and we can evaluate things on how similar they are to Protestant Christianity. And when they're similar, they're religious and when they're far away, they're superstitious.

[00:14:39]Um and the people other than the Europeans are not scientific, so we have to uh make sense of them in terms of their religious identity. So, we will count and control the people in the colonies in terms of their religious identity and we will assume that people have a singular and complete uh identity because of the religious wars in Europe.

[00:15:01]Um whereas in fact, many, many people have multiple religious uh participation and orientations. In China, it is not not unusual for people uh to you know, practice Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. That is not In fact, that was that was one of a a a long a long-standing tradition in China. Yeah. Uh and so, what I would say is of religion then is religion is something like a comprehensive orientation that we use in order to interpret and integrate what this is Taves' idea, special experiences. Experiences experiences that are salient um that are anomalous, that uh that challenge our relevance realization and our predictive processing and stand out to us and we want to make them memorable. We want to we want to wrap them in mnemonic uh wrapping paper so that we can easily recover and re-practice them. And when we do that and we feel that those special uh those those special wrappings uh those special uh uh anomalies salient anomalies are putting us in touch with something that is transformative bringing us closer to satisfying our our need to be connected to something that's significant that's really real, then we can start talking about the sacred. So, I think that's religion is this comprehensive orientation to allow us to interpret and integrate um experiences, realization is a better word that happen on this special to sacred uh spectrum. Um That's religion. Spirituality is the attempt to do that uh outside of institutions because one has lost trust in institutions uh because one is suffering the meaning crisis. So, um the meaning crisis means we do not have shareable mutually correctable meaning, which means it's difficult for us to trust in each other. Which means we have a trust apocalypse, which means we try to do religion on our own. And then we have spirituality is uh to a large degree, the religion of me by me, for me and to me. Um and this is not my view, by the way. This is the view of people who do work on religion and spirituality, academic research. Um Spirituality is a proper part of religion in so far as there is a degree of how you participate in religion that should do deal with your individuation, of course. But spirituality is an attempt to isolate that and make it something completely egocentric um in nature.

[00:17:43]Yeah, it as you were as you were talking, I was kind of like I'm doing a a little bit like a proto-mapping.

[00:17:50]Um Now, let's let's run let's run this by you, but it feels like it's it's something like calling it like the four like the four reductive misunderstandings, right? So, I think all all of these four angles, right? Are trying to ameliorate the meaning crisis, but I think we're Yeah. we're also having had inherited you know, for various cultural and historical reasons, not just in the West, you know, the the East has it as well, right? As I and I encounter this every day, is that like I'm sure mapping it to your four P's is like philosophy is reduced to only propositions.

[00:18:28]Right.

[00:18:28]>> Then spirituality is reduced only to um engineering, right? Or practices, things that you do and and psychotechnologies and tools. Um mysticism is reduced only to perspective, right? Yeah.

[00:18:42]>> Which is the the the mush the mushroom mysticism, right? The kind of oh, you blew my mind and religion is in a way reduced only to its rituals or its practices, but actually the case that I see you making is that like all four of these all interpenetrate at different We can't segment it that way. We can't And they interpenetrate for a reason. They need each other. They fundamentally need each other cuz the four kinds of knowing I think what you're doing is very very thought-provoking. The four kinds of knowing fundamentally need each other.

[00:19:13]Um and and so, we should we should adopt a more humble attitude uh towards uh um the legacy religions that have tried to give us living exemplars traditions Mhm. influenced by win living exemplars traditions of collective intelligence trying to come up with right? A way to integrate all of those spirituality, which should exist, but it should exist within a religious framework that also encompasses mysticism and should also encompass philosophy as a way of life. I don't know if religion is the right term for all of those anymore.

[00:19:52]But traditionally, uh given what I've said about the term is just really a bad term actually in a lot of ways. I think we we we might want to talk about, you know, people having religious consciousness and cognition and character and conscience individually and collectively rather than talking about perhaps religion per se, but I don't know. I I mean that is something that's much very much up in the air for me.

[00:20:17]I've been I've been influenced by so many people um that I'm trying to um I Everybody, this is a work in progress.

[00:20:26]I'm I'm trying my best with the help of all these people, both people I can talk to and people I can read from, and Ethan is getting me to be able to talk to a lot of these people like like William Desmond and hopefully Mark Wynn and others. I'm trying to come up with how can we best make sense of what we need to apprehend and uh perceive and appreciate so that we can collectively on a worldwide scale awaken from the meaning crisis. That is That's That's what I'm most in service to.

[00:21:00]Well, I think good to double-click on that because I think some of the one of the biggest markers at least that I've seen from the people that you've been in conversation with that I've had the the joy and privilege of also be able to enjoy um is kind of this like intercategorical lean.

[00:21:18]>> Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, which is not an old idea. Like I remember when I was very young people asking me I went to a Buddhist childcare center growing up.

[00:21:28]And it was a really amazing thing to kind of experience at like 6 years old we'd actually have like a time slot for meditation.

[00:21:34]Um so it was it was very difficult for many of us, the teachers especially.

[00:21:40]But I remember kind of holding that question as I was growing up like is Buddhism a religion?

[00:21:46]And then it's like oh it's more of a religious philosophy.

[00:21:50]Right? And it's like oh but those those two are kind of like sitting in this gray area of like you know a a religious philosophy and then when I look at say Confucianism I'm a big I have a deep interest in Confucius.

[00:22:03]Right? That in some Taoist temples, if you go to them, Confucius is a deity.

[00:22:09]Right? Yeah. Same as Mencius and there is a kind of syncretism that is happening and like really all the time it keeps evolving. I went to a temple the other day not the other but like a couple years ago a couple years ago a friend of mine Ben sent me a a picture. Uh and he was at the temple for Chinese New Year which had just passed a couple of weeks ago.

[00:22:31]Um and he was like dude, did you know there's a car god?

[00:22:36]I went What do you mean?

[00:22:39]He's like yeah, there's this like new statue at the temple. It's a it's a car god. It's a guy standing on a wheel and then you go there and then you tell them your car plate number uh and then you pray that your your you don't get into an accident. Right? So, obviously there are ways that the thing I'm trying to point to is the ways in which not just religion as a as a dynamic system evolves but the ways in which we interface with um whether it's the it's the propositions, the myths, the practices, right? The rituals, they are also continually evolving as you're naming. So, my question is is something like what is the difference between a religious framework and a philosophical framework and how does that reconcile this intercategorical religious philosophy piece?

[00:23:33]Which is a is an invitation to Zen Neoplatonism. I think that's what Um I'm fine I find the line between philo I mean so if we mean by philosophy analytic like conceptual analysis and propositional argumentation then it's very distinct from religion. If we mean philosophy as a way of life and we're talking about things like Stoicism and Neoplatonism, it's very hard to keep them um so for example, there is an ongoing and it looks like irresolvable academic debate about whether or not Stoicism is a religion.

[00:24:10]Um and I find this um I I find the the failure to solve the problem more insightful than any of the the so-called solutions to the problem.

[00:24:22]Um Uh and so I I I guess if I if I had to if I had to make a way of distinguishing them without claiming that they have a dichotomous relationship is I would say that as I said before, philosophy puts more emphasis on reason as what is the the the faculty by which we overcome self-deception. So, if we think of reason not as just rational argumentation cuz that would put us back in philosophy as analytic argumentation. If we say no no what we're talking about is reason and we're talking about a systemic throughout my entire psyche and systematic throughout my entire life and reliable set of practices, ecology of practices for reducing self-deception, then philosophy would say what we're trying to do is cultivate your reason. Um that extended notion of reason, the kind of reason we invoke when we talk about the reasonable person within the legal system within within a moral system.

[00:25:30]I think that religion um in so far as we're distinguishing it religion is putting more of an emphasis on religio on the more primordial sense of connectedness that I associate with predictive processing, relevance realization, right? That that optimal gripping that is presupposed by religion, that ability to orient and connect that is so fundamental. And so I think religion is about trying to explicate celebrate, educate uh religio.

[00:26:04]Uh now again, those two things will not stay separate from each other. The deeper The deeper you get into reason you will start bumping into religio. The more you try to educate religio you will hit self-deception and illusion and self-bullshitting and the more you will need a reason. And so the philosophy and the uh and the religion uh interpenetrate each other. I find it so amusing. I cuz I'm reading a lot right now. I'll be reading this book about you know they'll be certain products that we got to get the philosophy out of you know Christianity get back and then they'll invoke all these philosophical terms in order to try and explain their theology on what they're doing and it's like like um Yeah, so we have to stop being ignorant.

[00:26:51]We have to stop being We have to stop pretending. We have to stop being Eurocentric and also we have to and this goes to the heart of what you and I are talking about which is can we can we reorient, recalibrate how we uh perceive, how we apprehend, how we appreciate the sacred? And what this is saying is I I think for example we should replace the term syncretism uh which is largely a pejorative term with synergy frequently happening. And I would put it to you that um and many That a man a deal. I I get his name wrong. I'm trying to get it right.

[00:27:28]>> That a man a Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:32]He he basically makes the the the the the very good case that um almost everybody has a synergistic or he he calls it syncretistic religion.

[00:27:43]For example, most people in the United States who would call themselves Christians, they're Anglo-American Protestant and all those terms matter.

[00:27:52]Anglo-American Protestant uh capitalistic Christians. And with many of those already having a religious function. Um Americanism and capitalism are definitely religions and people have made very good cases for that and repeatedly.

[00:28:10]Um The Enchantment of Mammon is an excellent book on uh we can talk about that later if you want. Um And so I I I I I think what we have to do is think of this synergy.

[00:28:22]I like to use this phrase semiotic symbiosis.

[00:28:26]Uh symbiosis is when two previous life forms eventually come together but we're talking about it at the level of meaning semiotic symbiosis. Uh when I was giving my talk on Saturday about how instead of seeing this as a problem or something that would give comfort to the village atheist for saying look look it's all like this it's all this I I I I I take what happens in Equus. I read them actually the the the last part of Equus where Dysart is talking >> Yeah yeah yeah.

[00:28:57]And it's like why can't you see that semiotic symbiosis as the lifeblood of the sacred? Why does it have to be it's only if you have that completely moribund and I ultimately think unjustifiable and even immoral construct of religion that you think this would be a refutation of religion.

[00:29:18]But if you give that up if you give up the pure pristine impermeable permanent notion of the sacred and move to this um then you can say well no that's the lifeblood of the sacred. That's why Jesus of Nazareth gathers all these titles to them to him they get magnetized to him.

[00:29:38]Um and and of course the same thing with the Buddha it's why you see you know Stoicism and Platonism and Aristotelianism and right coming and Pythagoreanism coming into Neoplatonism and then integrating with Christianity or you see Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism which is already influenced by a bunch of things integrating together to give you Chan that then goes to Japan and integrates with Shinto to become Zen. Like that is the sacred. That's the philosophical Silk Road. And so we need to re we need to radically deconstruct our current notion of religion and even our sort of contemporary academic notion of philosophy to really adequately answer your question so we can properly orient and connect to the advent of the sacred which is which is going to be an instance of synergistic semiotic symbiosis.

[00:30:54]>> [music]