Telos Initiative
Telos is a term used by the philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause or purpose of something. Our telos is to seek truth and cultivate wisdom using dialogue and rational discussion. The podcast will cover a wide range of topics in various genres and we hope to grow with our audience toward our ultimate purpose in this mystifying existence.
Telos Initiative
Episode 16 - Truth
Dive deep into the exploration of truth as we unravel its multi-dimensional nature in our latest podcast episode. We engage in thought-provoking discussions, examining how truth shapes our knowledge landscape and informs our understanding of the world. Listeners will journey from observable facts to the deeper layers of metaphorical truths embedded in our cultural narratives, shedding light on how these elements intertwine.
We also take an insightful look at the Dunning-Kruger effect, revealing how confidence in our knowledge can sometimes blind us to the vast complexities beneath. Through this lens, we discuss wisdom as a synthesis of knowledge and experience—a guiding force that shapes our perceptions and interactions in meaningful ways.
As we discuss the importance of collective wisdom, listeners will gain insight into how histories and narratives shape cultural understanding, influencing contemporary beliefs. The episode encourages a culture of humility and self-awareness in truth-seeking, allowing for a richer understanding of our thoughts and beliefs. The path to truth is not just about accumulating knowledge; it’s about the willingness to confront uncomfortable realities and learning from diverse perspectives.
Join us for this engaging exploration of truth and its diverse implications, and discover how aligning ourselves with a spirit of truth can lead to profound transformations. Listen in, and don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to stay connected as we navigate these essential conversations together!
Hello everyone, welcome to the Telos Initiative podcast. I'm Angelo Cole,
Chris:I'm Chris Vigil
Matt:and I'm Matt Maes.
Angelo:Today we are going to be talking about the third of the three transcendental values, which is truth. So before we've done a podcast on beauty and we also did one on goodness, so this is the last of the big three. So we always like to start off with at least trying to get a sense of what we're talking about and maybe at least some sort of loose definition. So, uh, chris, why don't you kick us off? What?
Chris:okay, see, usually we wait to the end of the podcast to do this. I mean, I mean not necessarily something.
Angelo:Usually we at least try to define our terms a little bit, sure?
Matt:um, you got a notepad man, thank you, I know it's so professional you kind of blindsided me with the whole transcendental value thing.
Chris:I didn't know that's what we were calling them, but I like that. It's good. It's transcendental value, so I thought truth, being one of the three driving forces upon human consciousness, is a spirit of being impressed unto reality through the mind a spirit of being impressed unto reality, or on say unto reality through the mind.
Chris:So, truth, right. We like to think of truth as this thing that's out there, right, I think that was a saying in the 90s, right, about aliens. The truth is out there, but, um, it's something that stems from us, kind of like beauty. Right, beauty is the element within us that flows forth and that enacts upon our minds. I don't think truth is like this thing that we can find and that we can hold. We can't even hold it in our mind, but it's a spirit of being that drives us forwardly through life.
Angelo:That's interesting that drives us forwardly through life. That's interesting, so let me chew on that. For a second Spirit of being. I guess I usually associate truth more with a spirit of knowing, or rather more like the ultimate goal of knowing.
Angelo:Like if you A lot of times, the three transcendental values I kind of think of as, um, the goals of their respective domains. So truth would be in the epistemological domain, right, okay, yeah, you, there are things you can know, and ultimately, the thing that you would like to know is the truth. That's kind of the goal of what the pursuit of knowledge is is to know the fullness of what things actually are. And you can pursue truth without knowing what the truth is. Right, it's like this moving target that you sort of get better at honing in on. And the same kind of goes with goodness.
Angelo:Right, we were talking about goodness as the goodness domain is that of teleology or action. Right, the goal of your behavior should be to achieve the ultimate good, and beauty is a little. That was the one that was a little trickier, because beauty, I would say, is in the domain of ontology, which is being, which beauty? The definition there was somewhat tricky, but I think we came up with something akin to like. Beauty is the hidden order that everything strives to be towards. It's somewhat associated with life. A lot of things that are beautiful we associate with life, if you remember.
Chris:The flourish.
Angelo:Yes, yeah, so for something to be fully alive and fully present and fully being is to be fully beautiful.
Matt:So, like ontology, beauty, epistemology, truth, teleology, goodness At least that's how I like to try and frame it yeah and I think truth can be elusive in a similar sense as beauty as well, because while there, there's truth in all things and everything also has to do with truth, and you and you could even say that when we're talking about truth, we're talking about, I should say, when we're talking about any given subject, we're really striving for truth. That's really the central subject of what we're talking about.
Angelo:Why else would we?
Matt:be talking about it Because we're trying to get to it, yeah, to a true knowing sense of things.
Matt:Right, and it's an onion skinning as well it's like we could say the truth is not just this one point here. There can be a point where there is truth, but you have to be it's, it's multi-dimensional. I mean, you have to be able to see all these different facets to really try and apprehend truth. And I think you really got it that that it's something that eludes our grasp. We could say that we, we borrow truth, we're speaking truth, we're imparting truth. It's, it's something that's coming through us, but it's something that's coming through us, but it's something that we, we strive for. At the same time, we never we can never get our minds beyond truth.
Matt:There's nothing right that we can like aim past or beyond what's actually true right you could.
Angelo:You could say that you never come to fully know truth, right, because if you did know the full truth, you would be omniscient, and so truth is, um, something we're always growing towards, and I want to press you on something a little bit. You mentioned that you said you see a little bit of truth in everything, right? What do you mean by truth when you say that? Like, how? How is truth within everything? Do you mean in the sense that everything?
Chris:has a true nature.
Angelo:Do you mean that there's something that you can fully know about something there's?
Matt:a level, because, because we're talking about truth, we're talking about not only things that are factual, but things, but the way that things are interconnected and wisdom and there's so much. I mean all these things are tied up within this truth, right, Right, right. So if you're truly seeking truth, then you are truly trying to investigate to the best of your ability all these different things, which means you may have to go way over in this direction and see things that you couldn't possibly see just from this vantage point over here, you may have to go all the way over here to see this point.
Matt:And wonderful thing about being able to communicate with people from different perspectives and from different backgrounds is you don't have to spend all that time going all the way over here and all the way over here and all the way over here, when we can simply communicate amongst each other and pass information much, much faster than us having to go ourselves to all those different places. Right? So then you can see truth as this multi-faceted, multi-dimensional thing and not have to go through all the you know, slings and arrows that maybe someone else went to. But you have to be able to connect through empathy, to be able to, you know, put yourself in their shoes, so to speak. And then that I mean really loving truth, really loving the pursuit of truth. Even though you may know that you may never fully know truth, you still love as much of it as you can experience, as much of it can be imparted through you so there's an element of uh aligning your passions with the pursuit of knowledge and not just pursuing it from a rational basis Loving it for itself.
Angelo:yeah, I mean, maybe let's talk about different types of truth, right? Because you mentioned, there's factual truth and that's the obvious one that everybody knows.
Angelo:Hey, this is a thing that actually happened, or this is something that it's like an unchanging pattern across time. Right, that is reliant, you can rely on it. So that's kind of what science is ultimately based on. You want to know this type of truth, this type of truth that if I look at it and someone else looks at it, they're going to get the same answer. One plus one always equals two, no matter who you are, no matter what species you are Although I don't know another species that can do mathematics but I mean, hey, you never know, we've got Mac the Buffalo over here just doing calculus working at NASA?
Matt:I don't know maybe chimpanzees can do basic addition. I don't know. You might be able to say that I would put it past them honestly.
Angelo:I don't know too much about chimpanzee intelligence, not a monkey expert.
Chris:So you don't have any biological scientific facts to back up your understanding, I guess, or your knowledge.
Angelo:Well, I mean, I guess, not, I don't mean that.
Chris:Yeah, like kind of like, thanks for calling me out, Chris, Like yeah, I don't have facts to back up, but facts matter. So I just mean, like you know, talking about factual truths, right? So there's scientific truths that we can potentially look up on the internet, right?
Angelo:Well, I would even go as far as to say the scientific truths are ones that you can empirically observe for yourself. I can prove well, I can at least demonstrate to myself the basic addition sure, yeah, you can demonstrate that to yourself too.
Chris:And if we get into oh, was it euclid who had like the proofs right. You can do some sort of weird reason, logical thing where you can prove that one plus one is in fact two.
Angelo:I don't know about Euclid, but Well, that's Euclidean geometry.
Chris:Maybe you're right.
Angelo:I think Euclidean I was thinking more Aristotle, with axioms like the law of identity A does not equal or A always equals A, and the law of non-contradiction is A does not equal B, which are just fundamental axioms of knowledge, and the law of non-contradiction is A does not equal B, which are just fundamental axioms of knowledge that you have to agree on in order for anything to work at all.
Angelo:Okay so now we're getting into epistemology 101, but before we venture too far into that domain, this is just like one type of truth that we're talking about here this is like let's just call it factual truth, right?
Chris:the type of truth that is empirically observed well, you can empirically observe scientific things, like you can replicate experiments, potentially right right so you got math down, we've got science down, but well, it's, it's also history, right, I can observe a fact.
Angelo:I can say this happened at this time at this place and document it.
Chris:You okay, and that's a type of truth chronological, like history as a form of chronological events. I think that's true History as trying to come to terms with humanity as a whole. It's a little different, like what drove the.
Angelo:Second World War. Well, sure, you have your is and then you have your ought, and I forget who said it. But you can't get an ought from an is right. So the factual truth deals with the is domain, but there's also the ought domain, and so if you're trying to get a grasp on like history long term, you're looking at motivations and which direction are they heading. Is it progress? Well, how do you know if it's progress unless you have an ought? What are they aiming towards? What are you aiming towards? What are you judging this other culture based on what values and value structures?
Matt:are we talking about here? I love that you went there too, because we're talking in terms of what different people's standards of truth might be.
Matt:Like say, you say the people who are um are in the. This is the tried and true, this is the way we've always done it. This is very you know to them very solid and very defined and very like um, you know, very dense, right, but you may have someone who can see past all of that or see a different way. Those are the innovators people who are, who are able to see what may need improvement or way where some ways may have gone astray, completely right, but they in not going down this, this path, they are. They may look crazy.
Matt:So the people who are very into their insurance is the tried and true, this is the way it's always been, and and and all that stuff. And then, by the standards of the tried and true, people like well, you don't know how all this, all this works. How did you and this person truly it may not have immersed themselves in all of the? You know all the lore that went into the building up of this thing, but at the same time, it's like that doesn't really matter so much, because you see the bigger picture, you see a way that it could have gone in a completely different direction, that none of that would have been relevant. Right, that's a key word right there. Relevant, yeah, what's relevant like, what's true, and then what's the point? Right, being able to identify the point, that's a high level skill.
Angelo:Everything always comes back to the telos, right? It's about your aim, and what's relevant to your goal matters, okay. So I think truth in the context of what's relevant to you brings you closer to your goal. That's what you're trying to call truth, and that that is where you can kind of see a subjective element of truth, where it kind of varies depending on different cultures and different timelines and histories and groups of people, because they've all got these different aims that they're headed towards, and so truth looks completely different to someone who's aiming towards, you know, a nationalistic unifying of the country versus someone who's aiming towards, you know, reviving their culture that's been discriminated against, or a Globalist economy. There they're all looking at different aspects, and things that are bad for one guy Seem good for another guy. Um, and to call those types of things true is tricky, and that's why a lot of people kind of dismiss truth as being entirely subjective, because it's kind of like Well, I think the biggest reason too is because it doesn't submit to our opinions.
Matt:We have to submit to it.
Angelo:Oh, there you go. That's probably the difference.
Matt:Yeah, and we can hardly talk about that without talking about the. You know, if you guys are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, where you know I love the way this is referred to like you learn a little bit and then you're up here at basically Mount Stupid and you have to go down and learn some more before you realize like oh, how much there is to know actually. And then as you learn and you learn, and you learn and you learn, then you can actually ascend towards that point of actually you actually know something.
Matt:You actually you know you've actually got a fair amount of expertise, right yeah, you've actually got a fair amount of expertise, right yeah. So for those of you who don't, know the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Angelo:It's sort of like a bell curve of knowledge versus your confidence in a topic. So when you start off and learn a little bit about a topic, your confidence is actually very high oftentimes and you think, just because you did a few Google searches and looked at some of the first links on something, that you know what you're talking about because you made the minimal effort of research. And it's popular online to accuse your opponent of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Matt:If you're trying to insult their intelligence.
Chris:Yes, Very well put Thank you.
Matt:Thank you for breaking that down.
Chris:It's funny because I googled truth right before I came here. Dunning-kr. Very well put, thank you. Thank you for breaking that down. It's funny because I Googled truth right before I came here.
Angelo:Yeah, All it takes is a Google search.
Matt:This is the frustrating paradox that comes with that, too, is that the people who learn more and submit to that humility and the ones who actually know what they're talking about are actually less both less less bold than the ones who actually are these boisterous think they learn a little, but they actually don't know what they're talking about. And they're loud, right right. It's like the wise people need to be louder and the people who are more bold need to be more quiet. And then I know, I know it drives me crazy.
Chris:It absolutely drives me crazy so a few things that you said. Like you know, we strive towards truth and we have to submit to truth. Now, maybe I'm biased, but on just hearing is my definition of truth, which is that it's a driving force on the mind right and it's a state of being, because that's what I mean. So I, I have a, I have a talent for talking to people about their issues. Um, that's why I got into psychology when I was in college, wanted to be a counselor. Um, because when you have that state of being, that state of truthful being, you can take people's personal, like private truths, like their experience of reality, and you can transmutate that into wisdom so I would say a specialized subset of knowledge and experience that permits one to realize in both senses of the word.
Chris:both becoming aware and making real Wisdom is about realizing meaning in life.
Angelo:Realizing meaning that was beautiful Wow so wisdom is a type of truth, would you say. I would say wisdom is the servant of truth okay, so wisdom is a like wisdom is more on the value side than the, than the factual side, right. What do you mean we were kind of talking about? Yeah, so of truth.
Matt:Wisdom is an output.
Chris:Right, I am the system, wisdom is the output, and if I have the spirit of truth, I can take experience and other people's truth and give them wisdom.
Matt:Okay, it's like it's a synthesized form of understanding.
Chris:Sure yeah.
Matt:Like wisdom is the synthesis.
Chris:And you know what it takes. It takes a lot of listening and a lot less. Oh yeah. So I say, bring on the boisterous, unwise people and I will give them what I can it can be.
Matt:Well, I'll tell you one thing. That can be frustrating is when people are so completely heels dug in their ways of thinking that change is an existential crisis for people who have so sold into ideas that are not founded in understanding and not founded in truth, but they rely on those things. I like it's a it's.
Matt:It's a death to them yeah break that down and allow that truth to come in right. So they have these, these dense blockages. So you could, you can be speaking truth to them and they could just well, what was it? I think it was jesus who had the parable about the different types of soil. Like you have the rocky soil you have the, the fertile soil, you have have this dense soil. It's a. It's a matter of the people's right it was.
Angelo:That was the parable of the sower and the seeds so it's hard ground, the seed can't take root.
Matt:Exactly it's like if you have the soil that is not going to accept that seed. How are they going to have that understanding? How is your soil going to go into the? How are your seeds going to go into the soil? I?
Angelo:think you have your you. That's where the wisdom aspect comes in. Your heart has to be aligned with, like a desire for the, the truth, you. You have to not just be wanting to know just for the sake of being right. You have to want to know, to align yourself with something greater than yourself, and you have to be willing to admit that you're wrong and changing yourself right.
Chris:So, so don't forget that spirit. The spirit of truth is not the only spirit that we can possess right. We can have the spirit of beauty, spirit of goodness, and with the spirit of truth, you don't get to choose what kind of soil you encounter out in the real world. And I'll give you a perfect example of exactly the kind of person you're talking about.
Chris:I encountered this I I, you know, I don't mean any offense, but he was kind of a weird guy. He was really, um, I guess he used to work for ibm. He worked with computers and with mathematics and I just stood there and I listened to him talk about his insights on mathematics and how our quantum theory of physics is completely incorrect and Tesla had it right, and I just, you know, mostly listened and I gave him a little bit of feedback every now and then. You know, physics is not my specialty at all, but when we talk about, you know, he was a natural philosopher and we talked about, like, the human body and human consciousness and the ether and in all these different subjects, um, and at the end of the, at the end of it all, I don't know if I had anything to offer him. But he thanked me for being a young, smart person and I think that meant a lot to him.
Angelo:Some people just want you to listen a bit, yeah exactly there's a well, we and I forget which podcast it was, but we talked about dialogue and the value of that.
Angelo:We've probably talked about every podcast but the value, the value of just. You know you put your ideas out there and you're kind of want inviting other people to test your ideas and go up against your ideas. Sometimes it's not the results you like and sometimes you're going to have to try and defend your idea, but there's a, there's a wrestling going on there, but there's also a mutual um. It's like we're to to turn a phrase. It's like we're to turn a phrase.
Angelo:It's like we're raising each other's children, like if you think of your thoughts and your beliefs as your, your children takes a village right, we're all, we're all working together and either you nurture these, these thoughts, or you have to say, hey, this thing is not aligned with what's right, it's not true, it's not.
Matt:And that's really what truth is about right.
Angelo:You're all aiming towards that same thing.
Chris:This is why it's so valuable to me to have a spirit of truth rather than a grand knowledge of the universe. You know, you can have a grand knowledge of the universe and that's great, but that's not the truth.
Angelo:Oh that's not so. There's knowledge and then there's wisdom, right, sure, yeah, so you can have all the knowledge.
Matt:But if you don't have the wisdom that goes with it, it means nothing but where? Where are you going with?
Chris:that uh just just about there. I uh look at you guys finishing. I was thinking about this neoplatonic friendship witnessing it.
Angelo:I was, um, I was thinking about Dr Manhattan. He's a character from Watchmen. For those of you who don't know, he's basically just God, because his power is being able to reconfigure matter on the particulate level, but he also has some level of omniscience, at least on a scientific level. So he, he's kind of like the materialist wet dream of like I know everything and can reconfigure everything and ultimate physics superhero up to the point where he can't even die.
Angelo:He can just. And ultimate physics superhero up to the point where he can't even die. He can just put himself back together. He is pretty freaking cool he's unkillable that's kind of the point.
Angelo:There's no deus ex machina for Dr Manhattan, there's no possible way to really kill him, and he's just this. You put a figure like that into the superhero. Well, watchman's kind of a commentary on the superhero genre in general. So him having all this power, not being being able to be destroyed, is kind of like, um, they like they're playing with the idea of superheroes. But where I was going with this was Dr Manhattan. He, he's kind of what people think the culture's kind of showing us what it thinks knowing ultimate truth looks like when you look at that figure. That's kind of showing us what it thinks knowing ultimate truth looks like when you look at that figure. That's kind of this idea of. That's probably what we would be like if we did know everything. And another uh character like that is lucy from that uh that movie, lucy it's a movie she is.
Angelo:It's based on a faulty premise that if we were able to use a hundred percent of our brain power, what would happen? Which? We already do well, we use all of our brains. It's not all at the same time. It wouldn't look like lucy, but it's fun to be like hey what if you unlocked the secret superpowers in your head?
Chris:I don't know. I think if they had changed the premise just a little bit to something like Limitless, like the drugs that she was taking, like a lot of her full potential that would have been better, but whatever but.
Angelo:Lucy's the same thing. She's just like Dr Manhattan.
Chris:Yes, but Lucy's the same thing.
Angelo:She's just like Dr Manhattan In the sense that the writer of the show is like if I could imagine what it would be like to unlock 100% of knowledge, what would I be like? And that's his take on it.
Matt:Well, and here's the question on top of that too, it's a classic premise of the ultimate knowledge, or getting all the knowledge. Why do you want all that knowledge? What would you do with?
Angelo:all that knowledge, I suspect just because Dominate people on the internet.
Chris:No, I was literally getting to domination.
Angelo:It literally is about power, I think, and Nietzsche talks about the will to power. But you could even go as far back as uh aristotle he has um, one of his dialogues is about him talking to one of the sophists who's arguing that all of human motivation is ultimately about power and being the biggest kid on the playground. And he's arguing against that and he's like no, there's something deeper that we have to strive towards being, or else we're going to be. You know lost to.
Matt:Uh, that might, is not necessarily right, right, right and um.
Angelo:What is the ultimate motivation driving your search for knowledge that matters and that will change your outlook on what truth actually is?
Matt:now we get to purpose right. What is your purpose? You know you can use that power as a facility towards something right. So you have a massive amount of influence, and by influencing I don't mean manipulating or deceiving people or trying to get people to do something that's against their best interest.
Matt:I mean speaking to what resonates with people, that that that's relevant within a collective thing. You could even say things that they already deeply desire, and you're simply someone who is pointing in a direction. Hey, this is a vision of what could be, and you unlock that for people. You unlock their imaginations and their possibilities about what could be and what ought to be. Yeah, I think that's true vision, that's's true, that's true purpose. Right, because when you as an individual person see something that also resonates with a large group of people for the greater good.
Angelo:Let's talk about stories and narrative right. A lot of times we will speak to a story being true, even if it's not factually true. And what are we saying when we say a story being true even if it's not factually true? And what are we saying when we say a story is true? You could maybe. I don't know if I want to venture into the Bible per se, but maybe we can. Because that's like what else is there?
Angelo:Well, people use the Bible as a source of truth, capital T truth. And some people take that Bible literally. They're like it's true because it's historically true and every single thing in it is written as true. And some people are like, well, there's metaphorical truth.
Chris:Right. So I mean there's this grinding problem, right, the problem of evolution, which isn't just an evolutionary problem, it's really about anthropology, but the way that the creation myth is stated in Genesis. There's no way that the Earth could, like literally, factually right, be created in six days with dinosaur bones. Anthropology, our understanding of the way that humans have evolved into who we are.
Matt:That's a problem.
Chris:That's scientific empiricism versus metaphorical truth.
Matt:Can I try and attempt to bridge there too? Because if the one say God, who's speaking all these things into existence, resides within a realm where time is not a constraint, into a realm where time does exist, then from that realm, where that potential is spoken, time would be like, but in terms of our evolution, in terms of our time.
Chris:I see what you're saying. It's a thought experiment.
Matt:It's interesting. It's true to me as we're talking about it.
Angelo:I think we're in a culture that's just obsessed with factual truth and, ultimately, when a lot of these stories were written, that's not what they were really trying to say. When they're talking about a day, a day can be a symbolic day, I guess. To put myself on one side of the argument, it's kind of like if you really look at the story in Genesis, it doesn't make sense that you would have trees before you have planets and stars, right. So how are you going to reconcile that, even from a very basic perspective, if you understand the Earth is a planet that trees grow on, how are you?
Angelo:you're going to have to do a lot of jumping through hoops and and trying to shoehorn some ideas in or just completely poo-poo our entire understanding of science, and I don't think that's really productive, especially when, if you were, just give yourself the ability to say, hey, there are other forms of truth than factual, historic truth. Clearly, the numbers were symbolic to the Israelites and Hebrew people. They use them throughout Scripture all the time in different ways, to not mean something literal. Yeah, like gematria is just very prominent at that time. So, like the number seven is, it has significance. So to say something was created in seven days doesn't need to mean it's literally seven days.
Matt:It's a different form of truth. I think we come back to the thing of. I mean, it ties into the dunning-kruger effect. But also when you can grasp onto the most easily understandable thing and you're like I'm gonna plant my flag here, this is all I am curious to know, this is all. This is all I need to know right here. Solid looks, looks good whatever, but that's not necessarily all there is to it.
Matt:Right, and it's like the. It's like those of us who are more curious for truth and want to really understand things are going to naturally want to follow that path and naturally be curious about the, the numbers and the symbolism where this person over here is just like well, you know, I don't need all that. It's like it's more road, it's more effort. I don't want to go down all that path. It's like great, but then don't claim that you hold all of the knowledge and all of the lore and the understanding because you decided to plant your flag in one place and we're going over here and we actually want to understand, right.
Angelo:Yeah, and the funny thing about knowledge that I found about reality is that the more you dig and the more you discover, the more you start realizing how much you don't know and the more lost you feel. Yeah, there is, in a very real sense, an irreducible complexity, and we make this presumption that the more you know, the better grasp you're going to get on everything.
Matt:But it's almost the opposite.
Angelo:It's funny how we're even in science we're seeking this grand unified theory where everything like you could trace it like a domino chain all the way down, and we're finding that quantum physics and classical or general relativity we don't even know how to reconcile those two things. We don't have this one working system that makes sense from the bottom tiny stuff all the way up to the big stuff there's. It just doesn't even work, and so people who are like oh yeah we've figured everything out.
Angelo:It's like what are you talking about, in fact? Um, I read not too long ago that, uh, the some scientists swabbed a bunch of people's belly buttons and discovered hundreds of new, never before discovered bacteria just living within people's navels. Disgusting, but but in Europe you don't even know what's on your own body. So for you to see like oh yeah, I totally get it like. This whole thing is like this.
Matt:You know, you know it's such hubris might be subconsciously, they might have a fear of losing that confidence or losing that that feel like. Oh you know? Because then like you have to kill your ego a little bit exactly like the more you, the more you learn, the more you wow.
Angelo:You know you're it's the ultimate dunning kruger everybody is super confident in like this is the castle that I've built for myself and these are the walls. And don't fuck with me right.
Matt:Maybe you need that bottom end, getting you know the combination of the humility and learning and being humble to the right thing so that you can have authority in the world from the right place, because then you know yeah you can say so pissed I know I feel like it comes up for me a lot in, especially in this episode but like so pissed off at all the foolishness You're like.
Matt:No, I have to, I have to. Wisdom must prevail in the world. Wisdom absolutely must prevail, and you have a boost to yourself. You have this combustion Like. I must speak wisdom into the world.
Angelo:Right, like I must speak wisdom into the world, right, I think everybody, everybody's, more forgivable when they understand your underlying intentions, so even if they can tell that you are genuinely trying to understand and know and you're willing to say that you're wrong.
Angelo:People are like, well, that guy is in the pursuit of truth, he's he's aimed towards the right thing, so his I'm willing to trust this person more than this guy who, even though he might have a lot of knowledge in a certain topic, he's rigid and he doesn't want to change his mind oh yeah, that's the biggest sign, right there, I think, of someone you watch out.
Matt:watch out for, too, in terms of yeah, that can be dangerous, extremely dangerous, because they can be convincing while still not knowing and thinking that they know and creating effects and ripples in the world as if they know.
Angelo:It's funny because I think everyone will agree that we live in a time where, in the American political climate, we've seen things on both sides where people think that they know something so strongly that they're willing to just die on that hill all the way down to and it'll affect other people in a very negative way to the extent where you have to just be like why can't? We even talk anymore. It's people just like. It's like two completely different universes.
Matt:Yeah, we have to have us. We absolutely must, especially right now. I'm glad that you say that have a set of unifying values that we can say these things are true. That everyone, just that we all agree on these certain things, not for the sake of simply our agreement, but because they're actually valuable. And they actually are universally true and good and beautiful and we can unify around them, and that's really what holds the fabric of the country together.
Chris:Yeah, absolutely.
Angelo:Let's talk about collective intelligence. We've talked about collective consciousness before. We've talked about collective consciousness and the collective unconscious, but let's Thinking about knowledge in the sense that knowledge passed down not just through one person, but through entire generations to the next generation. That's honestly what I think generation, that's honestly what I think people are trying to say. The bible is at its core, is this it's this wisdom literature that is from a long, long time ago compiled and, you know, translated, but nevertheless it's something that people thought was so important that they wanted to, uh, put it at the, the ultimate place in their, in their pursuit of truth that they would say this thing is the ultimate reference for, for where I get my knowledge or my wisdom.
Chris:So first of all, for the sake of clarity, you didn't say wisdom at first. You said collective intelligence and then you said collective knowledge, I mean I probably was, and then when? You said like intergenerationally. That brought to mind traditional yes, traditional.
Angelo:So I I think I was trying, I was talking while I was thinking, so I probably didn't. I wasn't as precise as I would like to be, but I I was thinking probably more along the lines of collective knowledge than collective intelligence. Ugh okay or do you mean like collective knowledge or traditional wisdom.
Angelo:I would say what I'm trying to get at is this idea that not one person is going to encapsulate truth in their own mind. There's a sense in which truth is learned and passed down and discovered even more through cultures, through this collective mechanism, and that's what I'm trying to get at and I don't know what to call that you know what you make me think of.
Matt:different teachers over time who have, through their own life experiences, come to the same self-evident experiences yes like martin, luther king jr, like gandhi, like jesus, like the buddha, you know, have have all come to very similar conclusions, not just because, oh you know, one of them heard from another, one heard from another one. You know there is some of that, but then you can hear a thing and then dismiss it but they all have been compelled and led and done something about the things that they discovered. They all came to these similar conclusions, right?
Angelo:it's also a matter of faith and trust, like how much do you trust the source that you're getting your knowledge from? Some people will look at tradition and they say, well, it's a game of telephone. Over time you pass this on and pass this on and the message changes, and then the spirit of the message is actually diminished because it's mistranslated along the way. But I don't know if that's entirely true. I would like to say that there is still hope in some traditions that that people with the right intention involved would want to pass on the true message to the next generation and that something valuable has been preserved across time, across human time.
Chris:So I think if we look to the wisdom traditions, right Christianity, islam, hinduism, buddhism they all reflect some form of the spirit of truth. Right um now there's a bit of pagan non-christian literature that I really keep close to my mind and heart and that's the hermetic prophecy, which is that um, it's complex, I'm not going to repeat the whole thing, it would take several minutes but the idea is that no matter how far we fall away from that spirit of truth and, like you said, we're kind of in this weird rigid time in American culture and intellect. I honestly don't know if it's going to last much longer. We'll see. I'm hoping for the best. Right, there's perks to it.
Angelo:But I think we've definitely gotten a lot out of a lot of the positives out of the enlightenment period, yeah right, but we're kind of at a time where things are starting to get money muddy in. This post-modernist mentality where everyone has their own truth is starting to infect everything to the extent where there people, people are hungry for, for something real and objective and they can't find it because their epistemology says, hey, uh, it's all your, your opinions.
Chris:So, no matter what humans are going to choose, as far as their behavior goes right, enacting more or less violence in the world, the counterforce of the will of God will always bring us back to those spirits of truth. Or to the spirit of truth and I think that's our collective wisdom tradition Is that if you have the spirit of truth, you're going to be okay.
Matt:that spirit of truth, beauty and goodness, and let's, let's define okay too, because that was not the thing I was expecting you to define because, because, because in order. In order to really pursue truth, it very often may require giving up things painfully, that you've clung on to, things that oh sure, that are built up on um, on, you know, false substance. I'm not. I would go as far as to say definitely requires yeah definitely.
Matt:and then it's this whole reconfiguration, because you know it could be like, yeah, we're all gonna be okay in the end. Yeah, perhaps, sure, yeah, but you have to be able to let these things go that are keeping you in that false place. That could mean changing your whole entire life. That may mean changing your whole friendship Not to scare all our viewers here, well, but for this greater thing, that when you come out on the other side, then you can say this is actually better than where I was there's always death involved, right yeah, than well where I was, and there's always deaths involved, right yeah, there's always what there's always death involved
Angelo:death involved a little bit of death, when, when you have to, when you have to get rid of a part of yourself, like something that you held on to, like, let's say, you grew up and you were in this specific religion and you clung to that religion and that was how you defined everything in your life. It was your way of life, it was how you defined your own identity. To let go of that is a death and it's painful and it's destructive, and that's why people, when you bring up religion or politics at the dinner table, are like, oh my god, you're trying to mess with what I define myself with and they're going to fight you for it, because to lose that is to die in some very real sense. Yeah, and you're going to be in the desert and wander and you're going to have to rebuild your in terms of the archetypes, because we can't not right you know the warrior you know the warrior.
Matt:the warrior being that part of yourself that is defending, the part that establishes what your boundaries are, and it's so much tied to that sense of yourself that you're willing to defend, and we're talking about things that die, right, the warrior is the one that goes and dies on the battlefield Right. So, in the boldness of putting yourself out there, you may have to suffer a death of some kind to something that you're deeply defending in order that a greater life can come into you, in order that a greater truth and a greater goodness can come through you.
Angelo:But you have to be able to surrender that I would say that idea in and of itself is a truth that you have to come to face. How do you contend with the suffering and death not just of your physical body but of your ideas and your beliefs about yourself? I just want to put this out there.
Chris:That it's. It's okay to deconstruct your religion and your philosophical understanding of the world and everything. It's also okay to do that while also still adhering to your religion. Because I kind of did the most extreme version of deconstruction, which was not only deconstructing my ideas but also just giving it all up and purging my christian identity out of me. I wish I hadn't done that. I really do, I was. That was a a grave mistake that I that I made. So I mean there's people who do that.
Angelo:You know the religion is kind of the uh, the most common, uh way thing to talk about. When you're referring to a very personal paradigm shift, sure, but you can do it in the opposite direction too. You can be very. It doesn't have to be specifically a religious institution per se. It can be your view on your relationship and that can be shattered. Someone cheats on you. Your family was your sense of meaning and purpose and moving you forward in life, and that can be just. And your sense of who, who you are, who your partner is, what your kingdom was, is completely gone. Where's your sense of truth? Next, you've got to have something stronger than that, sure yeah, right, and that's where the truth, beauty and goodness anchor comes in, because that's got to be.
Angelo:If you rely, that's why it's like. If you rely on that, that's the like most ultimate so source I in my time I less will break and die.
Chris:See, I experienced a death of all of those things, right my paradigm of relationship and religion, and intelligence and experience. What I failed to do was experience a death of my ego, and I think you know so I I I emptied myself of of of everything that made me me trying to rebuild myself from the ground up, when really I should have just let go of myself and discovered myself in the context of, I guess, my life and the way I should have lived it. So it was also a loss of values, right? So the Christian values that I grew up with. When I purged the Christian identity from myself, I lost my guiding principles of living.
Angelo:Your compass yeah. Yeah, I definitely had a very similar experience, but I had affected my telos. Well, it's happened multiple times in my life, right?
Chris:You don't just do it one time. I get there, you know, but I mean the nice thing is you.
Angelo:You go through that a few times, it gets easier, because then you recognize, hey, changes is part of life, yeah, and to and change is healthy. And I know when I make a big change in life, even if a huge part of myself is shattered that doesn't happen to me that it's the end.
Angelo:I can rebuild from there yeah and that's the attitude to have you always got to be moving forward. Don't let you know, don't make something your idol. In fact, I think that's what scripture is actually referring to when it's saying you know, don't make false gods. It's not just talking about these like invisible ideas of uh some some personified being it's talking about like, hey, you can make money an idol, you can make your relationship an idol, you can make your sense of power an idol, like all of these you can make your own religion an idol to yourself.
Angelo:Where you're you're trying to, this specific ritual and way of life is how you're trying to live. It's not the thing you should be serving, the thing that that thing's aiming at, not the thing itself right, I've never thought of it that way and I think you're right.
Chris:I think maybe that was maybe in some ways that was a good thing that I well.
Angelo:Well, when you're a child, you don't even understand things you know. To you like literally, god is like an invisible friend in a child's mind.
Matt:Could I Hold on? You can even make yourself an idol.
Angelo:Oh yeah, Absolutely.
Matt:And then there's the whole. Was it solipsism where you think that everything revolves around you, right? Was it solipsism where you think that everything revolves around you, right?
Angelo:Then you're like well, you know too proud to submit to anything that isn't outside of your domain. It's like the ultimate narcissism. That's right, I am.
Matt:God.
Angelo:That's right I believe in a higher power, it's me.
Matt:Yeah, and metaphorically like what is the greatest sin?
Angelo:right Pride.
Matt:Pride, blasphemy. Thinking of yourself as God, proclaiming yourself as.
Angelo:God Right, that's the deepest message you think that everything revolves around you.
Matt:Well, who the hell are you? You know, honestly.
Chris:Have a little humility.
Matt:Humility, get yourself in that little squirt. Get some humidifiers, put them all over your bedroom and then get some humility, Cool down that pride a little bit and have the spirit of truth. That's a difficult balance too. You have these two poles.
Matt:Humidity and humility are, yeah, humidity and humility humility and humility, yeah, where where we have the, the baseness of our limitations as humans, as you know, physical beings, but then we're we also have this infinite divinity within us at the same time. So we're like right in the middle. You know, it's like mythically think of, like think of what a demigod is, who's from the earth but also has this divine connection at the same time.
Angelo:It's like that's that's really kind of what we are it's funny because there's this powerful movement in the culture to say that we are all connected and we are all God, but at the same time there's this sense that you don't want to call yourself, go as far as to call yourself God, because that's blasphemous.
Matt:Like the big G right yeah.
Angelo:So it's like the more humble you are and the more you're like no, I'm not the biggest center of the universe. I should serve and love everything that makes you more aligned with the center of the universe and the more you're like I am the center of the universe, it's all about me the more disconnected you are and so it's like a paradox I've never wow, never heard it put that way before.
Chris:Yeah, I mean I wouldn't. I wouldn't say that there's like, oh, it's so difficult. I would not say that there is an element of divinity in and of our own being. But there's a divine potential there and that's why you have humility and other forms of virtue to attain the spirits of truth, beauty and goodness, because when those reside in, your ego should shift from yourself unto god, and then you will gain the grace and knowledge and truth and power and spirit to to enact on the world in a holy fashion honestly, I think that's a great place to to end this one oh, okay, can I get an amen?
Matt:amen, that was uh, amen, chris, so thank you all for joining us on this journey about truth.
Angelo:Hopefully you learned something and, if you made it this far, we're very grateful that you are willing to watch our content and listen to us talk. Please do your part Like, share, subscribe, comment, share your thoughts. Let us know what you're thinking and we hope to see you on the next one.
Chris:It's been real All right.
Matt:Thank you for listening, until next time.
Angelo:Take care.
