Ep. 2 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution

SUMMARY OF THE PREVIOUS VIDEO: Key words: Meaning making - Enhanced cognition - Altered states of consciousness - Wisdom. Upper Paleolithic transition was probably driven by the way shamanism was a set of psychotechnologies for altering states of consciousness to cognitively exapt the enhanced abilities that trade rituals and initiation rituals and healing rituals had already been creating. Cognitive exaptation: changes in the software of the brain (functions) that were developed through evolution but its structures weren´t made with that purpose.

VOCABULARY

  1. Shaman: person who engaged in various disruptive strategies to alter his/her framing of reality in a different way.
  2. Framing reality: it is to think out of the box that enhances the adaptability and the ability to find new or different patterns.
  3. Shamanic ritual: it is a ritual for healing.
  4. Disruptive strategy: it is a strategy that alters a state of consciousness because it causes significant change in the attention, for example, some of those are sleep deprivation, sex deprivation, social isolation, use of psychedelics, extended chanting , etc.
  5. Different kinds of knowing:
  6. Flow state: popularly describing as being in “the zone” in which a person is involved in task very demanding and his/her skill abilities can just through like sort of insight and restructuring . The flow state is much more connected to meaning in life and is universal. A kind of self-consciousness disappears and it is super salient. There is a kind of brightness and vividness through the experience.
  7. Flow induction machines: the skills of a person are constantly improving and the demand of the environment is also improving in dangerous contexts or it can also be through video games.
  8. Video game: it is a program that induce the “Flow state”, becoming an addiction. Problem is that it doesn´t belong to the real world.
  9. Addiction: it is a condition to a particular substance, thing or activity that runs off machinery that is evolutionarily adaptive.
  10. Shamanism: it can also be a way to induce the “flow state”.
  11. Connectedness
  12. Mindfulness training: it increases the capacity to get into the flow state
  13. Phenomenology:
  14. Cascade of insights: it is to have an insight that´s leadind to another insight and so on and so far. This chain of insights are going to improve skills of abilities
  15. Implicit learning: it is the tremendous capacity outside our conscious awareness to pick up on very complex patterns in the environment without being aware of it. Implicit learning cannot be replaced by explicit learning.
  16. Intuition: it is the result of implicit learning.
  17. Bias: