Humanity Is A Trip

Episode One of the new Kosmopolitika show, made in collaboration with Boris Shoshitaishvili of the Berggruen Institute and Robert Wright’s Nonzero Foundation, is here:

Episode Two will be taped live on Youtube and Zoom this coming Easter Monday, April 21, at 1pm ET/7pm CET, here. You can click the button below to add it to your calendar:

The show is hosted by Boris and me, but can include you: the Youtube stream features a link to a Zoom room, which any viewer can join.

In the first conversation, we talked about belonging.

You can get a sense of how it went from the timestamps:

INTRODUCTIONS

4:14 Nikita: Leaving Russia. The psychedelic lineage. Humanity is a trip, not a species

21:59 16 years ago, Boris took such a good nap after visiting a sacred Ancient Greek site that he still thinks about it

25:25 In The Dark Places of Wisdom: mystical practices at the root of Western civilization

26:57 What makes us feel we belong: identity & community

31:00 Humanity as a planetary force

MEMBER PARTICIPATION PART

39:15 What makes us feel we belong: values & norms

49:14 What makes us feel we belong: direct experience

52:26 Psychedelics & meditation in service of planetary identity

54:19 “To be” comes from the word "to grow", "am" & "is" from "to breath"¹

56:32 Rationalists

58:15 How Socrates got himself killed

1:04:30 What makes us feel we belong: awareness of inter-dependence

1:11:30 Gaia, humanity, and AI are 3 generations of planetary forces

1:15:32 Zizians. There's something to be said about dogma

1:17:47 “DMT, death, and nanobots are the same thing, somehow”

1:21:24 Humanity is still being born

1:23:21 Ideas are alive

1:25:59 JFK's "my fellow Americans" address, in which he casts the country as a peer to the citizen

1:30:13 VR brings us back into the body

1:34:33 The human experience is an image that arises from the play of ideas and matter

1:38:30 Agency found in choosing one's metaphors

1:42:15 Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Message

1:47:52 Homeric rhapsodes

1:52:34 Conversation as distributed thinking

I listened back to it while producing the video. It’s a strange and interesting experience.

The conversation is a kind of a distributed thought process; by definition, I don’t know where it will lead me and my partners while it is happening. I just try to play my part. I pay attention and try to help the conversation unfold, which sometimes means listening and sometimes means talking. Because I’m thinking out loud, and because a lot of our topics are slippery, I’m not always sure what exactly I mean; I know the people I talk to sometimes feel similarly.

Listening back to it is probably similar to a musician watching a recording of her jam session, or a chess player his game. I see the party in its entirety — I the trajectories of topics that were raised and abandoned, the ways different ideas played with each other — and sometimes I understand something that got said on a deeper layer, or from a different angle.

I get a new (still preliminary) understanding of what it is that we’re trying to do here.

(I once had a dream in which a character I called in my journal A Mystical Baby said about me, “Gnostics wanted to bring the Moon down to Earth. Nikita does not possess Gnosis. But he has Co-Gnosis.” In the dream I knew what this meant: I’m as blind to reality as the next guy, but when I’m in conversation, a degree of direct, felt, non-conceptual understanding of it can emerge, for a time, between me and my interlocutors.)

Anyway, one of the things we do at these shows is playing with ideas.

Like these ones:

Today is Easter, and it’s a big thing in Málaga: this whole week, it was barely possible to walk through the city center, because the streets are blocked for the processions of the city’s Catholic brotherhoods: people in hoods carrying candles and crosses and heavy statues of Jesus and Virgin Mary, playing pipes and drums until 2am.

Here’s a quiet moment from Friday:

So I think religion and ritual might come up tomorrow.

But anything else is hard to predict.

Click here to add the event to your calendar and save the link to the stream.

I hope I will see you there!

1. Boris’s said something slightly different in the episode. He later found and emailed me the full quote from Julian Jaynes, where he got this from:

“In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, even, we may say, created the abstract on the bases of metaphors.

It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete metaphors become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb ‘to be’ was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, “to breathe.” It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it ‘breathes’.”