The meaning crisis that is currently unfolding in our culture is producing a form of existential angst that is gnarly, messy, and very real. There is a palpable collective low-grade anxiety that can be felt on all levels. We may turn to various distractions or succumb to a silent form of apathy.
On this episode, we interview John Vervaeke. Speaking to the meaning crisis, John’s work is centred around bridging the gap between science and spirituality. He talks to us about psycho-technologies such as meditation and psychedelics as tools to help us overcome self-deception and move towards wisdom. We also navigate the world of altered-states and transformative experiences. John has been with the University of Toronto since 1994 as an Assistant Professor teaching courses in the Psychology department, Cognitive science program, and the intersections between Buddhism and Mental Health. He has won numerous teaching awards. John is the first author of the book “Zombie in Western Culture: A 21st Century Crisis”. You can find his most recent series on YouTube titled “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.”
Highlights:
- Knowledge vs Wisdom
- Overcoming Self-Deception
- Meditation and Psychedelics as Psycho-technologies
- Convergence of Cognitive Science and Spirituality
Resources:
- A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
- Keith Stanovich Applied Psychology and Human Development
- Jonathan Baron’s Active Open Mindedness
- Griffiths Hopkins Psychedelic Research
- Transformative Experience by L.A. Paul
- Dr. Andrew Newberg’s Research on Religious and Spiritual Experiences
- Memoirs of an Addicted Brain by Marc Lewis
- After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield
- The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays by Harry Frankfurt
- Mindset: the New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
- John Vervaeke and Jordan Peterson Discuss the Meaning of Life
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Full Transcript
Adrian
John, welcome. Thank you for coming on the show.
John Vervaeke
Great. Glad to be here.T
Adrian
I was sitting and thinking about all the different things we could really explore with you. At a basic level, I see all the stuff that you’re doing, all the research and lectures that I’ve watched seem to be trying to bridge or unify science and spirituality.
John Vervaeke
I think that’s very fair representation of what I’m trying to do. I see the situation that we’re in culturally in the West right now is one that I’ve called the meaning crisis. Many people are converging on this topic, and you see increasing number of books even talking about this. The Malaise of Modernity by Taylor or the Crisis of Modernity. These kinds of books are proliferating. I don’t just mean quantitatively, the quality of somebody like Charles Taylor is bringing to bear his enormous philosophical acumen on this, it tells you that something central is going on. He followed that up in The Secular Age. So I think all of us are concerned with what do we do with our spiritual heritage. So I mean, we come from this period. I’ll often do this with my students in class. They’ll say, how many of you read anything from the bronze age? How many of you read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian myth. Nobody reads that. I’ll say, well, how many of you read Plato? A lot of people put up their hands or the Bible. A lot of people, you know, Confucius, lot of people. why are those people sort of ours and the people before the Bronze Age clubs aren’t? There’s some controversy about this, but I think I agree with many people like Bella and Karen Armstrong that around 600 to 300 BCE. We went through this radical transformation, right? That laid the foundations many of the foundations for what we call Western civilization. That axial revolution gave us kind of a grammar, the fundamental grammar for our spirituality and what had happened is before the bronze age collapsed and then the axial revolution that follows it during the bronze age you had a much different view of the cosmos so that there was a lot more continuity. It was like a continuum between the natural world, the human world and the world of the gods. Right? It was much more sort of a continuum of differences in power. So it wasn’t strange for a very powerful human being to be godlike or even a god perhaps like in ancient Egypt. Then what happens when the bronze age civilization collapses is that continuous Cosmos tends to be to be challenged. Sorry this is a bit of a speech, but I need to lay some groundwork here. What happens is there’s a dark age and then there’s an invention of a bunch of psycho-technologies. We can talk a little bit later about what a psycho-technology is. One of the most important is alphabetic literacy. Another one is coinage and what they both do is they are invented for very practical reasons, but the thing about alphabetic literacy is it makes literacy available. The thing about literacy, you think about how much it empowers your cognition. If I were to take literacy from you, most of the problems you try to solve most of your information processing, collapse and look around you. Everybody is using literacy. The other thing they’re using is numeracy. And that’s what coinage does. Advanced numeracy, advanced abstract, symbolic thought. People get these psycho-technologies and they, they internalize them because they’re using them everyday and automatically. See the thing about technology is it, it spreads beyond where you originally use it. What happens is people’s cognition is suddenly amazingly bootstrapped and they’re seeing the world, right? They’re getting what Bella called second order cognition. They’re getting much more critically and self aware. And this is what seems to be prototypical of the age. It’s the rise of what’s called theoretical man. Sorry for the sexist term, but that was the traditional way of talking about it.
Thal
It can also be noise.
John Vervaeke
Uh what? The psycho-technology?
Thal
Well yes, being bombarded with text and numbers and all that, and a lot of people become disenchanted with being bombarded.
John Vervaeke
Well, that’s part of what I want to talk about. Part of what I want to talk about is the fact that when we got the axial revolution, when we had that bootstrapping and people became much more self critical. What happened was they create this sort of legacy and when we’re in danger of losing the legacy precisely because of what it has given us. What happened to us before there was this continuous cosmos, but as people became very critically self aware, they, they gained a tremendous sense of responsibility that they were responsible for the violence in this suffering in the world. It wasn’t just a natural part of the world because they have become very aware of how self deceptive the mind was. this is where you get this emerging awareness of how much the mind can create illusion and self deception. So what happens, right, is before the axial revolution, wisdom is about fitting into this continuous cosmos. It’s kind of like you know, the, the, the vulcan way of life, living long and prospering, right kind of thing. After the axial revolution, people are like, they’re really aware of their capacity for self deception, but there are also simultaneously because these two go together, aware of their capacity for self transcendence, right? What they do is they change the notion of wisdom. It’s not about fitting in because you don’t want to fit into this everyday world because this is the everyday world of illusion and self deception and suffering. Instead what you want to do, wisdom is about transcending, rising above, freeing yourself from those self deceptive processes and what happens is right and the degrees to which this is taken literally and it’s understood philosophically or mythically like Plato, but nevertheless you get this. You get this grammar of two worlds, the everyday lower world of illusion and suffering into which we have fallen and then there’s an upper world or the real. The really real world and wisdom is about getting there. What develops is people start developing entire sets of psycho-technologies for trying to enhance. You can see it in Buddhist mindfulness. You can see it in a platonic theoria. There’s all these psycho-technologies that are developing and think about how a lot of this way of thinking right has just become natural to you. It’s becoming your grammar. Now the problem is we have this tremendous heritage that gives us all these psycho-technologies for dealing with how we can deceive ourselves and get enmeshed in foolishness, but they’re bound up with this two world mythology, this two world grammar and the problem is for a lot of historical reasons that dovetail with the emergence of the scientific world view. We don’t have that two world mythology anymore. Very few people, and I don’t mean to step on anybody’s religious toes, but very few people believed that there is a supernatural world or an other world above and beyond the scientific worldview. What happens is all of these psycho-technologies that are still effective because of the way they work with cognition are now orphaned. They have no world view that legitimates them. That legitimates them to into a systematic set that really helps you cultivate intellectually and existentially respectful manner like this wisdom and self transcendence we’ve been talking about. So people thrash around and they try to cobble together little bits and pieces of discarded world views and they play with alternative realities and they alter their state of consciousness to try and get an alternative metaphysics. And they’re struggling to try and get back something that we’ve lost because there’s a deep sense, right? That the psycho-technologies were almost essential or at least indispensible to dealing with these deep issues of foolishness and flourishing. As our lives become more foolish and as flourishing becomes more and more difficult, our sense of connectedness to ourself, to the world and to each other is being radically undermined. That’s what I mean by the meaning crisis.
Adrian
It looks to me that part of your work is to actually come up with a new grammar that helps to unify this fragmentation that’s happening where everybody’s trying to claim, you know, that their version or their techniques are better, you know. Maybe that’s a nice place to actually lay down some understanding of how you view the mind. What are you talking about when you mention cognition?T
John Vervaeke
That’s a great question. The central idea is to try and understand cognition in terms of our capacity for problem solving. This is the initial and profound insight that goes back to Binet. When we started studying intelligence and that’s why we test it. We test it by giving people problems to solve and what has been found or repeated over and over again is that there seems to be a general factor. So if you’re solving a set of problems here, like it tends to be predictive of how you will solve. So spearman founders, right? Like he noticed that, you know, how kids were doing in math was weirdly predictive of how they were doing in English and how they were doing in art contrary to a lot of the cultural stereotypes we have. There’s variation in talent. I don’t want to, and personality and I’m not dismissing that.
Thal
Separation is an illusion. Part of separating between the different ways we perceive, separating between Math and English and how we perform is illusory.
John Vervaeke
Well. I mean there are some aspects that don’t transfer it.
Thal
Right
John Vervaeke
But there does seem to be a general factor. Yes. Underlying all of them are. People don’t like this because they tend to think of intelligence as sort of some sort of death sentence. In fact, we’ve got quite a bit of research coming out of Carol Dweck lab and others. How you think of your intelligence has a dramatic effect on how you’re living your life. The main idea is that you are a general problem solver. This mic that I’m talking into is a special purpose problem solver, it solves basically one problem, doesn’t really well in fact it does it way better than I could do it. Right? And this class is a special purpose problem solving. The thing about you is you solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains across many contexts, throughout a very long lifespan. What’s impressive is that capacity, we can measure that capacity. People don’t want to hear this, it’s the single best measure we have in the life sciences for human beings. If I can only get one thing from you, one variable in order to try and predict as much of you as I could, I want to know your general intelligence because that will give me the best set of predictions for you better than anything else. Personality variables come second. Self regulation abilities perhaps. Right? I wanted to understand like what’s the center of this? And initially I was just interested in this scientifically because I thought of this as the core of our cognitive agency and I came to the conclusion with the help of a lot of great people like Tim Lillicrap, like Richards, Leo Ferraro, Anderson Todd, Richard Woo. Just a whole bunch of people that I’ve just been so lucky to work with and continue to work with. The core, and this is convergent with other people’s works. So it’s not just my conclusion, but the core of this ability to be a general problem solver is your ability to zero in on relevant information and ignore the irrelevant information. That sounds sort of trivial because your brain devotes so much energy and effort to it that at the, at the level of your personal ego, you’re just taking for granted, you know, what’s standing out for you, what salient, what’s grabbing your attention because technically, scientifically, the amount of information available to you in this room is astronomically vast. All the possible ways in which you could put together your behavior patterns to interact with it, also explosive, and then all the information you have in your long term memory and all of the possible combinations, overwhelmingly vast. So this is what you don’t do. You don’t search it all because you can’t. You can’t search it all and yet, and this is what you don’t do either, you don’t look at everything and determine if it’s important to you or not because that would take the lifetime of the universe. So somehow, and this is sounds like it sounds like a magic thing or miraculous, you brain ignores most of the information and those three domains and somehow zeroes in on the relevant information in a way that fits you to your environment so that…and this is not a static thing, so you have to stop thinking of the mind and this is part of third generation cog-sci as something in your head, think about the mind more like Darwinian fittedness, like what makes an organism fit is not something in the organism or in the environment, but how the organism and the environment fit together. That’s what relevance realization is. It’s your evolving cognitive fittedness to your environment. I’ve done a lot of work on that and trying to understand that. And like I said, there’s just increasing convergence like sort of this is not meant to be self promotional meant to be the opposite. Many people are coming to similar ideas about this being a central thing and that it’s, it’s a dynamic self organizing self optimizing process. The insight I had. I suppose. Is that I came to the conclusion and I have a lot of argument for it, that that cognitive connectedness that makes us an intelligent agent is also the same sort of connectedness to ourself and the world and other people that’s at the core of spirituality so that your relevance realization machinery is inherently interested and invested because it’s a self organizing, self optimizing process, thinking about when you have insight, that’s the relevance realization process, feeding back on itself and restructuring itself. It’s inherently interested in and invested in this because it’s just foundational and it precedes you egoically. Relevance realization is there from the beginning, fitting your brain to the world and then your sense of self and how meaningful your world is co-emerge out of this ongoing evolving fittedness and that’s why it has this sort of primordial, mysterious depth to it. There’s so what I’m trying to get at, although there’s some hard brain science, I think emerging and dynamical system, self optimization, to point your listeners to so many things, right. There’s all these deeply spiritual aspects of this relevance realization that seemed to line up with a lot of the traditional stuff and then here’s the final gem and then let you guys talk. What if, what we’re doing when we’re overcoming foolishness and self deception and becoming wise is enhancing that capacity for relevance realization so that the wise person is the super insightful, super connected, super able to make meaningful connections person. Well that sounds both scientific and spiritual at the same time.
Adrian
What I want to ask you about is at the practical level, the practice of spirituality. You’ve mentioned psycho-technologies. How does that activate or get this process of relevance realization going or evolving?
John Vervaeke
I mean, we’re doing it already, but here’s where I think, the work of Keith Stanovich and others has had like a profound impact on me. Keith, I think he’s emeritus now, but he was also at U of T, at OISE, for the center of applied cognitive science. Really brilliant worker researcher and he’s just a amassed all this work. So remember I told you had an, and this will directly answer your question, it is directly pertinent. Remember how he remember how I said we have this general measure of intelligence, right? So what he showed is like you can also give people all these, all these experimental tests for how rational they are. So let’s say rationality is about using your intelligence best. Remember I mentioned earlier that how you relate to your intelligence has a big impact on how adaptive it is, right? What he was showing you, is that right? I think he’d be okay with me. This is my language, but I think I don’t think it’s imposing on him. That’s why I’m being a little bit cautious here. But I would say this, those very processes that make us so adoptive are our general intelligence are also the ones that really drive and enhance our self deception and make us vulnerable to self deception. I recently gave a talk about this on how as we’re making ai more like us, we’re making it more and more capable of foolishness. You can give people all kinds of rationality tasks and what’s going on in these rationality tasks, for example, I’ll give you a proposition you tend to agree with very deeply like, and I’m not taking a stance on this issue just using an example. Abortion is right. Okay. So you find people who either agree or disagree with them and then what you do is you give them two arguments. One is a valid argument that leads to the opposite of what they believe, you know, so let’s they believe abortion is right and here’s a valid argument that leads to the conclusion that it’s wrong. Then you give them a very bad argument that leads to the conclusion they like and you ask them to evaluate the argument, right? People vary on that because you can imagine what happens is a lot of people find super salient the product or the result of their cognition and they’re not stepping back and caring about or paying attention to the process. If you don’t pay attention to the process, you just go to the conclusion and right, and then so your ability to evaluate arguments is very, very poor. Now that’s very, very dangerous, right? Because it means we can’t use rational persuasion to alter people’s beliefs. That’s an example of many kinds of tests. So you can do all these many varied kinds of tests on how rational people are and what you he found was just like the measures for intelligence. They form a general factor of reasoning. They form a positive manifold. So then he asks, and this is what makes him so brilliant, right? He then asks this really straight, this really profound question. I mean he is a great scientist that makes complex things simple, right? He asks this profound question, so simply. Are the measures of intelligence identical with the measures of rationality? The answer is no. Overwhelmingly, no. On average, the correlation between the measures of your intelligence and the measures of your rationality are point three where, where it varies from none, which is zero to one, which is maximum. Intelligence is necessary but nowhere near sufficient for being rational. So what’s the difference? This is now the core of your question, what the psycho-technologies are doing is that there are ways of internalizing, practices and skills and ways of training your attention that get you to best applying intelligence to paying attention to how you’re using your intelligence. That sounds so trivial, right? But people, it takes a lot of practice and effort. So one thing he talks about is he, which is directly relevant to the ancient practice of stoicism and modern psychotherapeutic work in cognitive behavioral therapy. He talks about Jonathan Barron’s active openmindedness. This is a psycho-technology that makes you more rational. It helps you overcome the ways in which your intelligence makes you deceptive. So let me give you an example. I just flew back from Cuba. I told you that. Okay? So here’s what people. Your loved ones take you to the airport, right? You’re about to get on the plane and they’re oh safe trip and text me when you’re there. Basically what you’re doing is saying, don’t die, don’t die, don’t die because you’re terrified that they’re going to die on this airplane. Now, why are you terrified? Well, think about it. Your brain is trying to calculate the probability of things. Remember when I talked about that explosion? If you were to use pure probability theory, trying to calculate the probability of events is vast (inaudible). You can’t do it. So your brain does these two short cutting technique. It uses like a couple of what are called heuristics. It uses this availability heuristic. If I can easily imagine or remember something, I think of it as highly probable. Well, I can remember airplane crashes because they’re on the news and I could easily imagine it because my homo erectus brain goes” a big metal in the sky…no it will fall.” The other is how representative, how much does it sort of stand out? Then again, when there’s a plane crash, people make it super salient. They call it a tragedy a disaster and so you go in and the availability heuristic, which is very adaptive for you and the representative heuristic, very adaptive, this sort of frontline relevance realization, and they tell you this person’s going to die in a plane crash. This is self deception because you worry about them. Then without a second thought, you get, you go into the garage and you get in your car..
Adrian
Chance of dying goes up.
John Vervaeke
…which is the North American death machine, right? So active open mindedness is about learning to see how these heuristic processes that are central to our adoptive intelligence can be present in our day to day behavior. What you do is you look for…you actively try to look for these heuristics misfiring. How often do you look for evidence that disconfirms one of your beliefs as opposed to just finding evidence that confirms it.
Thal
I just have to say I’ve been enjoying what you’re saying and it’s in line with the questions that I have been sitting with prior to my own awakening in a way. My background is more literature. I also come from the Sufi background.
John Vervaeke
Excellent.
Thal
The way you’re talking for me is just giving language to questions that I’ve had in my mind for a long time. Your wording and everything you’re expressing is just answering very deep questions that are probably even pre language for me, so I don’t even have any question right now, but maybe more like..
John Vervaeke
You don’t know how often I get that comment. It always takes me a little bit aback and I get it informally and student evaluations in my courses, but I get it like in spontaneous situations, like, just happened now. People often talk about me giving them a vocabulary even for before, and this is like an or a grammar like we were talking about earlier before they could articulate it itself, but nevertheless, it resonates very deeply with us.
Thal
It excites me because I just started my journey as a doctoral student in Transpersonal Psychology. Right. That’s where I’m like, okay, I want go into that space where science and spirituality meets. I’ve been in the spiritual space for a long time, but because using your words, a lot of the way my cognitive space was working, I didn’t have the language to explain what was going on. I’m hoping that with the recent work that you’re doing. I’ve had experiences in the psychedelic space where now I have the language. I get it.
John Vervaeke
I think that’s excellent. I think that’s a great point because I want to be clear the active open mindedness that I mentioned is just one psycho-technology. We step back and become aware of another important one, our mindfulness practices. So whereas active openmindedness is about paying attention to how your adaptive process can mislead you when you’re making inferences. Mindfulness is about how can those how could this salience machinery cause you to basically deceive yourself at an attentional level? So what you want to do is you want to find as many of these, what I would say scientifically validated psycho-technologies and try to see how we can align them together and, and so there’s a lot of work right now and my lab is involved with it and I’m just involved with a lot of really great people about it. Daniel Craig is doing this great work. I want to continue to make it clear that I’m privileged belong to and to some degree lead a community. So we’re really interested in this question of what’s going on in both psychedelic experiences and spontaneous experiences that are similar. What I’m particularly interested in and what it aligns with the most is the aspect of the psychedelic experience with the mystical experience where the awakening experiences that align most with what we’re talking about is when people get a particular kind of experience. The Griffith lab did the same thing on this. There’s a difference between a psychedelic experience and a mystical experience and I think there’s a difference between a mystical experience and what L. A. Paul calls…if there is a book I can recommend to you L. A. Paul’s book on transformative experience is literally the book. I got to meet Lori and lecture in her class, I was very privileged to lecture in her class on transformative experience. So what I’m interested in, and Steve Taylor does this, talks a lot about this in his book and sort of Andrew Newberg. Normally when people have an altered state of consciousness, they do the following thing. They go into that altered state of consciousness. Let’s consider a typical one. You dream, you come out of your dream and you say, oh, that was weird, that wasn’t real. This is real. And why do you say that? You say that because, well, it doesn’t fit together very well. It doesn’t make sense and it’s not coherent with the rest of your life. Right? So this sort of coherent intelligibility that people sometimes have, there’s a subset of altered states of consciousness, higher states of consciousness, which can sometimes occur in psychedelic experiences. I don’t want to talk about when and where but they’ll have an experience and they’ll say that is more real than this. It’s that hyper-realness what I called onto-normativity, because it’s not why I call it that is, it’s not just, it’s more real. They feel like an obligation that they have to transform their lives and their identity so they can stay in contact. Remember that sense of connectedness. So they can stay in contact with that deeper realness. It struck me. I mean this is a really good scientific problem. Why? Here’s this bizarre experience. It doesn’t fit into the rest of their life. They often come back and they say it’s ineffable. I can’t tell why it has no content to it and yet they say it’s more real. It should be discarded. I was trying to get at what’s going on in these experiences that, right. Why are people experiencing them as more real? And secondly, is that a legitimate experience? Like because they’re changing their lives, right? And so you want to know, do those kinds of experiences, can they be ultimately enmeshed.
Thal
Practical.
John Vervaeke
That’s it. Can they be integrated with these other psycho-technologies? Could we, I mean, this sounds ridiculous, but could we come up with a set of psycho-technologies for these higher states of consciousness that would be nicely systematically working with active openmindedness and mindfulness. Could we create this systematic sap and so that’s, yeah, I’m really interested in it. The thing I would really tell your listeners and I’m not telling you what to do or anything, but I just, I just feel a responsibility. The transformation isn’t in the drug, right?
Thal
This is important to mention.
John Vervaeke
The drug isn’t, this…So like higher states of consciousness are tools, they’re not toys, right? If you’re using them in a situation where you have not put them within a set of psycho-technological practices in which you’re cultivating wisdom, you’re really looking for ways in which you are prone to self-deception. If you stick that into those, there’s a great chance you’re just gonna bullshit yourself.
Thal
Perpetuate that self-deception at a deeper level.
Adrian
I’m reminded of what Jack Kornfield who wrote first the ecstasy then the laundry because there is a real trapping in the pursuit of peak experience. So you have a glimpse and then you want to go back to it because it’s not sustained. You’re bringing this important point of the mundane everyday practice to bridge that.
John Vervaeke
What you see in ancient traditions like in the neoplatonic tradition, which greatly informs Sufism by the way. You see this tremendous philosophical endeavor to, in a deeply integrative fashion, create a worldview that tries to articulate this enhanced sense of meaning and intelligibility, the cultivation of all of these practices, right? And then, and then they’re integrated with these existential moral practices. So the idea of being rational and mystical are not oppositional. They’re supposed to be deeply intertwined, mutually constraining and mutually informing each other.
Thal
This was the split too in Sufism between the orthodoxy and the ecstatic poets. Where, in my opinion, the ecstatic poets were to mesh the rationality and the mystical, but because they were talking about the ineffable then the orthodoxy were unable to accept them and were considered as heretics.
John Vervaeke
I think this is a very important point. I think that pattern gets repeated. It gets repeated. I think also within Christianity, I mean, Meister Eckhart is almost, you know, he’s pretty much, he dies before he gets condemned as a heretic.
Thal
Even within science, there are those who would consider what we’re talking about as heretical in scientistic or scientism.
John Vervaeke
There’s all kinds of orthodoxies, right? And this goes towards your point, and this is another point I would want to make this is a broader issue about the ways in which I want to speak very carefully here because I’m not, I’m a scientist and I love science, but there’s ways in which the culture at large has been misled by science. What I mean by that? What science does, right? Is Science, and this is what the scientific revolution when it, it actually, it actually comes out of and then sort of solidifies and exemplifies a trend that had been growing in western civilization since the, around the beginning of the 13th century. What am I trying to get at? What science does is enhance your capacity for propositional knowledge, right? So propositional knowledge is your knowledge of what we call facts and people. You know, what a lot of the people that are, um, you know, rationality, this, on Youtube, and they talk about facts. Ask them what a fact is, is it made out of matter…What is a fact, what do you mean by that? What’s the metaphysics of a fact? Well, they’ll say, well, things are true. Okay, well what do you mean by true? What they’re basically talking about is propositional knowledge is knowledge of that something is the case. So what they’re talking about is that they have propositions that they consider are well-evidenced and well-argued, right? And that’s propositional knowledge and so that is a form of knowing that is centered on belief, that is why belief has become so central in our culture. We understand everything in terms of belief, why ideology is so powerful, because what ideology is…it is the attempt to replace spirituality with sets of beliefs that are supposed to be doing, but the problem is for all the terrific importance of propositional knowledge. It’s not the only kind of knowing we have.
Thal
It can be dogmatic.
John Vervaeke
Well not only it is dogmatic, which is true. I don’t deny that, but I think what’s happening in the case of the teachers you’re talking about, right, is that they try to represent another kind of knowing that has to a very large degree, been sort of quashed in our culture. Let me give you some examples. In addition to knowing that something is the case you have, you have what’s called procedural knowledge. You know how to do things. For example, you know how to ride a bike, which isn’t the same thing as having a bunch of beliefs like you know how to ride a bike. In fact, you’ll find a great deal of difficulty and actually putting into effective words what it takes to ride a bike. This is one of the gifts of the work in ai because we thought, you know it’s all about propositional knowledge. Getting computers to do propositional knowledge it’s hard, but we’ve gotten really good at that. Getting computers to skills like knowing how to catch a baseball. That turned out to be way harder than we thought because that procedural knowledge is much more embodied. It’s much more about that direct online fitting of the brain to the world, but in addition to that, because you’re a conscious being and consciousness is not the same thing as belief at all, right? Because most of your beliefs are unconscious. You, for example, believe that Africa is a continent. You don’t have to hold it in your mind or consciousness, right? Because you’re a conscious being. You have perspectival knowing. You know what it’s like to have this experience right now. What it’s like, what does water here? I’m having a drink right now. You know what it’s like to drink water and notice how ineffable that is. How would you explain that to somebody.
Adrian
The direct experience. That’s been directly experienced.
Thal
The embodied experience.
John Vervaeke
It’s a perspectival knowing. It’s how is your salience landscape being shaped and altered and what’s standing out to you and then what state of consciousness are you entering into and this is all not captured by your beliefs. Then finally, and overlapping with the procedural and the perspectival is participatory knowing this is the knowing you have not by altering your beliefs or even alter your state of consciousness. You have it by altering your identity. It’s the knowing you get by binding your identity to something and letting your identity being transformed in conjunction with how that thing is transforming. Hopefully this is why this metaphor was used in the mystical traditions. This is hopefully how you know the person you love, right? You don’t just have beliefs about them, that’s kind of creepy. You don’t just have skills about how to work with them. You should have skills, you know what it’s like to be with them, but there’s something deeper. You have become a person you could not have been or become other than in your relationship to them and also they have become in their relationship to you. So you know them by how differently you know yourself and the world in knowing them. Does that make sense?
Adrian
It reminds me of sort of that Buddhist notion of the dissolving in self and other.
John Vervaeke
Yes, it’s so. It’s very much that it’s knowing by identifying, its knowing by being at one, it’s knowing by sort of being dynamically coupled to something so that you’re getting reciprocal revelation and this goes to like what’s at the core of what is called third generation cog-sci and sort of it’s Heideggerian framework. Is this notion of a deeper kind of truth. Sorry, that’s going to make the wrong people in California happy. What I mean by that is like there’s propositional truth which is can be deep and profound like e=mc squared, but there’s also Aletheia, which is a Greek word that Heidegger uses. There’s a sense of, right before I can make sure my beliefs correspond to the world, I have to be connected to the world in the right way. There’s this irrelevance realization stuff again, so that right as the world discloses itself, it draws something for me and right and then that draws something from the world. They’re mutually growing from each other. And this is all part of what’s right and, and this can also be put into very scientific language about complex, complex systems and dynamical systems. But the basic philosophical idea is there’s this reciprocal, a revelation, reciprocal revealing of self and world. Now what’s interesting is my good friend Mark Lewis recommend his work highly, by the way. He’s one of the people that brought this whole dynamical systems approach into neuroscience. Also at UofT, he’s one of the. He wrote memoirs of an addictive brain. He’s one of the foremost people on addiction and what’s interesting, he’s got a theory of addiction that’s the opposite, which is what he calls reciprocal narrowing. So instead of addiction being thought of as just biological, by the way, that’s just not true. We have this model that addiction is this biological craving that your system has and that’s just insufficient amount. I like. I was at a conference in July, the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and they’re just one, one…That’s the wrong model of addiction, right? Because it doesn’t explain a lot of things. It doesn’t explain the fact that a lot of people would just spontaneously.
Thal
It is disempowering.
John Vervaeke
It doesn’t explain again that like a lot of people will just spontaneously stop being addicted when they enter their thirties. People will like, you know, all the people that were using heroin when, during Vietnam and then they returned to North America and they just stopped. They don’t have to go to treatment, they don’t have to go through Rehab. So he has instead this sort of what you may call anti-Alatheia model of addiction. What happens is right, because the addict’s salient landscape is being altered by the drug. The options in the world narrow a bit and because the options in the world narrow a bit, their right, their sense of self gets a little more rigid and you see what’s happening. It’s like this vicious cycle and as the self becomes more rigid, the world narrows and as the world narrows, the self becomes more rigid and you get this reciprocal narrowing.
Thal
Their cognition becomes impeded.
John Vervaeke
Yeah. It becomes you lose cognitive flexibility and and that’s exactly what’s happening in the things like PTSD and things like that. Right, and that’s why the psychedelic experience can be so liberating because what it can do is it can throw the brain into a state that it’s not normally in and break that vicious cycle, but it’s gotta be. It’s gotta be coordinated with therapy. It’s got to be coordinated with cognitive restructuring. Flexibility is great, but it has to be. It has to be. That engine has to be tapped in insight and a change in the sense of identity. Look we’re continuously in a process of co-identification. Look, I’m here right now. I’m assuming that identity, either professor or a scientist and I am assigning identities to you. Here’s a glass, I’m assuming identity as a glass grabber. This object is a water holder for me, even though it’s a million other things, scientifically molecules and all kinds of electromagnetic field. We’re always, always, always in this agent arena relationship. We’re constantly in this, you know, bi-directional fashion, creating identities in the world.
Thal
Assigning meaning.
John Vervaeke
It’s not in your beliefs, it’s in the way in which your world is either reciprocally opening up because your sense of agency is being opened up and the world is being opened up or it’s narrowing down in a self deceptive self destructive fashion.
Thal
I was enjoying like when we first started our talk like you, you gave some amazing historical context, but I was also thinking about what about those people that their cognition is so impeded and their sense of self is so rigid and so small and you know, they’re unable to break free from whatever cycle that they’re stuck in.
John Vervaeke
That’s a really, really important question and I’m hesitating precisely because I have so much to say about it.
Thal
That was the one question that was sitting me when you were talking in the beginning… I was like…how can I bring that in?
Adrian
It’s that inertia, right when you’re stuck like existentially with midlife crisis, quarter life crisis, whatever you want to call it.
John Vervaeke
I call it existential inertia, by the way. Let’s talk about. Let’s talk about this. Let’s devote some time to it if you’re okay with that, because I think this is. This is where these broad issues about wisdom and transcendence and the meaning crisis. This is where it comes to people when people get this fundamental stuck-ness, this barrenness, emptiness, voidness, futility, right? And by the way, Thomas Nagel is right. All the arguments people give for meaninglessness, none of them are logically valid. All right, well oh I’m so insignificant to time and space. So what…If I blew you up to the size of the galaxy are you better? Like, does that do anything for you? It’s not helpful. It’s not…what I’m doing does it matter a million years from now? Well, the argument is symmetrical. What they’re thinking of you a million years from now does it matter to you? He, he points out that all of these arguments are not actually logically valid. They don’t, they don’t lead to. So it’s not that people’s reasoning is actually leading them into this, but I think that’s basically a form of rationalization. I think you guys would put your finger on the actual issues. What are like, what’s going on in this existential inertia? I would say there’s another thing, there’s an existensial indecisiveness. So let’s talk quickly about both. We were talking about that agent arena. I was talking about this in one of my talks, but right, there’s a thing where like there’s a difference again because of the participatory perspectival, there’s a difference between believing something and actually it being something you live within.
Thal
Lived experience.
John Vervaeke
I want to really deepen that. I appreciate how you’re introducing it. I have some criticisms of how some people use that. I think that gets used often romantically as a way of…you have to be careful here because I’m not saying that everybody uses it this way. I’m not saying that I am not saying that, but what I am saying is some people use this as a way of doing what you mentioned earlier, Adrian, right? What they’re doing is they’re collecting important experiences of suffering or you know, or, or peak, you know, people look for tail ends of the distribution that will guarantee their uniqueness, right? There’s their narcissism by special, special uniqueness, right?
Thal
Thats the word, narcissism.
John Vervaeke
It is a response to the meaning crisis. That’s why narcissism is becoming such a problem for us. I want to deepen that notion. Let’s say like, sometimes this will happen to me like you’re reading a novel perhaps, or like for me, I’m reading like a particular philosopher, like Whitehead or something and I’m finding the arguments very persuasive and I’m getting all kinds of beliefs. Right? And it’s very propositional, you know, but then there’s this thing and it goes from being like propositional to being adverbial. I start seeing the world in a Whiteheadean way. I start feeling it, experiencing it, and I start to understand and experience myself in a Whiteheadean fashion. Now I’m living the worlview. It’s viable to me as opposed to. Right. And so I’m really interested in what makes, because it’s relation to the meaning crisis, what makes a worldview viable like that. And I think Harry Frankfurt’s work is really helpful here. He talks about um, whether or not something is, he calls it unthinkable. I don’t like that word, but that’s his term. So let me give you an example. My son, my oldest son, lives with me right now, right? So I can imagine kicking him out and I can make all kinds of inferences about what I would pay. Say more money. The apartment would be cleaner, right? So in one sense I can imagine, I can make an inference, but it’s unthinkable to me because I can’t make it a viable option. I can’t get myself into that process of identifying the world and I, I can’t get my identity and the identity of the world to be resonant in such a fashion that I could be the kind of person that would kick my son out the fittedness. So it just doesn’t work. It’s not viable for me. Now that’s positive. Right, and that has to do with love because it can think about it because you know when I was talking about that reciprocal revelation in Alethea though as the world is revealing its self to me, I’m revealing myself to it and those are deeply interpenetrating processes. That’s also, that’s also love. That’s why love has been used as a metaphor for this kind of participatory knowing. Right? In fact, if you do that with people, that’s what Erin’s work show. If you get people to do mutually accelerating revelation about each other, disclosure, you start to disclose a bit about yourself and that I disclose a bit more about me and then that makes you, and if we start getting into that, then that’s how you get people to fall in love. Whether it’s sexual or friendship, right? So there’s that love element that that reciprocal connectedness right now, that’s a positive version of it. And I remember talking to asking Laurie Paul about this, and she thought it was a good a good point. I said, but isn’t there a negative version of that? Where like, and I remember bringing it uo to Mark. I said, Mark, you’ve got the negative version. Where’s the positive insight? Because also say to Frankfurt, you’ve got the positive versus the negative. Can’t that reciprocal relationship. So bind you in, and this was your point, Thal, so binds you in that you can’t write. You can believe what you need to believe and you can imagine it, but you can’t unfold. You can’t, you can’t, you know, reverse the direction of the reciprocal relationship in that’s existential inertia. You get locked into a world that’s the existential inertia.
Adrian
Which is different from indecisiveness?
John Vervaeke
Indecisiveness is another thing. So let’s call it, let’s call that an existential to inertia and I want you to think about how important that is to therapy. Because when people come into therapy, they know they have to. They know what they have all the right beliefs about where they should be and they can imagine it. They could make mental images of where they need to be.
Thal
They can probably see their patterns too.
John Vervaeke
But they can’t get there, they don’t have the know how they don’t have the perspectival and the participatory knowing. Okay, let’s do the existential indecisiveness. Adrian, and this goes to the heart of Lori’s work. L. A. Paul’s work and transformative experience. She talks about transformative experiences and they’re, and they have this following kind of characteristics. She had this wonderful gedanken experiment. Philosophers do this, right? They put you in bizarro world and you play with it, and then once you sort of agree with, oh, that makes sense. Then they say, Aha, so this is what she does. She says, imagine the following. Your friends come up to you and they give you indubitable evidence that they can turn you into a vampire. Do you do it? And you go, what? And she says, well, here’s the problem you face. You don’t know what it’s what it’s going to be like. Remember the perspectival knowing to be a vampire until you’re a vampire so you don’t have that perspectival knowing, right, and you don’t have the participatory knowing, you don’t know who you’re going to be because when you become a vampire, your priorities and your sense of identity and your sense of agency, all that coin and all that’s going to be changed. So here’s the problem. You face, you’re ignorant. You’re deeply ignorant of the perspectival knowledge that you don’t yet have ahe participatory knowledge that you don’t yet have. So what do you do? What do you do? Well, I don’t do it, but then you don’t know what you’re losing. You don’t. No you don’t. No, sorry. You don’t know what you’re missing. You don’t know what you could be missing the best thing ever. Well then I will do it. Ah, but then you don’t know what you’re losing. You don’t know what you’re going to. You don’t know what you’re going to see. The thing is you can’t, you can’t do. So we typically, what we thought is, well, what we do in situations of uncertainty is we go we are bayesian in, right? We calculate the probabilities, we calculate the utilities, but you can’t calculate the probabilities. You can’t calculate the utilities because you’re absolutely ignorant. So what do you do, and so she said this is the thing is this is what she calls a transformative experience. When you go through this radical transformation of your perspectival and your participatory knowing. So people also face that when they’re in therapy, they face this existential indecisiveness, which they’re stuck in inertia, but they’re also contemplating changing. They don’t know how that’s part of the problem. But the other part of the problem is, well, what will I be losing when I go over there? What will I don’t know what I’m missing and I don’t know what I’m going to be. So they’re, they’re existentially indecisive. And you see, we used to have, you mentioned the Sufis. We used to have these broadly powerful traditions in which we had institutions and traditions and communities that gave people support and guidance and structure to transformative experience.
Thal
So that they plunge into the unknown…
John Vervaeke
But they don’t, like we sad, with the psychedelic, they don’t plunge into it like in an autodidactic fashion. Autodidactism is, uh, you know, it’s the worst way to do science. It’s the worst way to make literature. It’s the worst way to do poetry. It’s also the worst way to do spirituality. Right? Laurie sort of does that and she really wrestled her point, which is the brilliant point of the book is like our normal notions of standard rationality just don’t apply to transformative experiences. Laurie’s no romantic or like she’s a hardline.
Thal
It is funny that you use the word autodidact because I consider myself an autodidact and that’s what hindered me from my own progress. Absolutely.
John
You only have most of your cognitive flexibility comes from your ability to internalize the perspective of others and to internalize psycho-technologies from your culture at large. Right? And if you’re an autodidact, that’s often that self organizing adaptive intelligence just runs in its own echo chamber. So I got really interested in this problem, the transformative experience problem and how psychedelics and mystical experiences. So I started thinking, okay, Laurie’s right, you can’t sort of logic or probability or theory your way through it. So what do people do? Do they do the Kierkergaard’s leap of faith?
Thal
I was about to say that. Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.
Adrian
Do a test drive where they, they do little micro experiments.
John Vervaeke
Excellent. Exactly. So this is so, so let’s do this. So the point about the gedanken experiment, right, is you’re not going to vampire, but then Laurie says, but you face real decisions like this in your life. Here’s one, have a child, and if you haven’t had a child and I have had to two, you don’t know what it’s like until you’ve had one and you don’t know who you’re going to be because you’re going to be a different person after you. If you’re a good parent, right? Or you decided to enter into a romantic relationship with somebody. If all that participatory knowing we talked about, it’s going to happen. You’re going to be a different person in a different world. You don’t know what you’re losing. You don’t know what you’re missing, and then I pointed something out to Laurie, which she, she agreed with. I said, you know what? Every developmental change that the brain’s going through into all of our cognitive development, we’re facing these transformative things. She said, yeah, it’s that pervasive. So let’s go back to Adrian’s point because I think it’s excellent. What did people do when they think about having a child? He said like, they do the test run, so I looked around and so what people do is they get a pet and they do weird things with the pet like they get, they’ll take family pictures with it and they’ll take it on vacation with them. So they do this, they do this thing or in, you know, uh, my, my partner and I were talking about this when we we’re away going to Cuba. It’s like one of the things people do, but in order to decide to get a relationship as they go on a trip with somebody and I thought, okay, what’s going on here? What’s going on here? And I thought, oh, this is really interesting. So what people are doing is they’re engaging in a very serious kind of play, right? So think about like how a play object is, has two identities, the plastic sword, it’s a sword but it’s not a sword so you can play with it to see what it’s like, but it doesn’t have the danger. So same thing with the pat, same thing with the trip, right? So it’s this, it’s this, it’s an analogy, but it’s not a propositional analogy, it’s an inactive analogy. You’re acting it out and it, and it takes tremendous skill. Like a good analogy. It’s gotta get. It’s got to get the balance between the two worlds, right? It’s got to get. It’s got to keep you in contact with the world you’re in right now because you know you don’t want to lose it without right, without being able to judge, but it’s got to give you enough. It’s got a trigger, enough of that perspectival and participatory knowing so you get a real good taste and think of the word we use taste. A taste of that world and you and you got to get it perfectly balanced. And I realized that’s one of the things that was going on with the ancient gnosis. Gnosis was this participatory knowing that was supposed to bring about transformation by trying to get. Give people these inactive analogies, this symbolic way of interacting so that you could play right now. You need it to do one other thing. Let’s go back. So that’s going to deal with the indecisiveness by giving you the test run. What about the inertia? Well, here’s an idea that comes from sort of the central Plato, platonic tradition, but we talked about it already, right? Giving people psycho-technologies that get that, that process of reciprocally opening the world up. Plato had a word for this anagogie the ascent, right? And what you do is, and Plato had this great insight that if you get the psycho-technologies lined up in the right way, they will become mutually reinforcing. So what I want is I want psycho-technologies that reduce my inner conflict because it’s the different motivational centers are what skew my salience landscape and make me self deceptive. So here’s a typical one. You have, you have hyperbolic discounting. You tend to find presence stimuli, very salient and future ones, very non-salient. That’s why people procrastinate. That’s why dieting is such a failed industry, right? Recidivism rate is 95 percent. They only have a five percent success rate and they rake in billions of dollars, right? What you want to do is you want to make sure, and this is what was lacking, what Stanovich was noting was people was lacking. See, your intelligence makes things quickly, salient, to you. Remember the airplane crash, right? You’ve got to retrain your salience landscape so that it will tend to zero in on the real patterns as opposed to the illusory or false patterns and that takes a lot of practice. One of the ways you do that, plato saw is by working to try and get an optimal relationship between what you find salient, but also what you find true, right? So trying to get that part of you that urgently connect you to the world, talking to the part of you that can pick up on more abstract but real patterns. What Plato saw right is as that internal conflict goes down, my self-deception goes down. Because if my salience landscape isn’t radically skewed away from my truth landscape, if they’re much more talking to each other and consonant then I’m much less likely to engage in self-deceptive practice. But here’s the. Here’s the insight, as I reduced my self-deception by achieving inner peace, and that’s what was behind the stupid hallmark card, right? And we want inner peace with the idea that what I want, right? I have this meta drive to try and optimize these various adaptive ways of interacting with the world so that I get an optimal grip on the world. Right? But what plato saw as I get better at reducing this inner conflict, I start to see the world more clearly.
Adrian
What does that look like in practice? So I’m having a hard time what’s the exercise that Plato was referring to? Is it inner dialogue and like how do you.
John Vervaeke
That’s the thing, you’re not gonna find it in Plato because Plato is enormously. You’ll find it more on Plotinus and you’ll find it also like in the Sufi tradition, you’ll find it all these practices. So one of the things that you should be going to a mindfulness practice for is not relaxing, not feeling better. I’m actually going to be on a TV show for the fall The Beaverton, where I represent a scientist talking about mindfulness as opposed to people who are sort of practicing mindfulness to feel good.
Thal
I’ve heard people actually refer to mindfulness as…oh, this is bullshit now.
John Vervaeke
That’s right and that’s because mindfulness should be about education. It’s not a vacation, right? You should be going into mindfulness. To reduce. You should see a significant reduction reported to you by others in your self deception. That’s what it starts to look like and you start to see situations and people differently. Now as you start to see people and situations differently, you know what that means. You start to do, you start to understand yourself better and differently, so you now start to get better at aligning the psyche, which then means it’s better for you to see and understand. That’s how you can start to get that positive feedback cycle going. Does that make sense?
Thal
I’m just also thinking about spirituality also that some people even use that as a self deception mechanism. Totally. It just becomes a bypass and don’t go into the like your inner world and to reduce that inner conflict.
Adrian
I think part of it is how it’s sold to us. I mean, for me, I started diving into meditation practice only about three years ago, so I consider myself very early on the path, but the way that it’s often taught or the way I interpreted it is escapist version of meditation.
Thal
It has been my journey for seven years, Adrian.
John Vervaeke
It’s part of this sort of crypto romanticism. I mean that as a philosophical cultural project not romantic love although that where it came from too. Like romanticism with the idea, right? How can I put it here? Here’s how I would put it in a somewhat simplistic slogan, the idea that you have a true self, not at, not in a Buddhist sense or like the the inner machinery but you have an autobiographical self that you have to be true too, right, and this is, this is the opposite of the axial revolution is the aspirational self. Socrates was trying to help us realize and cultivate and through wisdom and transformation come to our true self. You are not born with it as a finished identity that you constantly have to harken to and then your project is to show to the world how unique and special right that inner self that you’re born with. The project isn’t the project shifts from how do I realize and become my true and better self to the project of how do I continually demonstrate to the world myself and what it is and how unique it is. And so what people do, I think is they collect spiritual experiences and then they’re like, they’re these bejeweled glamorous that they put on their narcissistic shelf and um, yeah, I think, I mean I think that’s just a disaster, but if you go back to what we were talking about, if you, if you get a community that gives you this serious play and that gives you the tools.
Thal
The cognitive tools.
John Vervaeke
That serious play, that inactive analogy, that enacted anagogic transformation, then you can bring about a transformative experience and people are doing this spontaneously and they’re doing it and they’re doing it. Let them. Let me give an example because this is so bizarre, right? So what are some of the most secular countries in the world? The Scandinavian countries. So in Scandinavia there’s a role playing a style of jeep form that has emerged. And so the point about this is like a you know what a role play game is, right? Dungeons and dragons, and then you have larping where you live action role playing, right? Larping I should say. Right? And then this is one thing more or so what you have is you have a bunch of people, they come into a situation, they’re given a situation, they have to act out, and then the dungeon master is actually like a director and what to do like a movie set director. He’ll cut a scene or they’ll say switch or switch roles, or I’ll give you a prop and say this is a sword now use it and what you’re doing is you’re acting out scenes and you’re acting on scenes that are actually real life scenes and this is what you actually are striving for. You’re trying to get a phenomenon called bleed, so what you want is you want the senior acting out to be similar enough analogically similar enough, but open you up and do enough flexibility in play that you’ll the line between what you’re playing and your real life bleeds so that you can do. Now if you would ask the people or even religious, they go, what are you talking about? But you said, but why are you pursuing this? I mean, from the outside. This looks to me like a spiritual practice. This is a radical practice that started a highly ritualized situation with a community of support and desire and you know, and it’s not escapist this like it’s often like deeply disturbing and troubling to these people, but they’re seeking genuine release from this indecisiveness, existential indecisiveness, and existential inertia, that’s the kind of thing.
Adrian
Is this unconscious, you suspect they’re not going and knowing that that’s what they’re doing it for?
John Vervaeke
I think it’s semiconscious. It’s sort of like it’s mythologically aware to them they, they got, they know that this is meeting, look like. Think about it. When we were talking about that inner peace, you have played this Plato’s great insight that in addition to whatever you want, you want to, you want to experience it with inner peace. If I said to you, I’ll give you tremendous fame, but it will rip you apart inside. Do you want it? You go, no, I don’t think so. Right? But there’s another one. Remember, in addition to any piece, I want to be in contact with the real patterns. Same thing. People have a metta desire to whatever they have, right? They want it to be real. So I’ll do this in class with my students. So I’ll say, how many of you I’ll probably have I do this too much. I’m going to spoil it because they are students and they’ll start just screwing around with me but generally I’ll say, how many of your in like deeply satisfying personal relationships right now put up your hand. Surprisingly, a lot of them put up their hands contrary to all the complaining we hear. And then I’ll say, now the following, I want you to imagine it’s like Laurie’s Gedanken experiment. Imagine that your partner is cheating on you and finding out that they were cheating on you would absolutely end the relationship that you have right now. How many of you want to know if your partner is cheating on you? Keep your hands up. 95 percent of the people keep their hands on it. They’d rather have the real suffering that the fake happiness. Right? And so I think the same thing’s going on with this jeep forming this. They’re, they’re finding that they’re getting, they’re getting a bit of that analogic play, they’re getting a bit of that anagogic, you know, reciprocal revelation. They’re getting that opening up, right? They’re getting that, that, that transformation and their perspectival and participatory knowing they’re getting that gnosis and they’re feeling deeply connected to themselves and to each other into their world. Now they don’t think of that as the hallmark of spirituality and I think that spirituality is about believing in supernatural entities and seeing strange lights, but I think that’s the key is spirituality because they’re going through these radical transformations of consciousness and cognition, community and communing with others, designed to bring about enhanced relevance, realization, enhanced insight, wisdom, cognitive flexibility, changing. They’re very patterns of co-identification, how they identify others and their world and themselves.
Thal
It is like that awareness expansion. To go back to that question you mentioned, is it, is it religious? No, it’s not because there’s no dogma.
John Vervaeke
I make a distinction between religion and religio. So religio is a Latin word and it is one of the two contenders for the edible, logical origin of the word religion but religio actually means connectedness this to connect things, to bind things together. So that sense of binding I think was crucial. Now I think what, what goes on in religion is you also get credo, I believe, right? And you get these propositional statements. Now the point of the propositional statements is to originally is to, is to create a community and to create practices and psycho-technology, literatures about psycho-technologies to help people. But the problem is like you can get a creedal oppression where the credo crushes the religio.
Thal
Brings about rigidity and increases inner conflicts…
John Vervaeke
Right and so what we get is we get, we get another thing that is a terrific sign. So we talked about narcissism and these two are related, although most people won’t see them initially is related, but. Oh well good. Okay. So the narcissism, the meaning crisis. And then here’s another thing that’s connected to the meaning crisis and also connected to narcissism and that’s the rise of fundamentalisms. Beliefs not enough. So what I’ll do is I’ll just believe even more, like I’ll, I’ll pour everything into belief and I’ll make credo absolutely like the complete identity. When I talk to people from a religious background. I’ll often say … when I get into discussion and I do this respectfully because I really respect people who belong to a religious traditions because I understand like what, sorry, that sounds arrogant. I don’t mean it to be, I’m trying to say I understand in an appreciative fashion what they’re doing, what they’re trying to do, but I’ll often say to them, don’t tell me what you believe…tell me what you practice and tell me how those practices are making you more wise and more compassionate or capable of self transcendence and more capable of transforming the world to deal with the situations we’re dealing with. Don’t tell me what you believe. Tell me about your practices.
Thal
This is an important distinction. Just because I come from a, like I was brought up in a more religious environment and that’s the struggle. Growing up, a lot of young people are just given all these dogmas and instructions and it’s so divorced from the reality of everyday and so the young generation becomes so disenchanted, so they either turn to complete nihilism or the other side is fundamentalism.
Adrian
Yes. The interesting move for me coming from pretty secular, um, you know, upbringing towards a more open mystical, you know, explorer. I think the move for me was to shift away from asking what’s true to how is this useful, right. It is literally the bring it to the practical ground to get in practice. Was, was the move that helped open me to something that was uncomfortable and different and scary and start to experiment.
John Vervaeke
Well, I think that’s the key. I mean, I think the summit of propositional knowledge is what we call knowledge scientific knowledge. I think the summit of the procedural perspectival participatory stuff is what we call wisdom. And those are not the same thing. You don’t get wisdom by getting a lot of knowledge. Knowledge is relevant to wisdom, but it’s like the relationship between intelligence and rationality. It’s a necessary but not sufficient. I would say useful, but you want useful again and I’m hoping this is helpful to you. I’m not trying to step on your toes, right? But you want useful to be broadened in the sense of useful for helping you overcome patterns of foolishness and useful for helping you engage in patterns of flourishing, things that are useful for the cultivation of wisdom. Are you getting better at seeing when you’re in messy situations do you have sets of practices that help you zero in on what’s relevant and what’s real. So I understand what, what, what true, but if we talk about real in that athletic sense, that sense of I’ve got a connectedness to the world that’s opening up me and the world in an ongoing fashion. A fashion that in which I can. There’s good reason and good evidence to believe that, you know, I’m, I’m becoming wiser, more compassionate, more engaged and effective person. Right. Then that’s what I’m saying…usefulness means…I hope you find that helpful because of the problem with the word useful is it’s, broad and, it can be sucked into that narcissistic project. It could be useful for promoting myself image and then it undermines the very, the very thing we’re trying to talk about here, I think.
Thal
Useful in a more meaningful, profound way.
Adrian
In a relational sense.
John Vervaeke
I would say existential and sapiential sense. Yeah. So if you’re, if you, if you have sets of practices that take you through the unavoidable and indispensable transformative experiences that you need to encounter and to go through there are unavoidable in your life. Someone dies, you leave, right? You lose your job, you decide to enter into relationship. All these things we’re talking about like do you have right cognitive practices, consciousness practices, community practices, character building practices that reliably take you through the in a way in which the field of flourishing life is expanded for you and the lives you touch. That for me is what I would say usefulness is so I’m a little bit critical of people who have some points where have a little bit critical of Jordan Peterson. I wish Jordan would get a little bit clearer on his pragmatic theory because I have. I want to debate him again at some point.
Adrian
It brings it back to the narcissistic tendency of I think a lot of spiritual circles. That pursuit of selfing it keeps defining it actually making the self more rigid.
John Vervaeke
This is why, again, like you’ve got to so, so the struggle, Thal, that you’re going through. For example, as where do I go to get like a community because you need, you need many people committed together to this like the jeep formers, regular, reliable meeting and getting together. Where do I find a community? Where do I, that it has as systematic set of psych-technologies and exemplar role models that are at different developmental stages in life so that as I moved through those developmental stages, I have a narrative understanding of what’s going on. Where do you have that? Well, the only place where we’ve typically had that up until now are religion, right, and when we tried second or alternatives, we tried ideologies in the 20th century and that drench the world in blood. Right? So we don’t want. We know that that’s not right. That’s not working and many of us, the traditional religions don’t work for a lot of the reasons we’ve articulated, but we need something very much like what they did. This is why I’m critical of people like Dawkins and Harris, right? Because yes, I think, I mean I consider myself a non-theist that, that I think both the theist and the atheists have presuppositions that are shared that I reject and at some point I’d like to talk about that agree not today but at great length, but see the thing about people like Dawkins is they concentrate on the false beliefs. It’s like, yes, okay, great, but you know, and this is what I sometimes point this out, you know, you have to get what Nietzsche talked about, like what he said, God is dead, right? The madman runs into the marketplace and he’s telling them who’s he talking to? He’s not talking to the theist, he’s talking to the atheist. He says, you don’t know what you’ve done. You’ve wiped away the sky. We’re forever falling. You don’t know what you’ve done by killing God. You don’t know. You’ve thrown away all this axial legacy, all this machinery and you and you don’t know how to replace it.
Thal
It is the most misunderstood statement.
John Vervaeke
Yes. So I mean Nietzsche’s great project is to try. But the problem is he was too much of an autodidact, right? And that’s my great criticism of Nietzsche. His project was, I mean he’s, he’s a great prophet of the meaning crisis, and his project was to try and create an alternative form of spirituality and then alternative mythology, the mythology of the Ubermensch. I have lots of criticisms of that, but people need, you need to see, what he was, what he was on about, wasn’t that people had silly false beliefs he was on about. No, no, we’re facing the meaning crisis and we’ve got to do something about this because if we don’t, it’s just going to get worse and it’s gonna get worse and people are going to turn to fundamental systems at the totalitarianisms and ideologies at escapisms and we’re going to get kind of the situation we’re in now today.
Adrian
So I’m just being mindful of time. I want to ask you personally, what are you working towards in moving towards the middle thing that we, you know, you mentioned about, you know, not religion but also not, not the secular ideology. What, what are you doing currently to support?
John Vervaeke
So in addition to the academic study and teaching of this material, I also try to teach people extracurricular that some of these psycho-technologies, mindfulness practices, I teach classes on meditation, Tai-chi and contemplative practices. I used to run a wisdom sanga. I’d like to start that up again. When you’re an academic your schedule changes all the time and it’s because it’s difficult. What Im doing also is I’m trying to…I’ve just, I’m just coming off sabbatical, like I have another one in a half a year. It’s a weird situation. With other people, not on my own, but with other people. A lot of these people I’ve mentioned colleagues, RAs, and fellow professors try to examine a lot of these psycho-technologies and trying to salvage what was going on when people are practicing this practice or that practice or that practice or that are trying to what we do in cognitive science, we reverse-engineer the mind. We tried to reverse engineer the mind, right. That’s what we’re trying to do in AI. I’m trying to reverse engineer what, like there’s all these oftern these creepy wonky metaphysics and weird beliefs and crazy superstitious. Right? But thinking about what Nisha said is, can we reverse engineer what were the psycho-technologies, what was going on in neoplatonism when people were doing theorgia, what was going on in, you know, when the gnostics were doing all their weird strange stuff, what’s going on when the Tibet and Buddhist and you can’t be, you can’t just dabble, right? You have to like, you have to like seriously read and study and practice and go through that transformative challenge, right? Yeah. So you have to guinea pig yourself to a degree, but you can’t autodidact. So doing a lot of that and trying to integrate that practical in a deep sense. It’s an insufficient word, that practical knowledge into a lot of this theoretical knowledge. I’m about to release a video series on my youtube channel. I’m awakening from the meaning crisis. It’s a series of hour long videos. I’m basically trying to lay out all this argument and that also talk about, right, how do we respond to the media crisis culturally, how is it enmeshed and interacting with other crises we’re facing. We were facing sociopolitical socioeconomic environment, socioeconomics, socio ecological crises, how, how is it Intermesh, right? And trying, but also individually giving people, okay, well what are, what are psycho-technologies you can practice, how can they be systematically related? Trying to give people, again, not on my own, but with many other people. Like what does wisdom mean? What does, how, what’s the theoretical structure that you could use? Right and trying to set that up for people. Sorry, that sounds pretentious and I don’t mean it to be, but I’m trying to answer your question.
Adrian
I appreciate it because there’s a sense of urgency. We can’t, we can’t wait for the perfect product, we just have to start doing it. We have to. Everybody has to try their best and, and collaborate and not, you know, not one person is ever going to solve this whole thing.
John Vervaeke
Exactly. Totally. And we are facing individually, collectively, and culturally we’re facing like we have to go through the greatest transformative experience with like and all those levels in some coordinated fashion that we’ve ever gone through because, you know, as I said, these crises are all mutually interacting with each other, like the meaning crisis and the ecological crisis. Like they talk to each other, they resonate with each other and you know, in, in this sort of nasty fashion. I talked about this with Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic and the book we wrote on Zombies as a current mythology that the culture is produced for trying to give expression to the meaning crisis, but also right? The idea of, uh, you know, have a devastated ecology because the interesting thing with zombies, they’re not super natural, right? Monsters, they’re just us diseased…decadent, right. What’s weird is that they’re mindless. They lack the capacity to make meaning and they’re like us. They’re the only communal monster. They move and horns, but there’s no culture.
Thal
There’s no real connection.
John Vervaeke
Right? And they consume, they consume, but to no purpose to no end, right. They represent like the meaning crisis and the way it has a both metaphorically like did the destruction of our spiritual ecology when, how that is intermeshed with the destruction of our biological ecology.
Thal
Just in closing, like the things that you’re mentioning is in line with why we even started this podcast. Adrian and I we’re having coffee together and we were talking about the crisis of meaning and how that’s affecting us on a daily basis and our generation. Today you just gave us a lot of food for thought a lot.
John Vervaeke
Thank you for the opportunity. I mean I really do that. There’s so much here. Sorry every academic says this, but we’ve really just scratched the surface in so many ways. There’s just so much going on. There’s so much going on and I’m like I said, you know, there’s going to be the video series.
Thal
Your language…to me is very mystical and scientific!
John Vervaeke
Well, that’s the thing. I would hope it’s both I find one of the things I find gratifying was when I teach courses like this, I’ll have people from both sides of the aisle who are usually yelling at each other and come up and say that was really good. Absolutely. Yes. I mean that’s obviously appeals to my egotism and acknowledging that, but I think I can, if I can put myself aside to some degree, but you also mentioned that you’ve worked with a lot of people. There are a lot of people that are talking this language now. That’s right, and that’s what I think. That’s what I’m trying to say. That’s what I try to tell my students that, and again, in this, the people say this and this could also be a twisty narcissist thing. Really focus on the work and focus on what was happening with the idea is don’t focus on me. Right. But really there’s…It’s simultaneously a terrifying and exciting time.
Thal
It is. Absolutely, yes.
Adrian
John to be continued. It was a pleasure.
John Vervaeke
Great. Thank you very much, guys. Really enjoyed this a lot.