John Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist, professor, and public intellectual best known for his work on the intersection of cognitive science, philosophy, and spirituality. He teaches courses on psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhism at the University of Toronto.
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Adam Jacobs: I have a lot of questions for you. I really, really enjoyed this book and the video series, so you've given me a lot to think about, and I have a bunch of questions. I'm just curious; this is totally irrelevant, but are people up there happy or unhappy about the resignation yesterday? (Of Justin Trudeau)
John Vervaeke: Oh, overwhelmingly happy, overwhelmingly happy across the country. It's been a long time since I've seen this kind of consensus, political consensus, yet it's the general view that he has become. He and his government, he specifically and the government in general, have become very corrupt, and they need to go, they need to go corrupt, and many main problems are not being handled well. That's sort of the general consensus.
Adam Jacobs: Okay, that's what I thought. That's the vibe I'm getting. And also, I think maybe it's a good segue into start talking about some of the concepts that you lay out. You've identified essentially that there is a crisis of meaning in the world and that there are multiple factors, multiple negative factors, as to why that is. You talk about media low trust in institutions like you just mentioned loneliness and a bunch of other factors. But my question is, and you also provide some of the searching that's going on for solutions to this problem, which I think is the critical part, but was there some kind of catalyzing event for you? Was there something that happened that got you motivated to start exploring this?
John Vervaeke: Well, mean, I grew up in a fundamentalist Christianity, and then as I left that and only later realized how traumatizing it had been, I had to go through therapy. Nevertheless, had, I sometimes say, I had the taste for the transcendence left in my mouth by that sort of mother religion.
So I fell into my own personal meaning crisis, and I was in my late teens and early twenties, appropriate time to do so. And I wrestled with that a lot. I met the figure of Socrates in the first year of university, and that gave me my first role model of how is it that one could cultivate spirituality and wisdom in a way that didn't seem to require what I had found as a traumatizing structure within the Christianity I had been presented. But unfortunately, that philosophical take that's presented by Plato and Socrates, where philosophy is about the cultivation of wisdom and the seeking of the good life in flip in fellowship, drops out of academic philosophy after you're introduced to it as the ideal, which was disheartening.
I went on to get my degrees in philosophy because I found the skills they were giving me, meta-scientific skills and meta cultural skills, and meta-ethical skills are terrifically valuable. But the project of cultivating wisdom was not being addressed. So I took up, right literally down the road, I took up Tai Chi which I would now call an ecology of practices. And I started to go through these transformations very often, very profound, and other people were noticing it in me.
And about that same time, heard about a new discipline called cognitive science. So I went back and got an honors BSC in cognitive science to get training as a scientist. And I started to put these two together, and somebody who had a huge influence on me, a friend and colleague of mine, Evan Thompson, introduced me to a way of doing cognitive science that started to bring together these wisdom-cultivating practices and the scientific study of the mind. And so I started to draw them together, and he was supposed to teach a course called Buddhism and Cognitive Science, and he couldn't do it.
And they said, well, is there anybody else that could do this? And he said, well, John can do it. So I started teaching that. When I started doing this convergence that I had found personally relevant and talking about, I was the first person to academically teach about mindfulness, to teach about the psychology and cognitive science of wisdom, and then bring up the meaning crisis, my students' eyes would just go like this.
And I realized, oh, there's something else going on here. So I've always been an amateur historian. I won a couple of history awards when I was in high school and things like that, so I was always interested in, so I did a deep dive into the history and brought that together with the cognitive science and what was happening in that course. And then I had a student approach me who had taken that course Buddhism and cognitive Science, and he'd taken a course on the psychology of wisdom that I taught, and he said, you got to put this on YouTube.
And so he said, I'm a professional videographer. My father's a professional editor, his name is Alan Kian. I owe everything to Alan in some senses. And then along the way, I'd started to write a book that never got published with Christopher Mastropietro called Science in the Sage, but that got broken up into multiple other books. And then all of this came together. We did the video series, and then Chris and I started working together. And that's how it happened.
Adam Jacobs: When your students were looking at you bright-eyed as you were describing, what do you think they were realizing? What were you identifying in them that needed addressing?
John Vervaeke: See, the meaning crisis is it's more complex than it's often understood. If you ask most people the sort of basic scientific questionnaire about meaning in life, do you have friends? Do you have family? Do you have work projects? Yeah, they're sort of above average on meaning. They're not like, ugh. And so you have to be really careful. You have to think about it; we can talk a little bit more about what specifically the meaning of crisis is. Let's just take it intuitively. You've got sort of four kinds of response. Some people suffer, they suffer a reaction to the loss and that these are the people of loneliness. These are the people of addiction; these are people of mental health struggle. And then there's a group of people that get picked up by these everyday, these scientific measures. Although when you do larger surveys, you get a lot more reports of, especially of young people finding their lives meaningless.
There was one done in the UK that showed that, but for a lot of people, what they're doing is they're sort of living in this little tiny bubble, and I'm going to be a little bit pejorative here. Part of the problem is that they're sort of caught in a cycle of they're very busy, they burn out, they get bored, and they go into busyness, and they're cycling around in that. And what that means is in a lot of ways, they're suffering, but they have positive answers to the standard questions. But what's showing up for them is they have a very small scope of meaning. It's quite fragile. So if they get hit by some major things, they don't have significant resilience. And COVID showed that quite significantly. So when that routine of busyness unto death gets disrupted, a lot of people were exposed to existential forms of burnout, the consequences of burnout, and also of kind of existential boredom, not just a bit of a daily boredom. It's like, oh, right.
Then you have groups of people that do sort of reactive replacement. These are people who are seeking to replace the things that used to give our culture, meaning philosophy, religion, poetry, and prophecy, not in the current term of foretelling the future, but people like Martin Luther King who would explicate a powerful or Gandhi, explicate, something that's implicit that needs to be brought into awareness. And so people, they look for those kinds of worlds. Maybe it's a virtual video game and we have video game addiction, or maybe it's the MC Universe and people's religious attitudes towards the MC universe, when it gets trespassed on, they don't act the way they act.
Like we used to act about sitcoms, they go into a rage because their sacredness is being sold. And then, finally, you have people who are doing responsible replacement. They're not reactive. What they're doing is, and so you see positive symptoms like their mindfulness revolution, the return of stoicism, more and more of these kinds of podcasts, more and more communities where people are getting together and either recovering old rituals or coming up with new rituals to try and cultivate meaning and wisdom. So that's comprehensively what's going on. And so my students would be a mixture of those.
To answer your question, there would be the hunger because they're lonely or they're on the edge of despair. Some of them are battling with various kinds of ways in which their agency is being lost to them. They're being manipulated by advertising and social media and stuff like that. Some of them are because they're students. As soon as you sort of burst that bubble of busyness and burnout and boredom, they feel. And then there's many people that have started up that practice, or at least they get a sense that they would like to have a more and a deeper kind of meaning in their life. They'd like to cultivate wisdom.
So I'll give you one more thing, Adam, and then I'll be quiet. So I'll ask my students, where do you go for information? And the cyborgs that we're all becoming, they hold up their phones; where do you go for knowledge? And they're a little bit jaundiced, postmodern, you write stuff and well, the university science, but they're worried about those institutions failing. And then I say, where do you go for wisdom? And there's an anxious silence. And so those are all the ways in which the eyes get opened.
Adam Jacobs: So what you're saying for me generates a bunch of questions about wisdom, and I sort of want to unpack that on one level, but meaning is also critical, and the two are related. So let me frame a question about meaning to you like this. There's a show that my 14-year-old son is really into called The Amazing Digital Circus, and it's about these crazy-looking cartoon figures in this sort of very circus-like but disturbing sort of world. None of them know why they're there. And one of them has a vague memory of putting on a VR set at some point in the distant past. They go through a set of activities that this AI named Cain sets up.
The stated purpose of these activities is basically to keep them sane, meaning if they didn't have something to do in this place, they would go nuts. And somehow, the whole thing just struck me. And they're all struggling with their emotions, and they're struggling to make sense of what they're doing and why they're doing it. So when we talk about meaning, can meaning exist in a vacuum outside of a big M, meaning like an objective, meaning this is meaning or is anything a substitute, so to speak, for meaning, is my stamp collection so sufficient to be meaningful in my life? Or is there some other level that we're meant to aspire to?
John Vervaeke: Okay, so this is another critique I have of the standard psychological construct. This is a self-critique, by the way. I used to just use without reflection, the standard psychological construct, but I'm engaged in a project right now, very much like I did with the mindfulness construct of a very powerful critique and reformulation. But the point you bring out is that meaning is what's called a thick term. Thin terms are a term that's just sort of like a bottle. Great, you're just pointing at something. But let's take the term rational. That's a non-controversial thing. It not only describes its praises, so in the philosophical sense, not the statistical sense, but in the philosophical sense, it has a normative to mention it demands of people that they try to orient to what is more true, what is better, what is more beautiful, that sort of thing.
Meaning is also a thick term. When we say somebody's life is meaningful, we're not nearly describing it; we're praising it. And so the problem we have is the psychological sense. It doesn't pick up on the normative dimension, which is part of what it is to properly have meaning, is to aspire to have more and to have better meaning because it is properly a normative thing. So you can satisfy the psychological need, let's put it that way, of that kind of connectedness that's going on with your son in that virtual world, because what is the virtual world supplying that It's picking up enough on these.
So, another problem with the standard construct is that it is all about, it's self-centered. Is your life meaningful to you? And we don't have questions about whether the world is meaningful? Does the world make sense? Is it a proper home for you? So notice that what's happening is there's an acknowledgment that the world isn't meaningful. That's why the world is kind of creepy and alien, and they're properly not at home in it. But you can try and cultivate some basic sanity, which is a basic kind of connectedness. And what it's doing is it's giving you a story to belong—giving you a set of rules you can discover so the world makes sense to you, and it gives you a way of leveling up or getting better, at least maintaining something.
So those, you can get the sort of core psychological dimensions on the self end of meaning in that situation, but notice what that's associated with. It's associated with this sort of red queen dilemma of running to stay in place. You have to put all this effort just to stay sane, not to become. So you have that default low level of meaning that preserves your cognitive agency, preserves your sanity, right? I think that has to do with basic mechanisms. Maybe we'll talk about, maybe we won't, about relevance realization, but you don't have those moments.
Adam Jacobs: I wrote it down,
John Vervaeke: Okay, what Rosen calls resonance, where it's not, you're zeroing in on things that you consider important, but not how are they important to you. It's more that this is something important that deserves your attention and your time. You come around the bend, and you see the sunset, and it calls to you, and something emerges on you unpredictably because of the unpredictability of that, and you feel that you're getting in touch with something that's deeper and better, that's resonance. And what's probably lacking in your son's game for the characters are moments of resonance. Resonance requires not only that the self find meaning but that the world can be home to you, the world can call to you, and provide you a way. And why do we need to be called? Because there's a normative dimension to meaning. You need something to call you beyond where you've gotten stuck in your meaning project because meaning is inherently normative.
Adam Jacobs: So my inclination is to wholly agree with what you just said. Let me put on my skeptic hat for a second,
John Vervaeke: Please.
Adam Jacobs: Okay, let's say I'm a physicist, and I look at a sunset, and I say that's a really, very pretty sunset. However, I know that all it really is is a gigantic ball of hydrogen that is seemingly sinking below the surface of the horizon. It has no actual meaning. It is, as Richard Dawkins said, it's “blind pittiless indifference” in the universe, and just because it makes some nice colors doesn't really mean anything.
John Vervaeke: Sure. So that's an important skeptical response, which means I can't give you a sort of one-shot. This requires a bit of argumentative development is what I'll need. But the problem with that is, okay, this is the other issue. This is the issue that is lurking behind the people who are just caught up in busyness.
This might all just be an illusion. So there's a lurking performative contradiction, not a contradiction between performative contradictions. For example, I'm fast asleep right now. I have to be conscious to speak. And so the state that is pre state, that is presupposed by my statement, those two could be in contradiction. Now, notice that there's something interesting going on with the scientist. The scientist is claiming that the level at which things are meaningful in which he's oriented towards trying to find beautiful patterns and questioning whether or not they're true, that is actually an illusory orientation. That's what we're talking about with meaning. Yet science presupposes that.
If I should be a scientist, I have to find some facts more important than others. I have to find the facts that are beautiful and elegant, the ones that take me into reality rather than distracting me from reality. And I have to find the quest to do that fundamentally, intrinsically good because the truth is intrinsically good. So the scientist like Dawkins is making a kind of performative contradiction. He says this whole way of talking, that's an illusion, but the state from which I make those statements is the state from which you're doing science. And so what now happens? Am I supposed to regard the conclusions of science that are filtered through meaning also illusory? And then how would you possibly know that the sunset is just a ball of hydrogen, et cetera, et cetera?
Adam Jacobs: I think he would say, because we could test it, and we know that's the only information that is presented to us. And I think he would say…
John Vervaeke: Why did you test that, Richard? As opposed to finding out if there's a correlation between the number of paper clips in your office and the number of squirrels you will see in the day. Why did you pick that one? And why do you seek for a broad and powerful explanation and not be satisfied with a limited local explanation? And Richard, why do you think that all your theories should be unified together, and why not just disparate and separate? See?
Adam Jacobs: Yeah, I do. And obviously I would be delighted if thinkers thought more along those lines, and I think we would all be better off in the long run, frankly. But no, your point is well-taken, and I think it's a good answer to the question. I do sometimes wonder if there is some way of helping people by doing some type of measurement, by doing science in a way that demonstrates that there is a correlation between these things, that there is this sort of meta-meaning available in life. And I suspect you can tell me if I'm wrong, that you might say something like, look, you’ve got to sit down and do it and then see how it hits you. You have to try meditation. You've got to understand what mindfulness is and so on and so forth. It's something you have to experience as opposed to put down on paper. Am I right?
John Vervaeke: Well, I would say both. I would say there is a science that does that. The science is not physics. The science is cognitive science, and that's where all the work relevance, realization, and other things are taking place. And that cognitive science, as I've argued, points to the fact that we have multiple kinds of knowing. We have the propositional kind of knowing that is the hallmark of the scientific statement, knowing that the sun is a hydrogen giant, for example, knowing that, and what we do is gather evidence, and we have beliefs that convince us that they're true. And we store those in a specific kind of memory called semantic memory.
That's very different from knowing how to catch a ball or knowing how to swim. That's procedural knowledge, and that's your skill knowledge. It doesn't give you a sense of conviction. Are your skills true or false? That doesn't make any sense. It's how powerful they are. Do they apply and do they apply well? And then that's stored in a different kind of memory. There's a reason why we have this different kind of memory that's procedural memory.
And then you have, well, how do you know what skill to be using right now? And even the scientist has to make use of skills before they can come to their propositional conclusions. Well, I have to have a state of consciousness. I have to have a state of mind in which I'm foregrounding some things and backgrounding others. So things are standing out to me. I'm taking a perspective. I know what it's like to be me here in this place here, and now I have a sense of presence. Notice that, for example, when my beloved partner has gone, I believe she's still alive. I believe she's still in a relationship, and all my skills of interacting with her are still there, but I miss her presence.
And by the way, that's why that's what we're trying to get in video games. We're trying to get a sense of what's it, I really in the game, I really have this. I know what it's like to be here now in the game. That's perspectival knowing, and you have a kind of memory associated with that. It's called episodic memory. It's the kind of memory that you engage When I say, do you remember what you ate for breakfast? And you'll relive an event that's very different from engaging a skill or remembering a fact like cats or mammals. You relive an event, you have episodic memory, and then it's like what makes that fittedness of cognition and consciousness to the world possible?
Well, your biology and your ecology, and it's modified by culture and technology, but they have to be reshaping each other. This is called niche construction. I'm shaping the environment; the environment's shaping me. We're participating in the same patterns, the same principles, the same processes. That gives me a participatory note, and that one's largely unconscious. But you know what? It's missing when your son gets a sense that the world doesn't quite feel right. Things are out of joint. There's that sense of belonging.
Homeness is gone, and you have a particular kind of memory for that. That's called your identity, the sense of self. You can do cognitive science, which consists of propositions about nonpropositional, but the propositions can't be nonpropositional. So you have to be very careful when I answer your question; yes, we can measure relevance realization and do all kinds of scientific work. I publish on this stuff, and that's the science, but it won't give you what we're talking about that will epistemologically justify and explain it. But to actually realize it, you have to engage the nonpropositional kinds of knowing.
Adam Jacobs: Yes, I hear that. And I hope that this kind of information gets out and gains more credibility and concurrently that people can be taught in a way that is credible to them, how to experience these things. And for them not to be considered absurd and thereby address some of the meaning crisis. Because, of course, if there's no meaning, there's no meaning. And if you can't taste it or experience it on any level, of course, you will conclude that the world is meaningless. And then all the problems that emerge from that will be there.
John Vervaeke: And I just said we never met because we've set up a whole, and it's financially independent of me. It's autonomous. Although I helped to give birth to it with Taylor Barrett and Christopher Mastropietro and other people, they're called Awaken To Meaning, a platform where you can go and do mindfulness practices and dialogical practices and imaginal practice, all the kinds of things. I don't have scientific evidence for this, but we've done lots of workshops, lots of courses, and it's never been the case that when people are able to cultivate more and better credible meaning, they go, oh, I wish I hadn't done that. That's never the case. They say things like, “I've always wanted this, although I didn't realize that I did.” That is the best marker of how the meaning crisis actually shows up in this. I always wanted this, although I didn't realize that I did,
Adam Jacobs: Which describes the human condition, I think, for almost all of us to some extent, some more than others, but I think it's true that we're all feeling somewhat not at ease in the world and looking for something more grounding and more inspired and bigger than whatever we're experiencing on a day-to-day basis
John Vervaeke: And more real and more real.
Adam Jacobs: Right? Yeah. The lack of reality is very disturbing culturally and otherwise; like you say in the book, if you're lied to enough times, you don't know what ground you stand on, and it's hard to draw conclusions about anything, really.
John Vervaeke: And that's the other, and in complement that, there's another B to go with the burnout and the busyness on the boredom, which is, and I'm using this in a technical sense. I'm not trying to be offensive. This is Frankfurt's notion of bullshit. The liar is still working in terms of the value of truth. They're depending on you valuing truth in order to manipulate you. The bullshit artist is trying to get you unconcerned with whether or not something is true or, therefore, real and instead just caught up in the emotional or attentional salience. And our world has devolved into 24/7 advertising. And advertising is automated, professionally delivered bullshit. That's what it's designed to do. And so we're in a very rough place, and our politics has devolved into advertising as opposed to argument.
That's another thing that pervasive sense of bullshit. So when we wrote the book, when Chris, Philip, and I wrote the book on zombies, which was a precursor, zombies are a metaphor for a modern myth for the meaning crisis. We did a thing about the use on the internet of the term bullshit, and it's just skyrocketed. It's just skyrocketing. People are just everywhere. Now the thing is, again, if you go and ask them the standard question, do you have friends? Do you have a purpose? Do you have family? Oh, yes, yes. You see, you see, that's what I mean. That's what's missing. That's the meat of the matter.
Adam Jacobs: So let's talk about that. The superheroes and zombies, which you emphasize a lot, and I think it's a really interesting cultural observation; at least in the States, we seem to be obsessed with superheroes. It's another thing I've asked my younger kids is that all these movies in the Marvel Universe seem so canned, so predictable, and so uninteresting, but they revel in them. They know all the characters and all the timelines. And so what is the obsession with this superhero about on the one hand and the opposite, which is the zombie, which is this fully evil, thoughtless creature who destroys the whole world. Okay, so let me ask that question in the context of why is it so black and white? Why do we have these supreme good beings and these supreme bad? There's no nuance; there's no humanity to it.
John Vervaeke: Because I think what's going on is we are talking about something that's happening at a very pervasive and profound level, and the level that the sort of cognitive, cultural level we draw upon when we address that kind of thing is mythological. See, your kids love the MC universe because they love the universe. They actually love the world. A world in which some human beings have undergone significant changes, a world in which powerful narratives make a huge difference.
There's a world in which there are real moral rules and epistemological rules. You can know what's really going on, figure it out, and know what the right thing to do. That world is deeply attractive. They love it because they want to spend time in it, which is why they don't like it when that world is being sacrificed for political ideology. Because a world beset by political ideology is the world they are trying to leave behind, where it's nothing but adversarial, propositional warfare, and they want to go back to a world where their mythological concerns, they wouldn't put it this way.
I'm putting it this way, but where their mythological concerns are being addressed. So that's why they are so white, and then zombies are so black because that's when they turn to touch that. And this is why the relationship to it is so non-propositional. They're not there to gather facts about zombies. People will even do zombie watts, which we wrote about in the book, which is so weird how people dress up in zombies and take; they want to confront this, they want to confront this meaninglessness that's just like a penumbra at the very periphery of their awareness, and they want to try and foreground it in some way. They want to try to share and articulate it to each other. So, nuance is not important when you're in that kind of stringent situation.
Adam Jacobs: Okay. Do you think it benefits them?
John Vervaeke: No. We argue that the zombies and the superheroes, Chris and I, are prime examples of reactive displacement. They're the attempts to give us the gods and the demons that religion used to give us. There are attempts to give us great stories, great abilities of self-transcendence, and magical power. They're religion surrogates because religion was the thing that used to give us this, and they introduced us to heroes and God-like beings or the other. See, the thing about the zombies is the zombies are actually a powerful morality tale of what the people don't realize. See, the zombie is not supernatural.
The zombie is us decayed, literally decayed, in which we no longer have community. We are in a hoard. We no longer have meaning. We no longer have direction. We drift, and we consume without satisfaction or purpose. And so it's a morality tale and it's a perversion of the Christian idea of the resurrection. You come back from the dead, but not to a glorious life, but to a decadent life. And then it gets somehow, like magnetism. They got attracted to the Christian notion of the apocalypse, where the apocalypse was supposed to be the final redemption of the world, but instead, in the zombie apocalypse, it's the final condemnation of the world to endless meaninglessness. You see? So these things express the crisis that they don't really address. Don't give people a scientific understanding that would make credible sets of practices I like to call oncology of practices that will actually help them cultivate more and better meaning in life, which is deeply interpenetrated with the cultivation of wisdom.
Adam Jacobs: That was very interesting and added on a lot to what I already enjoyed you expressing in your book and your videos. And that gives me a lot to reframe the whole zombie thing in. I think a really important way. And I think it seems intuitive that what you're saying is correct.
John Vervaeke: Thank you.
Adam Jacobs: So let's talk about the way out of it, which is what you call relevance realization. And I wrote down a quote. It's either from the book or from a video, I can't remember, but you say enlightenment involves a radical improvement in relevance realization, a heightened ability to discern what truly matters, cut through distractions, and align oneself with the flow of reality. And you talk about flow in the book. Okay, so how does one start? Let's say I want to be enlightened. People listening to this are convinced we've got a problem. Yes, I'm feeling these feelings that you guys are describing. What should I do? How do I gain enlightenment?
John Vervaeke: So this is a really simultaneously important and challenging question. So part of a big marker of, again, the meaning crisis is the rise of the spiritual but not religious. In recognition that self-transformation, self-transcendence needs to occur. The problem with the spiritual but not religious is it's still immersed in and it's justifiable. I give historical arguments, and there's an additional one, but a growing distrust and disenfranchisement from our institutions. So people, what they're basically saying is, I want to do what religion does, but I don't want to belong to institutional religion. That's basically, in a nutshell, how you pick out because it doesn't mean anything else. It doesn't mean anything else clearly, or at least when you take a look at anthropological and sociological work. In fact, I've read many people, many academics, theorists on this that say spiritual but not religious just means the spirituality of me, sorry, the religion of me spiritual but not religious, is the religion of me. First of all, I want to be clear that I understand and have proper sympathy.
Both that mixture of understanding and empathy for why people distrust institutions. There are good reasons, some of which are articulated in the book. However, there's a problem if you just do spiritual but not religious. (I am answering your question, by the way), because the problem is you're doing it in a way that is exacerbating a lot of the factors that are driving the meaning crisis. You're buying into a kind of rugged individualism and that you can be self-made, you can be an autodidact, and you can somehow get really good at cutting through your own bullshit. And all of those are largely false. Your cognition isn't inherently individualistic. This is something I can argue at length if we need to. Being an autodidactic is very, very dangerous. You get into all kinds of bias, reinforcement, and the problem with social media is it makes it seem like you're getting independent corroboration, but you're not because you pick the people who agree with you, you get echo.
And then the idea that you're really good at cutting through your own bullshit is actually faulty. You're really good at cutting through other people's bullshit. We're really bad at cutting through our own. We fundamentally need each other in these deeply shared practices. That's what ritual is, these shared practices in which I become your best opportunity for self-transcendence, and you become my best. There are things we have to do on our own so that we can properly come in.
So, you need to have an ecology of practices. Some of them have to be individuals, some of them have to be groups, and they have to be ecologies because they have to address different things. You have to train your attention with mindfulness. You have to train your imagination with imaginable practices. You have to train; I don't even use the English word dialogue. I use the Greek word because the English word is so denuded of dialogs. We have to get back from the model we have now: I'm transmitting information to you and trying to defeat you, and you will take up my position. It's an adversarial transmission, and I win if I debunk you, defeat you, or get you to join my cause. And that is absolutely destructive because that puts you into game theoretic. And then everybody does tit for tat, and you spiral down to the lowest common denominator.
Think of the opposite. We've all had this. You get caught up in a conversation that takes on a life of its own. It starts going places you and the other people did not expect, and you feel so alive and in touch with both your inner and outer reality. You feel so connected to these people. That's dial logos. That's a kind of flow. So you need dialogical practices. You need an ecology of practices, individual and group, and different domains of practice. You need an embodiment. The body has to be involved. You have to do imaginal practices, dialogical practices, mindfulness practices, reflective practices, and then you need them housed within a credible, and I mean a scientifically credible, framework that will protect you against somebody coming in trying to say.
But it's all just an illusion, and that's what we need, and that's the project I've been working on. However, I have an important criticism of everything I said to you; okay, I think it's right, but it can be fundamentally wrong, and I was wrong about it. An important way this can strike you as an engineering project that we have to, we somehow have to sort of build this, we'll make, I used to call it the religion. That's not religion. We'll make an ecology. We'll do all of this. We'll just make it and offer it to the world. And it's like, nope. Those conversations that are so living are living because they take on a life of their own. If I try to engineer them, I will crush them. It's like explaining a joke.
So, we make a distinction. I can do dialectic and a whole bunch of practices that increase the chances that that spark will catch. But if I try and engineer and demand produce that spark, I'm losing the sacredness, its ability to launch me into self transcending, transformative meaning is removed. So there's another project that is needed, in addition to tutoring people on an ecology of practices that makes them prone to moments of resonance and reverence.
We need a…that's what I'm doing in my next big series…we need a way of creating a lingua philosophical between all of the big wisdom traditions, European, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese so that we can engage in a comprehensive college of traditions. Because I think what is needed right now, and I've been privileged to see this, is what I'm calling the advent of the sacred, one of the responses, one of responses to the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times of nihilism and cynicism and despair is the vege, the spirit of the world to use a Hagel term of the advent of the sacred, like something like happened in the axial revolution or the Renaissance where there's this thing that starts happening as a response to the breakdown, and I think it's happening.
And so we need to properly, I'm going to go on a pilgrimage and go to these places and talk to the sages of these places, of these great traditions that we're so integrative and deeply we able to talk to each other and try and afford the advent of the sacred while trying to also further develop scientifically credible colleges of practices that people can either take up or take back into. Many people do that in a renewal, a re-homing within one of the organized religions. Many people take up my work that way, and that's great. We need to do both of those, and I'm trying to do both.
Adam Jacobs: That sounds great, and I hope you'll be very successful with that, and it will benefit many people. As always happens, I could have another hour or two conversation along these lines, which is literally my favorite thing to talk about. However, my time is coming to an end. But I want to see if I can get in one more question.
Okay. You talk about the initiation ritual, and I've often wondered whether that would be of benefit nowadays, and I'm not talking about staying on the Fire Ant Hill all night long and enduring immense pain, but do we have any examples of that in our culture where something has to be endured to sort of open your mind and demonstrate your own capacity to yourself and so on and so forth? And if we don't have it, do you think that that would be a useful doorway to get towards a more enlightened self?
John Vervaeke: I do. I think the fact that we have made what's left over from the initiation non-costly has cost us tremendously. So
Adam Jacobs: You want them to be costly?
John Vervaeke: Yeah, because there has to be a willingness to give up—to let your identity and your frames the way you're framing the world. I'll be a little bit poetic. Let the world and you simultaneously reciprocally crack open. And that cracking open usually takes some smashing. Now, of course, what you need, and this is another function of these, the people that administer these initiations are people that have gone through it, and therefore, we find them credible. One of the problems, and you see this, especially in the younger generations, is that they don't have credible role models. And the thing that's most predictive, by the way, of people successfully aspiring to transform and become better, becoming more the person they would aspire to be, is not planning or budgeting or blah, blah, blah, blah. The two things are joining a group with people you find credible because of the next point. You need to find credible people that you will internalize as role models
Because most of this is happening non propositionally, just gathering facts won't do it. You need to have the presence of credible people who challenge you and whom you trust to go through things that you can't properly foresee because you can't foresee how a transformation is going to change you. Because if you could foresee it, you could merely engineer it into place. So, we do need these initiation experiences. Some are very powerful. My friend has a Return to the Source, a wonderful ecology of practices. A dear friend of mine and I did this, and I am, I'm like 60, what? 60 or 61. And going through this course with all these 20-somethings, you're doing parkour in the wild and climbing, I mean serious climbing, and martial arts.
I knew I was going to get hurt, and I knew every day there would be something that I wouldn't want to do because I was very afraid to do it; I made a promise to myself that I would take the injury and that I would do it. There were one or two things I couldn't do because I had my ears, and if that got triggered, then I would wash out. But other than that, I was committed to doing everything at least once, at least once. And so that's there for people who really want to do that kind of initiation into an orientation towards wisdom. There's Return to the Source.
I can't remember Ben's last name right now. Slip me. He does vision quests and they're supervised, you're safe, but of course you take it out into the wilderness and he's lurking out of view, making sure that you're safe. But you go through a vision quest and must stay in the circle. You're deprived of everything but water. There are people offering, and credible people are doing that kind of thing. Something that people mistake for an initiation ceremony, which is very much more questionable. There's ayahuasca, tourism, and travel down. The psychedelic renaissance is part of the advent of the sacred, but a lot of people are not educated on the science and the philosophy of psychedelic experience to properly set their mind right, in the right setting, have the right credible people, have a good integration framework, have a lot of skills for dealing with the possibilities of self-deception. You have to have all of that before these experiences, or you're putting yourself at tremendous risk.
Adam Jacobs: The whole conversation was really great. And I think you have a particularly articulate presentation, which I really appreciate. So, I want to thank you for taking the time to be here today. I want to recommend that people go out and buy all your books and watch your videos on YouTube and wherever else they may be and really sit and think about what you're saying. I think it's something that we all need to explore more deeply and benefit from. So thank you. Thank you very much.
John Vervaeke: Thank you, Adam. This was fantastic, and thank you for promoting the book. If I could ask if people like the book, well, do what you want, but obviously, if you like the book, please consider writing a review on Amazon. That also helps.
Adam Jacobs: I will do that myself.
John Vervaeke: Thank you, Adam.
Adam Jacobs: Okay. Thank you for being here.
John Vervaeke: Anytime you want me to come back, I'm happy to come back. This was fantastic.
Adam Jacobs: Okay, we'll have you back. have a great day, and enjoy the new Canadian world.