The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life - John Vervaeke

1. 0:00 – 11:04

   Why Do Humans Need Meaning?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      Given that we are biological creatures, why do we need meaning? Why do humans need to do all this extra work in order to be satisfied with life?

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke0:11

      Huh, well, uh, I have to tell you that, um, I've been, uh, going through a, uh, since the publication of the book, I've been going through a serious reflection on this question again, uh, and going, uh, deeper into it. Um, there's many levels of answering that question. At one level, uh, meaning has to do with sensemaking. It has to do with how we p- properly pay attention to the right kind of information that can allow us to reliably solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains. (clears throat) And that's one aspect of meaning, that sort of agentic aspect. Um, but, uh, consonant with that is we f- we need to be connected to other people because most of our problem-solving is done in connection with other people. So, there's an initial sensemaking dimension. This is often talked about as sort of coherence in the meaning and life literature. Does your world sort of... Is your sensemaking making sense to you, is, is how I sometimes put it. Like, uh, the sensemaking is what you're doing sort of automatically, and when you reflect on it, you go, "Yeah, that makes sense. My l- my world isn't absurd," or things like that. (clears throat) And then, um, we need to feel connected to other people because most of our, um, problem-solving, uh, is done via other people. That's our great superpower. Individually, biologically, as you framed it, we're pretty pathetic animals, you know. A really angry dog can take us out. Um, and, and so, our superpower is we can coordinate together, um, and, uh, and, you know, get some... train some of those dogs and sharpen some of those sticks and then kill anything on the planet. Uh, and so we need to be connected to other people, and that brings with it its own special problem, uh, my friend Greg Enriquez made sort of prevalent. Uh, we developed a superpower of connecting and coordinating called language. And language does something really, really powerful in, in helping us coordinate, but it also does something really novel. It makes, uh, our s- our, uh, th- the content of our minds, uh, uh, accessible. We're sort of exposed to each other in a way in which no other organism is exposed to its c- its, its fellow, uh, creatures. And so, we have to also develop this way of balancing between coordinating with other people, but not being overexposed, so we have to develop relationships of trust and forgiveness and belonging, and we have to balance between being individuals and having an individual identity and a group identity. So, that's all central to, uh, meaning. And then, uh, beyond that, uh, we fall prey, uh, in both of those domains to massive self-deception. Um, I don't pay attention to the right things. I misframe you. I'm biased in my attitude towards you. And so, uh, we have to do a lot to correct that. We have to try and ameliorate that. And what that means is we also have to be connected to standards by which we can correct ourselves, standards about what is most real, what is best, what, what's, what is most beautiful, um, and that, that's a deeper kind of connectedness. That's kind of a connectedness to what we consider ultimacy. So, I've tried to show you how all, all of these things are all important dimensions in, uh, why we have to pursue, uh, meaning in life. I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the standard psychological construct called meaning and life to measure and talk about all those di- all those dimensions in a, in a, in a coordinated fashion.

   3. CWChris Williamson3:49

      Can you talk to me about the sort of established body of work when it comes to meaning and how you diverge from that or what you would suggest as an improvement?

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke3:56

      Yeah. So, um, the standard metrics are around sort of four dimensions, really three. Uh, one is coherence, which I mentioned, which is, does your sensemaking make sense to you? Um, uh, another one is purpose. That's not well-posed, uh, 'cause if you think standardly of how people think of purpose, purpose is you're working towards some ultimate goal. That's a very dangerous way of framing meaning, because if you never reach your goal, your life was meaningless, and if you reach it, going forward, you're pretty meaningless. And I discovered that way back in high school, and that sort of really bothered me. And, um, uh, so I think they're, what they're talking about more is orientation, and then orientation is, um, uh, uh, a more important way. People have to feel not disoriented but oriented in the world. Um, and then, um, the next one they talk about is significance, that you have things in your life that aren't transitory, ephemeral, shallow, uh, but that seems to be just sort of one side of this, this deeper thing which is called mattering. You need to feel connected to something, m- people typically use the metaphor, bigger than, uh, uh, yourself. Uh, I want to g- be connected to something larger than myself, right? Um, they, they don't mean that literally because that would be ridiculous. (laughs) Uh, you know, uh, attaching you to a locomotive engine doesn't give you a profound sense of meaning in life. So, what's going on there is, I would argue something like this. There's a deep connection between the sense of bigger and more real, and let me try and give you an everyday example of this. (clears throat) When you're in a dream world, you're in this little world and it seems so real to you, and then you wake up, and notice we have all these waking up metaphors and enlightenment metaphors. You wake up, and from that larger world, you can see how the earlier world, the smaller world is limited and biasing you and warping and thwarting you, uh, in, in, in, in you trying to, uh, uh-... get a flourishing life. And I think that's what people are really struggling with when they're talking about mattering, about being connected to something larger than themselves, and it's this sense of, uh, realness, which I don't think is properly captured, uh, just by the psychological notion, uh, of mattering. Um, and, and here's the fundamental thing. I mentioned that, uh, meaning i- is a... has to do with being, uh, connected to something that's more real, uh, than yourself, in some important ways, because it helps, uh, make you feel more real to yourself. Now, that's a problematic notion to think of as just purely... I'm just describing something, like a psych- like a standard psychological phenomena. This is actually, if you'll allow me one technical term, this is a normative term. Uh, meaning is, uh, uh... A meaningful life is not a descript-... When I say your life is meaningful, I'm not just describing it, I'm praising it. I'm saying there's something fundamentally good to it. It's meeting some standards of evaluation. But those standards of evaluation are completely absent from the standard psychological model. That would be the crux of... That's one of my two main criticisms. Um, and, and so in a very deep sense, the meaning in li- the standard meaning in life, um, psychological model is completely divorced from the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. And if you look across all the religion and philosophical traditions, that's not the case. They're deeply wound t- well, you know, wound together, bound together, right? The cultivation of meaning and the cultivation of virtue and the cultivation of wisdom are profoundly intertwined. Stoicism, in fact, said they're e- e- exactly identical, um, which tells you how strong some positions have been on it, and the psychological model's missing all that. The second one is, uh, the psychological model... And this is ironic, because it's talking a lot about connectedness, but it doesn't talk about the connectedness (laughs) . What I mean by that is it only talks about the individual agents' attitudes. It doesn't talk about how the world is showing up for them. So, h- y- let me give you an example of how this can go wrong. You can ask somebody, you know, "H- and you ask them the standard sort of questions o- o- on meaning and life, and they have friends and they have family and they have work projects, so their life is pretty meaningful, above average. But if you ask them, "Uh, do you think your world's very coherent? Do you think the world makes a lot of sense? Do you have a lot of trust in the world? Is the, is the world presenting itself t- with a lot of beauty and depth to you?" You'll get, "No." You'll get people saying exactly the opposite. And, and see, and then if you ask people, "Is your meaning and life actually bringing you a lot of peace? Is it really integrating you well as a person? Is it reciprocally opening you to reality?" No. Because people are experiencing a lot of burnout, a lot of bullshit, and a lot of betrayal. They're losing trust and faithfulness in their institutions and in fellow people, right? And so they... there's a famine of people being able to get into the flow state and being able to have that basic trust and forgiveness with others, fellowship, and a, and a sense of faithfulness, um, is massively diminishing. I just saw a report that, um, Americans' trust in the Supreme Court is at an all-time historical low. It has never been so low. Um, and of course, that, that is only prescient, I think, of what's happening all throughout the Western world. And so the meaning-and-life construct is leaving out all of this that's really bedeviling people in a very, very po- very powerful way. Um, and so I think the meaning-and-life construct gets a little bit about how our agency works and contributes to meaning in life, but it's leaving out a lot. Let me put it one last sentence, and then I'll stop. The issue isn't just about finding information relevant. It's about can you enter into resonance? This is what, uh, Rosa calls, like, this relationship th- uh, that is so centrally lacking in most of our life. This is, does your meaning and life allow you to reciprocally open? Does it take you into the depths of the psyche and align them? Does it take you into the depths of reality so you feel you're meeting standards that allow you to correct yourself according to what is true and good and beautiful? Is it doing any, uh, of that? Tha- that's resonance. And then resonance also needs to be transmuted into reverence. Are you, are you ultimately oriented to what you consider ultimately most real? Uh, because that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the judge behind everything else that we're evaluating. So sorry, that was a long question, but I-

   5. CWChris Williamson11:01

      N- n- not at all. Not at all. Uh,

2. 11:04 – 16:53

   Do People Feel Like Their Lives Are Actually Real?

   1. CWChris Williamson11:04

      the realness point, I think, is very interesting. I... Maybe it's a contemporary problem because of how much people are mediated by their screens. Maybe this is worsened by the fact that we're atomized and isolated into our little droid boxes and we spend a lot of our time on our own.

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke11:19

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson11:19

      Maybe it's because of a lack of connection to nature and awe and dread, or whatever it might be. But I would guess that m- a lot of people have this sense that their life is surreal, and not surreal in the, "I can't believe how amazing it is, I'm so blessed that everything's going right," but in a, "I don't necessarily feel fully connected and grounded to the experiences that I have day-to-day. My mind and my feet don't rest in the same location all that much." M- you can maybe call it presence. Um, but it's sort of... It's more than just presence. Presence is necessary but not sufficient. It's, it's the connection to it. It's being able to feel like I can reach out and grab it, like things are happening and the things that are happening are, are-... they're important, and I have some sort of agency, and they affect me, and, and that they're actually going on. As opposed to kind of like everything being a sitcom, and it all just sort of playing out in front of our eyes. So, I want to, I want to really dig into sort of things becoming really real, and, and sort of where that comes from.

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke12:25

      I think that's important. I, I, I think that is the thing that's, uh, uh, quintessentially missing from the psychological construct. That's the sort of ultimate, uh, norm within the normative dimension. Um, uh, because you can undermine any of this if, like, any of these relationships that are giving people meaning in life can be immediately undermined if there's a sense of betrayal, or that that was an illusion, or they were being deceived, right? Uh-

   5. CWChris Williamson12:52

      Explain... Ex- Uh, can you think of an example of that?

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke12:56

      So, there's a standard one I use. (laughs) Uh, uh, um, so and I've done this multiple, multiple times, and it's never failed to work, so-

   7. CWChris Williamson13:05

      (laughs)

   8. JVJohn Vervaeke13:05

      It's not quite a scientific study, but, uh, it, it's pretty good. So, I ask my students, "How many of you are in really deeply satisfying romantic relationships?" Romantic relationships are the culture's current surrogate, or at least one of its surrogate. Idolat- idolatrous sur- surrogates for God, and culture, and virtue. Like, you're supposed to find the one, and they're supposed to do everything, and you're supposed to transcend yourself and find familiar, uh, uh, fulfillment in it, uh, which of course leads to the weird thing that people value, uh, romantic relationships sort of most of all right now, except maybe with their kids. Um, yet romantic relationships are the source of most suffering and a lot of mental health disorders. Um, and so that tells you we're, we're, we're treating something... We're putting too much pressure on something. Okay, so let's take that. We've got this thing. This is like our culture tells you, "This is where it is at. This is where you find it." I ask them, "Okay, how many of you are in such a really satisfying romantic rela-" and they put up their hands. And I say, "Okay, now I'm only addressing the people who are in relationships. So, the rest of you, sorry, you're not in this now. But for those of you who put up your hands, how many of you would want to know if, if your partner was cheating on you, if that meant the absolute dissolution of the relationship?" And almost all of them, like somewhere between 95 and 100%, reliably put up their hands. And I say, "Well, why?" Wh- wh- like y- like you could continue to go on and enjoy the relationship and get all the pleasures out of it and all the companionship and all the sexual gratification. Like what? Like why? And here's my students, and they're at the university, so they're hard-bitten with cynicism and post-modern nihilism and everything, and all this sort of stuff. And they, without a beat, say to me, "Well, because it wouldn't be real." It wouldn't be real. And then that removes all of the other ways in which it is contributing to meaning and life for them. That's an example of what I mean.

   9. CWChris Williamson15:01

      So good. So good. And intuitively, everybody knows that there is this sort of sense of honesty, the honesta, that you need to... that you expect. And, uh, you know... Who was the experience machine? Who did the experience machine?

   10. JVJohn Vervaeke15:18

       Nozick, Robert Nozick.

   11. CWChris Williamson15:20

       Yeah. I mean, it's not too dissimilar, I guess, to the experience machine, but it's a much more salient example that everybody knows. Um, yeah, would you... Uh, uh, how, how would your experience change if... You know, The Truman Show might be a-

   12. JVJohn Vervaeke15:34

       Yeah, exactly.

   13. CWChris Williamson15:35

       ... an- another example of that where, you know, you're going around living a good life, and everything seems fine. But what if everybody else was an actor? It's like, "Well, I, I wouldn't want that."

   14. JVJohn Vervaeke15:45

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson15:45

       Why? That to you, this sort of felt sense, nothing would have changed. It's the exact same. It's like, yeah, yeah, nobody... There's, there's something about sort of intention. There's something deeper. There's something beyond not just the sort of utilitarian, "What do I get out of this situation?" It's what, what is the intention behind that? What's the meaning?

   16. JVJohn Vervaeke16:07

       Exactly. And notice his name, which is really central, True Man. It's about truth. And it's not about just conceptual truth. It's about like being true to, right? Uh, true to his humanity, true to reality. And of course, he's willing to break through the wall, right? Remember, he's sailing on the, on the little sea-

   17. CWChris Williamson16:26

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   18. JVJohn Vervaeke16:26

       ... to break through the wall, um, a- and bec- and, you know, and the same thing was offered in The Matrix when Morpheus says, "All I'm offering you is the truth." Right? Uh, like you, you, um... Uh, and, and the villain, of course, Cipher, which means a symbol without any depth, right? He wants to go back to the matrix. And, and, and we know that's why he's a villainous person 'cause he's betraying the commitment to reality and to his own humanity.

   19. CWChris Williamson16:52

       Just

3. 16:53 – 24:02

   Differences Between Purpose & Meaning

   1. CWChris Williamson16:53

      l- l- lingering on what you said before about the difference, I me- a lot of people, I think, will use purpose and meaning almost interchangeably, even though when, when you think about it, it, it's not quite, but the two kind of come as a, a package pair. They're a twin pack of, uh, of values that a lot of people talk about. When you were mentioning about how if you use the word purpose, if you don't achieve it, your life is worthless. And once you do achieve it, if you do achieve it, what do you do next? It seems to me the difference between purpose and orientation is the same as between destination and journey.

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke17:26

      Yes.

   3. CWChris Williamson17:26

      That one is moving you in a direction, and it's kind of an endless game. It's an infinite game. Uh, whereas the other by design, the purpose is this thing, unless you do some jiggery-pokery with your purpose and create some sort of like instrumental purpose. "My purpose is to show up every day in a manner" that's like, yeah, give... whatever. Don't litigate me. Don't litigate me out of what most people mean by purpose. Um, yeah, it, it feels like that attachment, attachment to outcome-

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke17:56

      Yeah. And, and I think when you, when you ... Soon as you ta- I think that's exactly right, journey rather than destination. Uh, and I think in playing the infinite game rather than the finite game, uh, Carces notion, I think that's exactly what I'm trying to convey. What also comes up when you, when you get back to the notion of orientation, uh, you, you, you start to connect, uh, what can be isolated by the term purpose, you start to connect back to, well, what, like, what ultimately orients you is what is, what's true, what is good, what is beautiful. Um, whereas purpose can be very egocentric. It can be what I most want to have. Um, uh, whereas orientation is reality-centric. What do I most need to be in order to be in touch with reality, to be deeply in touch with myself, with other people, uh, with the world? Um, and see, a lot of people have kind of... and you see this in sort of the rampant rise in cynicism and nihilism in popular media. Because of massive senses of burnout and betrayal and bullshit, um, people have sort of given up on the world in some ways. Um, and the problem with that is that's not optional. Our model of who and what we are is inevitably bound up with our model of who and what the world is. And, um, so the degree to which we find the world an incredibly scary place is the degree to which we, we create sort of an insula- an insular model of ourselves. We withdraw, and we withdraw, and we withdraw, and we withdraw. Uh, the problem with that is, uh, that's the behavior ultimately of an organism in pain, um, and in distress. And the fact that we don't recognize it as that isn't the central, uh, of central importance. We're withdrawing, um, and, uh, that's the, that's the move of pain and distress. That's the fundamental move of depression. So even if you don't feel depressed, you're already behaving in a depressive, uh, manner.

   5. CWChris Williamson20:02

      What do you make of the recent uptick in depression and anxiety, uh, how this sort of relates to the work you've been looking at?

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke20:10

      So, uh, Chris and I, Christopher Mastropietro and I, we talk about, uh, three kinds of responses to the meaning crisis. One is just a, a reactive, uh, sense of, like, despair. Uh, you see this in depression, anxiety, uh, increasing rates of suicidality in places that are marked by affluence, which is a very strange paradox, uh, given our current cultural way of thinking about things. Um, loneliness, um, uh, addiction, all of these things are, uh, people basically falling into some kind of drift towards despair in powerful ways. Uh, the number of close friends you have is going down reliably decade by decade, even though the number of social connections you have up is going up exponentially. Um, things like this. We're, we're, we're obviously tr- we're doing it the wrong way, because we're doing more and more that's giving us less and less. Um, so that's one group. Then there's, there's a replacement strategy where people try to replace the kinds of things that used to give this normatively charged sense of orientation and meaning in life and give us ways of cultivating wisdom and virtue therein, namely religion and philosophy. People are trying to replace that with, you know, with things like, you know, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which they, which they investigate, they identify with. They go to... they often dress up as these people or put, uh, markers of them in their home, and they, they protect this universe with a religious fervor. Uh, so there has been rage, self-righteous rage at how Hollywood has destroyed these universes. I agree with the aesthetic criticisms, by the way. I think Hollywood has just destroyed a lot of these things. But people aren't paying enough attention to, why does this matter so much? Why do you spend hours online raging like this? And then that's a, that's a replacement strategy. And of course, people are also doing this, can do this in political arena, uh, they can do it with pseudo-religious ideologies, they can do it with this weird amalgamation of conspiracy theory and spirituality called conspirituality on both the left and the right. Neither pole has any monopoly on foolishness. Um, so there's a lot of that. Um, and then there's a replacement strategy, which is where you see hopeful responses, uh, to the meaning crisis. You can see the rise of an ancient Roman philosophy, Stoicism, becoming super important. You can see, um, uh, the psychedelic renaissance, the mindfulness revolution, the rise of dialogical practices in communities around the world. All of these are, are showing that, um, there's also a healthy response. What was interesting is h- how COVID was such a cleaving point, right? Because it showed that how many people have w- what, like, what's called existential resilience. Soon as the normal routine that keeps them busy, right, busy unto death, uh, soon as that gets disrupted, they are confronted with... some people were confronted with an abyss of meaninglessness. Um, and they dove into, in spirituality and all kinds of stuff. Other people, uh, turned to a replacement strategy and started, you know, attending online mindfulness courses, uh, starting to read some philosophy. Uh, so it's, it's a very, it's a very complicated response, uh, to the meaning

4. 24:02 – 30:00

   Is the Pursuit of Meaning a Selfish One?

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke24:02

      crisis.

   2. CWChris Williamson24:02

      I'm interested in the role of the individual.... on their own. And, you know, e- even beyond the sort of connectedness, interconnectedness thing, the fact that, uh, seeking meaning as a, a purely selfish pursuit. And, um, I heard a quote the other day, (laughs) which I loved, which was, "After a while, you just get sick of yourself." And, uh, it really made me think, um, about that step change that a lot of people go through from just living for me, just thinking about me, to trying to serve a... Pay it forward, perhaps, and pass it on. And that, that perhaps comes along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older. But yeah, I'm interested in the, the self versus, uh, um, selfless element here.

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke24:50

      Excellent. Um, and, and this goes towards another criticism I have of the standard meaning and life construct. It's completely egocentric in its orientation. It should be asking questions like, "How much are you making meaning for other people? How much coherence and beauty are you bringing into the world?" And it doesn't ask those questions, and that's exactly right. Uh, and you see, the self-centered orientation is extremely problematic. Uh, obviously there's ethical problems, and we get, you know, we get the increasing, uh, growth of spiritual bypassing as an o- as a growing psychological problem, uh, so people pursue spirituality, um, as a way of avoiding their important economic and ethical responsibilities and obligations.

   4. CWChris Williamson25:36

      Hmm.

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke25:37

      Uh, and I think... And, you know, and, and spiritual bypassing is an offshoot of this large, this growing group of people, spiritual but not religious. So, if you look into the academic literature (laughs) on spiritual but not religious, like people who do the anthropology and sociology of religion, what they'll tell you is, "Spiritual means the rel- spirituality means the religion of me." That's what it means. It's, you're doing all the standard religious behavior, but you're doing it, uh, toward, for you and towards you and by you and evaluated by you. And that's extremely problematic because, um, autodidactically, we're really bad. Um, so if you notice, for example, you're very good, and this shows up metabolically in terms of even of, of cognitive effort, you're very good at pointing out the biases in your friends and other people. You're really good at it. You are, by the way. You are really good at it. The objective evidence shows you're really good at it. Um, and you do find it relatively easy. And what that evidence also shows is you're really crap, and I'm really crap, at doing it for myself. I'm really bad at finding my own biases, my own self-deception. Now, that doesn't... Let's be clear what I'm not saying. That doesn't remove the responsibility for addressing those from me. Of course not. But that, that... I'm not saying that. You're, uh, we are still always individually responsible for our vices. So, I want that clearly stated. But what, what it shows is, and this is something that, you know, that we've known since Socrates and, and, and we emphasized in, uh, until recently in current scientific practice, you are my best source of self-correction, and I am your best source. This was supposed to be the engine of democracy, but we've lost that, uh, too. And so the degree to which we become withdrawn and self-centered is the degree to which, um, we are going to, uh, fall prey to self-deceptive behavior, and the degree to which, uh, we might not pray pro- pay proper attention to the deep interconnections between our spirituality and our responsibilities.

   6. CWChris Williamson27:49

      How can people work out if they're being self-deceptive? By design, we're good at deceiving ourselves.

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke27:57

      Yeah. Uh, w- but we're also really good at, uh, uh, determining it in other people. That's the counterbalance. Uh, so you have to, you have to practice a lot with other people, um, and then you have to imitate what it's like with other people with yourself until you get good at doing it by yourself. Um, and then there's a lot of things you can do to, that do that. So, something that might not seem obvious that actually relies on that, mindfulness. Mindfulness practices like meditation are a good way at becoming aware of how you are biased in how you're paying attention. But how did you get that ability? Well, you got that ability by doing the following. Right? When you're a kid, you imitate how adults, because you trust them, they're credible to you, you imitate how adults are taking a perspective on how you are taking perspectives in the world and allowing them to correct you. And you imitate that and imitate that and imitate that until you can take a perspective on your own perspective that is corrective. That's metacognition, to use the technical term. And that's what you're exercising in mindfulness. But that's, that's a broad lesson to be learned. You practice dialogically with others until you can do it internally and reflectively.

   8. CWChris Williamson29:13

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke29:14

      It's the whole point of, uh, of, of Socratic philosophy. You hung around with somebody like Socrates, and you did all of this Socratic, you know, question and answer and exploration with him, and then eventually, you got to the ability where you could do it by yourself. Antisthenes, who was considered the fore founder of Stoicism, when, when asked what he had learned from Socrates, he said, "Well, I learned how to dialogue with myself." He didn't mean talk to himself, 'cause we do that automatically all day long. He meant that he had so practiced it and imitated it so that he had internalized it, so he had a inner Socrates that was quite competent at pointing out to him his own bullshit and self-destructiveness.

5. 30:00 – 33:01

   What is Causing Society’s Modern Lack of Meaning?

   1. CWChris Williamson30:00

      What... We, we sort of touched on it earlier on, but I'm interested in how m- how contemporary of a problem a lack of meaning is. And you also said about how-... as people become more affluent or as nations become more affluent, uh, problems of meaning seem to increase. I mean, what-

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke30:17

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson30:18

      ... what, what use is there in us all trying to attain or chase after affluence if all that comes along is a heavy side order of meaninglessness?

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke30:28

      That's a good question. Uh, Rosa talks about the fact that we're in kind of what he calls dynamic stability. Um, I talk about it as a, a phrenetic frozenness where you have to put more and more effort in, not to make things better, but to make sure we don't fall behind or miss out. Um, of course, and this is what's predictive of the massive amounts of burnout, and Han talks about how, how we- we've- we've become... We're not so much e- oppressed and exploited by other people as we are exploiting ourselves and oppressed by ourselves. Um-

   5. CWChris Williamson31:00

      It's the Red Queen fallacy, right?

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke31:01

      Yeah. Exactly, exactly. Um, and- and- and so I think, again, if you asked people and you used the standard metrics, they'll tell you, "Well, I know I'm- I have connections to... I care a lot about my kids, and I care a lot about my friends, and work's important to me, uh, you know, blah." Uh, and so you get that. But if you ask them, like... And we know burnout is a rising, the number of close friends you have is going down, people's sense of trust in others and in institutions is massively declining. So again, that's why I keep pressing on this, you have to ask this question really, really carefully. Uh, and- and I think around those issues of burnout and being busy unto death, um, and- a- and, uh, you know, sense of ever-increasing bullshit and betrayal, I think that... Uh, or- or if you want to put it the other way, a famine, a famine of wisdom, scarcity, we don't know where to go. You know, we- we- we find it very difficult to get into healthy flow situations. We have addictive and- a- and maladaptive forms of flow, uh, generation like video games. Um, we- we- we lack fellowship. Fellowship isn't friendship. We've lost the whole category of getting together with people, uh, that we basically trust because we all participate in something that we all are committed to together, like what used to happen in the church or the mosque or the temple or the synagogue, et cetera. We've lo- we've lost all of those things. Uh, and again, w- we've lost faithfulness. We- we've become increasingly short-term, and so it gets harder and harder for us, um, to be faithful, which means sticking in with things, staying connected to things because of their realness, even though it's at times very unsatisfactory to do so. Um, and so, uh, you know, this shows up in, you know, the fact that people are finding it harder and harder to maintain long-term relationships.

6. 33:01 – 40:01

   Could Having More Kids Solve the Meaning Crisis?

   1. CWChris Williamson33:01

      You mentioned there about kids, and I'm going to guess that most people would say a source of great meaning or one of the greatest sources of meaning in my life has been kids. Have you guys considered the base rate reduction in the age of people becoming parents and the number of people becoming parents that... I- I've got it in my head. A- a friend, uh, messages me semi-consistently when I do, uh, Q&As on the show, uh, and he's very interested, but he's a dad of two, uh, an old school sort of Irish guy, and, uh, he says, "So many of your audience just need to have kids." Like, they're asking questions, and as am I, about fulfilling my higher purpose, about, you know, enacting my logos forward, about how, why- why can't I give myself a break, why is it that I never really seem to be connected to the achievements that I have in life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, and I think, you know, what the sort of subtext of his point is lots of those problems are fixed or pale into insignificance once you have children. Uh, I guess two questions, then. First off, meaning crisis and associated with, uh, declining levels of, um, people becoming parents, and then the second one, is there something wrong or shallow or- or compensatory about leaning on your children to provide you with meaning in life?

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke34:30

      Yeah. This... First of all, excellent question, uh, Chris. Eberstadt in How the West Really Loved- uh, How the West Really Lost God talks about the fact that the countries that are the most, um, secular in their orientation are all, are- are, is predicted by how much people are living atomically, individually, alone. Um, and whereas more religious communities, uh, uh, tend to be related to people who live, uh, in more extended family kinds of, uh, situations. Uh, this goes towards a lot of research that puts, I think puts the nail, uh, in the coffin of the idea that people are religious because they're stupid, um, and intuitive and not rational. Um, so, uh, some of the best research done by Gervais and others, who, by the way, are atheists, shows that's not why people are atheist or religious. That's not what predicts if people are atheist or re- religious. In fact, you get weird anomalies. There's kind of a very weak correlation between how analytic people are and how irreligious they are, but you get important anomalies. Like, in the United Kingdom, uh, analytic thought is more predictive of being religious than non-religious. I- and so the- the whole enlightenment mythology still exposed by people like Dawkins, uh, and others, um, just doesn't... That's not what matters. What matters is how many... Remember the kid we were talking about earlier and how you get meta-cognition? You have to trust, right? You have to trust. You have to entrust yourself to credible others, people that you.... trust, because you can't believe this, but you have to trust that they can see things you can't see. And, and what seems like s- senseless behavior to you actually has a deeper, you know, meaning to it, a deeper function, right? And that requires, you know, typically, uh, you know, uh, we've relied on families to give us those kinds of entrusted relationships. But we've, we've narrowed the family down to the nuclear family, the nomadic nuclear family, um, and that has, uh, seriously eradicated a lot of ways in which we could get meaning in life. I think he- h- your friend is right, uh, in the sense that children are, are, are very powerful indicators, especially of how meaning in life is not about wealth, because you're, uh, you 'cause you have a child and your wealth goes down, man. (laughs) Uh, the other one is, it's not about, uh, subjective wellbeing, uh, especially at the beginning. Having a child crushes all the measures of subjective wellbeing. You're not sleeping, you're not eating, um, you're wet all the time, you're under a high stress 'cause the baby's crying. The person who you thought loved you the most in the world hates you right now, your partner, uh, uh, a- and yet... So, that shows you the two things our culture tells us are necessary and sufficient for meaning in life are neither necessary nor sufficient for meaning in life. So, I think having children is important. Children orient you non-egocentrically. You have to go from, "How is everything relevant to me?" to, "How am I relevant to somebody other than myself?" Um, and I think that's a big... Uh, that's, those are important moves, uh, for meaning in life. Uh, although, as I w- as I, as I've been arguing, not captured by the current, uh, psychological measures. Um, now, I would say he's wrong and you're right about, uh, we can turn our children into i- idols too, and we've done that. Uh, Jonathan, you know, Haidt, has made a good career out of pointing out how an idolatrous relationship to our children, uh, in which we made them the be all and end all of existence, and helicopter parenting, and, uh, you know, and trying to wrap, uh, you know, protective layers around them so they never suffer hurt or pain, has actually, you know, destroyed them in some very important ways. And he's got a ton of research to show this. I know most people don't like hearing that, uh, but, um, it, it, it seems to be the case. And so, we have to be careful about that. I think be... Having children is a powerful way of reorienting you. I think our meaning in life, um, the way I've been talking about it, evolved out of our capacity to be parents. Uh, but it's not enough to be a parent, because if you're just a parent, and here's my point that I've already made, you're still withdrawing into your own little circle. And you can be having ki- children, uh, and not really caring about the world. Now, what's interesting, of course, is children make you care about the world, or at least they should make you care about the world. Um, and then that's-f my s- final point, which is being able to care about things in the right way and really focus on what's the really real, um, I mean, that's wisdom. Um, and your friend sounds like a good person, so, uh, for whatever set of reasons, they probably w- were wise parents, or at least wise enough, um, that's not an, that's not necessarily the case. So, you could get sort of intense feelings of meaningfulness, but you could be an incredibly foolish parent, and I think that's very problematic.

7. 40:01 – 47:35

   Does Religion Have to Be True For it to Be Useful?

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke40:01

   2. CWChris Williamson40:01

      Mm. Yeah, the, I had s- uh, Dawkins on the show maybe four months ago, something like that, and we had a live event. We had a discussion in, uh, in Austin, Texas where I hosted him, and he was lovely. Uh, but I, I got stuck. We both got stuck twice in two nights in a row. First live on stage in front of his, his audience, and then again the next day when we did the podcast. And I mentioned how delegating the story behind religion, whatever it is that people choose to follow, because you can't prove it or it can't be proven in the manner that you want it to be able to be proven, doesn't reduce its effectiveness. It doesn't make it any less useful even if the level of truthfulness, the bar that you want it to reach, is something that it can't do. And, uh, I've been obsessed over the last couple of years with things that are literally true but figuratively false, and figuratively true but literally false. And, um, yeah, I kind of feel... I get a sense in the zeitgeist that people are sort of turning away from the very hard, cold, sterile, uh, well, it doesn't matter, it has to be literally true-

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke41:12

      Mm.

   4. CWChris Williamson41:13

      ... at, at, uh, at all costs. Uh, that, that doesn't seem to quite be the case, and I wonder whether that is born out of a... We kind of had a crack at this. We tried to simultaneous equation our way through coming up with answers to big questions, and maybe I just need something that works even if I can't describe to you why it works.

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke41:32

      Okay, well, that's a tall order, but, uh, it, I, I, I, I, I, I do want, I do feel I, I have a responsibility to respond. Um... You, you have to be careful about, um, uh, th- this notion of truth, um, it's very one-dimensional, uh, that's being used by Dawkins. Um, it's about, uh, evidence that convinces you that a proposition, uh, should be believed. Um, I think that's important. I'm a scientist and that's what theories are built out of, scientific theories in the, in the scientific sense of theory, not in the everyday sense.... which is completely opposite to how scientists use the word theory. So, I think that's important, and Dawkins is a scientist, so of course he values that. But of course, that's not the, those are not the primary ways we feel in contact with reality. Um, um, so evidence isn't the same thing as relevance. Um, so your skills are, they have to be true to th- Like, your aim has to be true. There's a different sense of truth. You have to be able to make things present to yourself, and you have to be able to, like, interact with the world in a way that reliably, uh, gives you some degree of agency in the world. That's really important to you. In fact, I would put it to you that if you had to choose between your skills and your beliefs, you'd give up your beliefs rather than your skills. Um, and they're a big part of how you sense what's real. This is know-how, and this goes into your procedural memory. But you talked about it a bit earlier, and, and this is important, um, we, we also have, like, what it's l- p- what I call perspectival knowing, what it's w- what it's like to be you here now in this situation, in this state of mind, and, and that is a different sen- This is knowing by noticing, it, it's knowing by being present, um, it's how you're sizing things up, uh, what's your take on things, how you're framing things, all that sort of stuff. Now, notice, uh, s- so my partner, she w- she was gone recently because she was at a yoga retreat getting her certification to be a yoga instructor, uh, we're gonna run retreats when we're both retired. (clears throat) And so, um, now I had, still had all my beliefs about Sara, I still believed that they were all true, right? And, and, and I still have all my skills, uh, for interacting with her in place and everything, but she wasn't present to me. And she f- that's, oh, and we, you, there's a sense of that lack of presence really matters to us, and there's a sense, a- you can just feel it right now, there's a sense of, "This is real because it's present, it's present, there's this power of presence," and that matters to us. That's not captured by propositions. I could state all of the propositions all day long about Sara; that didn't make her present to me.

   6. CWChris Williamson44:33

      I, I wonder whether that's why long distance relationships are often difficult.

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke44:37

      Exactly, that's exactly right. And then beneath it, is this (coughs) is what I, I've called participatory knowing. This is knowing by n- sort of emplacement, being in place, like you have a h- like a b- you have, you belong. I- it's not just a space, it's a place, you belong, you fit the space and the space fits you, so it's a place for you, right? And, and, and, and this is often very unconscious, but you, you lack it, uh, for example, when you're homesick, um, or, or, or you lack a f- certain version of it when you're lonely. Um, and s- this really contributes to your sense of real. Have you ever done that thing where you've traveled to another country and it's all exciting and interesting, but you don't really feel like you're properly in place? You, you're getting a bit of culture shock?

   8. CWChris Williamson45:27

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke45:28

      And it, and then it starts to feel less real to you, it starts to feel surreal to you, to you use your... and see, so what Dawkins is, is forgetting, he's forgetting all of those other aspects of realness that matter, um, if what we want is to be in contact with reality. S- and secondly, right, it, it, it's not that, that he's forgetting all of those, he's forgetting that our access to those non-propositional kinds of knowing is largely done through what's called the imaginal, okay? So for example, I'm present to you, I hope, okay? Do you, can you literally see into my mind? No, you're imagining it. Now, it's not imagining the way you're imagining a sailboat, where imagination is taking you away or distracting you from reality, you are looking through your imagination because you're trying to have insight look into my mind. Now let's make it even more freaky. That space inside your head where you're aware of yourself, is that a literal space? N- nope. Is it just a, a fable? Is it just false? No, because you get p- real self-knowledge. In fact, that's central to you being a rational being. So that's imaginal, it's fictive. Or Richard Dawkins, open a science book. Oh, look, here's on page three, here's the solar system, solu- solar system model of the atom. That's almost completely false, yet we teach it to kids. Why do we give them this image? Because the image trains their perspective-taking, gives them skills, so that they can get to the place where they can then get the deeper propositional knowledge. The imaginal is irremovable from the way in which we need to train the non-propositional in order for us to get those proper connectedness to reality that allows us to find the causal patterns that establish the propositional, the, the scientific kinds of claims.

8. 47:35 – 53:21

   Seeing Meaning as a Thinking Problem

   1. CWChris Williamson47:35

      What about people that think meaning is a thinking problem? A lot of us spend a lot of time in our heads, we're learning, it's, this is, you'd, somewhere between philosophy, psychology, sociology, all of these thing. And the, the only place I have to experience these things is, is, uh, in the head, a little bit in the body, and that gets fed up through my head as well. Can we fix this by just thinking our way out of the problem?

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke47:59

      No. I mean, especially we think of thinking as just running a lot of propositions together and making sure they're coherent and computing with them. That's not gonna work. As I said, most of this-... most of what w- we're talking about here when we're talking about this kind of connectedness, this sense of belonging, this sense of emplacement, is happening, right, it's happening in an- in- i- a completely embodied fashion. It's happening non-propositionally. Like your skills. You have the skill of swimming. Can you get access to that skill without swimming or doing something imaginal? No, you can't, right? What about, you know, what your state of consciousness is like? You have a kind of memory for that, episodic memory, like, did you take a shower this morning? And you sort of remember, and you sort of- you relive it for a moment, right? That's different from your knowledge of, "Are cats mammals?" You don't relive that, right? You have to a- th- like, like, there's whole aspects of you that you can't get access to unless you're doing it imaginably, and that means embodied. Like, this is all dependent on the fact that you're embodied. The view that w- that this is just sort of a matter of not having the right propositions... Look, look, here's how it's fun- well, here, let me give you a concrete example. This is from Thomas Nagel. All of the arguments for reality being absurd aren't actually good arguments. I- this came out in, uh, You Know, a really g- I think the movie's really good, by the way, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

   3. CWChris Williamson49:28

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke49:28

      But all the, all the arguments in there are, "Well, everything all at where, uh, you know, everything everywhere all at once. I- it makes your life meaningless." Well, how? Well, because there's so much, it makes this insignificant. But if it makes each part insignificant, how can the whole have significance? That doesn't make any sense. W- do you underst- if e- if all these little individual parts are made insignificant by this huge collection of all the parts, w- how does the huge have a better standard by which it, uh, renders all the parts so meaningless? Like, eh, "Well, I'm so small." If I blew you up to a galaxy, would that make your life more meaningful? "Well, you know, what I'm doing now doesn't ma- it won't matter a million years from now." So that means what's happening a million years from now shouldn't matter to you now. Like, none of these arguments actually work. They're really bad arguments. They self-destruct. That's not what drives absurdity. What drives absurdity is, right, when there's a clash between your perspectives, when you have this... Thomas Nagel tel- tells this wonderful story, and he wrote this way back when, when we used to... the dark, barbaric days where we had answering machines that were actual machines, that were actually in your home and things like that, uh, 'cause we couldn't carry our telephones around with us. And he tells this thing about, you know, uh, Tom, who realizes he loves Susan, and he, and he- he calls Susan up, and the- he hears s- the receiver get picked up. He says, "Susan, don't talk. I have to tell you I love you, I love you, I love you." And then he hears, "Susan is not here right now," right?

   5. CWChris Williamson51:05

      (laughs)

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke51:06

      Right? And notice you laugh. And laughter, like humor, is that there's a contrast between the two perspectives. There's the personal perspective of his- of his life and the impersonal perspective of the machine, and there's a clash there. Humor is when you're- when you're on the cusp of authority, and I got to meet John Cleese, by the way. When sort- when you're on the cusp of absurdity, and Monty Python was brilliant at that, right? They could take you to the edge of absurdity, and then what you do is you have a weird insight that relieves the absurdity. But if I- if you can't relieve the clash between perspectives with an insight, 'cause that's what insight does, it relieves a clash between perspectives, then you will experience absurdity. Now I ask you, Chris, can you think your way into an insight?

   7. CWChris Williamson51:59

      Huh, I don't know.

   8. JVJohn Vervaeke52:02

      Well, if you- have you ever needed an insight?

   9. CWChris Williamson52:05

      Yeah.

   10. JVJohn Vervaeke52:06

       And realized it just wasn't coming?

   11. CWChris Williamson52:08

       (laughs) Yeah, yes, many times.

   12. JVJohn Vervaeke52:11

       Insight doesn't work that way. Insight doesn't work propositionally. You can't infer your way into an insight. In fact, it looks like the- the parts that are responsible for insight and the parts that are responsible for inference are kind of like in opponent processing with each other. Let me sh- c- tell you why I say that. When we are doing bad inference, it's because we're jumping to a conclusion. That's insight. Insight is when you jump to something. When you like it, you call it insight. When you don't like it, you call it jumping to a conclusion, you-

   13. CWChris Williamson52:44

       Mm.

   14. JVJohn Vervaeke52:44

       ... you see? They're like-

   15. CWChris Williamson52:45

       Mm.

   16. JVJohn Vervaeke52:45

       ... the insight has to do with m- changing your perspective, altering your perception and attention, but also participating in a process that is self-organizing. You don't make an insight, you don't just, uh, receive an insight, you participate in a self-organizing process.

   17. CWChris Williamson53:04

       Mm-hmm. That's so interesting.

   18. JVJohn Vervaeke53:05

       So this is why you can't think your way through these thing- thinking matters. Don't misunderstand me. Propositions matter. I'm not saying they don't. But it's not just a matter of running good arguments, because that's not where the pri- the primary problem lies.

9. 53:21 – 1:02:56

   The Principle of Unteachable Lessons

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke53:21

   2. CWChris Williamson53:21

      I remember you saying that, uh, some truths are only knowable through transformation.

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke53:25

      Oh, totally.

   4. CWChris Williamson53:27

      And, uh, I was having a great conversation last night, and we came up with this term of unteachable lessons, and an unteachable lesson, one of the best unteachable lessons, I think, is money and success won't make you happy.

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke53:42

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson53:42

      And, you know, it is a unique category of lesson, where nobody gives the people trying to teach it sympathy. Uh, they're derogated in a manner that, uh, no teacher would typically accept, and I'm yet to... I- I- I- I know of nobody who has arrived at that realization logically. They've arrived at it experientially. Um...

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke54:09

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson54:09

      I was trying to think about some other, uh, ones that are not too dissimilar. I think, um... (laughs) ... don't, don't be, uh, swayed to falling in love with somebody who looks very pretty but has no morals or anything sort of deeper to do with you. You know, it's very much-

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke54:32

      (laughs)

   10. CWChris Williamson54:32

       ... uh, what, the, the thing that I kind of came to realize, at least with the unte- some of the unteachable lessons, I'm sure there's a million, um, but the ones that I'd found were ones that sort of limbically were very seductive in one form or another. They were about status, they were about acclaim, they were about resources, they were about sex, they were about power. And, um, that was so salient that what you end up with is this, you're at war. There is one higher version of yourself that goes, "Ah, I remember the last time that I got into a relationship with a girl that was pretty and kind of didn't really have much to say and we didn't really have much to do or whatever, and you know, that, that didn't end too well. But they, uh, you know, she's just so hot, I can't not think about it." And then, you know, the same with, "Well, yeah, everybody else says that sort of money and success didn't change any of the internal voids that they had, but that was them. I, I will be able to thread the needle in a different way." And, uh, I just, I thought it was so funny that, uh, unteachable lessons came to me last night, uh, knowing that I was gonna speak to you today-

   11. JVJohn Vervaeke55:28

       (laughs)

   12. CWChris Williamson55:28

       ... and the, some truths that are only knowable through transformation. I thought that was a nice, uh, a, a nice parallel.

   13. JVJohn Vervaeke55:35

       Yeah. That's powerful. I like that. Um, yeah. L.A. Paul's work on transformative experience, uh, that, um, yeah. B- b- because we don't know who we're going to be and what's it going to be like to be that other person until after we've gone through the transformation. So we can have all the propositions we want, we can even have some relevant skills, but the perspec- ti- the s- perspectival knowing, knowing what it's going to be like, the participatory knowing, who are we going to actually be, we won't know that until we undergo the transformation. And so we draw very poor conclusions, uh, because, uh, we've been sort of educated for quite some time, since Descartes, um, uh, that truths are just accessible to calculation. We should just be able to calculate all possible truths. Um, and that was to overturn an older religious idea that no, no, many truths are, as you're indicating very powerfully, many important truths are only disclosed to us after we commit to undergoing a fundamental transformation. Uh, I, I, and I think that's-

   14. CWChris Williamson56:40

       Mm.

   15. JVJohn Vervaeke56:40

       ... I think that's deeply right. Um, now the issue around this is, well, if you're ignorant, what do you do? And then here's where the imaginal comes back in, right? Um, so let's use one of L.A. Paul's powerful examples, having a child. You don't know what it's like to be a parent until you're a parent, and we were kind of talking about that a few minutes ago. You can read all kinds of books, but (laughs) they really don't help that much, right? And you can even practice some skills, uh, sort of in your head or on your friends or something and, um, but what do people do then? Well, what I've noticed is a lot of people do, and some people are even noticing that other people do this, is they get a dog. They get a dog and they pretend, but it's not really pretense because it's actually a, a dog, it's an intelligent living being that needs your attention and your care and is very demanding. And I, I'm helping to raise a dog right now, and you know, and so they get a dog and they treat it like a little person. They name it and they talk to it and they, you know, sometimes they'll even give it its own room and have family pictures and the dog is included. Um, and so this is what's known, what I've been calling serious play. What we do is we set up this liminal place, uh, Winnicott talked about this as this transitional place where we're neither fully a parent but we're not just single anymore. We're in this, like, liminal place where we're doing this very serious play by, uh, this kind of imagining through the dog, not im- (laughs) ... not imagining a dog, but imagining through the dog what it would be like to have a child that I'm responsible to. Now, the thing about the dog is it's, uh, it's still an element of pretense because it's not a, a human child, and so you can do things with a dog, like you can say after three weeks, "No, I'm not up, uh, this isn't really for me," and then you can find a new owner for the dog and nobody thinks you're a particularly immoral person. But if you do that with your kid, "Now I'm three weeks in, no, no, this isn't for me. I'm gonna find another... Here, do you want my child?" People think there's something, and, and as they should, there's something dramatically wrong with you. So we use, we need serious play, which is an imaginal practice in order to try and get a taste, uh, for, uh, uh, so that we can properly commit ourselves to the transformations that will disclose those unteachable truths. So let me give you a more concrete example that goes back to your, your first thing. I'm gonna use myself as an example, so I'm gonna make myself vulnerable here. I've not been what I would call successful in my romantic life. I've had lots of relationships, uh, some of them very long term, but, um, in many ways, they, um, they did not bring out the best in me and I did not act my best within them. I'll, I'll put it as succinctly as I could. So after my second, isn't that a point of vulnerability? Second marriage fell apart. I'm on good terms with both of my exes, by the way. Um, but, um, I realized that I had been doing what you were talking about. I had a type that I found particularly attractive, and this was probably driven largely by genetic Darwinian factors. We're s- we sound like Plato now with the monster in our genitalia, right? Um, and I decided I was going to change my attraction radar. I was going to go, not go towards the women that immediately were salient to me, sort of physically. Um, and instead, um, I tried to break against my type.... which wasn't easy, by the way. Especially when you're, like, feeling so vulnerable and that you'll never be loved again because a relationship has ended and all that crap that that little things says in your head. And then I found this woman, and she found me. And she wasn't my type. And because of that, and because I really wanted to be different on how I entered into a relationship, I allowed myself to be attracted in ways I hadn't been attracted before. And I fell in love with her soul. And then only did I realize, and now to my great (laughs) joy do I realize she's actually a very physically attractive woman. Um, and my type that I find attractive has completely shifted because of that. Um, and that was powerful for me. Um, and I'm not holding myself out as any kind of exemplar for relationship advice. Um, I'm saying that sometimes we have to be willing, uh, to overcome, um, our automatic salience, uh, projector. Um, salient, what grabs our attention, what arouses us, right? Um, if we want to actually find deeper connection and meaning. Um, and, and, um, this woman and I, Sara and I, we have made a lifetime commitment to each other, uh, because we have found that we reliably bring out the good in each other. Which is actually the basis for a relationship. Um, and we realized that that is what you should base a commitment on. Not, is this person satisfying all of your wants and needs? Not, is this person, you know, helping you with all your projects and helping you to self-actualize and all the stuff that we say in California. Um, but is... Are the two of you reliably bringing out the good in each other, such that... I, I, I, I texted her today, and I said, "I love that I get to know you more and more, uh, and while realizing that I'll never completely grasp you." And so that, that is something I would... I did not have access to as long as I was going according to what I typically found salient.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:02:52

       It's a beautiful story. And, uh, I've been

10. 1:02:56 – 1:09:35

    Why Would You Know What’s Best For Yourself?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:02:56

       thinking a lot recently about (laughs) , um, why do you think that you know what's best for you? Like, why is it that you have, you know, you had this assumption, "Oh, I have a type. I have a type. I have a type." And, uh, there's a, a need for control. There's a desire for control there. You know, "I have a predictive model of how things are going to unfold. I can therefore have a good example of it. The, the trajectory, I know exactly where this is gonna come in to land kind of -ish." And I know that maybe a couple of times this evidence has shown, but you're actually denying evidence. Especially if you've had a couple of these things occur, and you go, "Well, ah, those ones didn't quite go the way that I wanted to, uh, and this is something different. Well, maybe different could lead to a different sort of an outcome." And it's like, "Ah, no, I, I, I'm pretty sure that the same will somehow lead to a different kind of an outcome." And, um, yeah. As... In a world where people want to control... They do not like the idea of not being able to fully predict where things are going to come in to land, uh, reminding everybody, myself included, that you are not necessarily the best judge of what is best for you. You don't actually always know, or you can't always predict what's best for you. And that's a, a lovely example of a time where perhaps you were, you were right to be wrong in that regard.

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:04:19

       Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I mean, (coughs) one of the hallmarks of modernity given to us in the per- from the period of the European Enlightenment is this, uh, sort of, uh, putting on a pedestal, uh, uh, enfranchising autonomy. Uh, self-government. It's, it's Kant's biggest virtue. Um, and, and there's value in that, again, because economy reminds us that, uh, we are our, mm, we are simultaneously our best friends and our worst enemy, um, and, and that we are responsible for, um, the content of our behavior and our thoughts, uh, and our affect. And so that's important, and I don't want... Like, I, I don't want to just go back. But it's also given us this, and there is no other word for it, a lack of humility. It's given us an arrogance that we always know what is best for us. Um, and that's simply not true. In fact, we are really bad at dec- discovering our own self-deception. We're really bad at affective for- what's called affective forecasting. We're really bad at predicting what will make us long-term happy and what will be- make us long-term really, really sad. We're really bad at that. We're really bad at it. Um, w- we're really bad at it because we fall prey to hyperbolic discounting. That's a fancy sounding term. It means we find present stimuli very salient and long-term stimuli very non-salient. This is why it's hard to lose weight and it's hard to study and all those, uh, kinds of other things. 'Cause the chocolate cake is there or the party is there, and health, and, you know, the exam, or would off in the future. Um, and by the way, you can't argue yourself away from, uh, that hyperbolic discounting. It doesn't help. Uh, uh, giving people lots of reason and evidence, uh, for why, for example, why they should save for their retirement doesn't really help them do that. But if they do some serious play by imagining their future self as somebody, a family member that they've always loved and taken care of...... and they form that effective bonding, then they'll start to, uh, save for their retirement, kind of thing. Um, so there are lots of ways in which we are not, um, the best authority. We have to, we have to... (sighs) We have to become adults in which we've, right, in which we take responsibility. But... And that's important, and I don't want to denigrate that, but that's only one half of maturation. Uh, John Rusin, I think, is, uh, right when he talks about the, the, the, the main part of maturity is facing up. I like that phrase, it's beautiful. Facing up to reality. Um, and facing up to reality is humbling. You're looking to something... When you're looking up, that's a humbling stance. And you're facing it, you're confronting a reality that is making you look up. Right? And so that is an attitude in which you realize that you don't know best. Um, so how is... For, uh, uh, for example, as things started to succeed for me, um, I, you know, I f- I, I, uh, I had the Vervaeke Foundation but I br- I was blessed by terrific people. But I asked them to act as a count- a constant check on the fact that I could fall prey to, you know, self-aggrandizement, uh, hubris, arrogance, all the proclivities we see in social media people. Um, and they... And I, I, I, I, I committed them to this because I did not trust that I would be a good enough person for determining that issue. And this... And there... We've done things specifically. Uh, like we pivoted away from Voices with Revakea, and I was doing all these videos, and we just do now a couple of videos a month. Uh, and I've become very clear, we now have what's called the lectern. My role, I'm a teacher. People are not my fans, they're not my followers, they're my students if they want to study what I've te- what I'm teaching. That's my role, that's who they are. And I'm emphasizing quality over quantity. Um, a lot of things to try and prioritize, uh, virtue over success. And that initiative-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:09:17

       Mm-hmm.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:09:17

       ... wasn't my initiative. It was the initiative from, uh, uh, Ryan Barton and Christopher Mastropietro at the Vervaeke Foundation. But as soon as they said it, um, I recognized that it was true. So thank God for that.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:09:34

       (laughs)

11. 1:09:35 – 1:16:43

    Strategies to Be More Mindful in Daily Life

    1. CWChris Williamson1:09:35

       This is one of those moments... My, my background when I first started this show was a sort of productivity bro, uh, world. I was very much trying to wrangle chaos, and have the right Notion template, and the morning routine, and time blocking in the calendar, and all of this stuff, trying to create some sense of organization out of what had been a pretty sort of messy 20s. And, um, it's funny that even in things like this, you know, we're talking about transcend and we're talking about, you know, uh, accounting for the various machinations and ways that your ego is going to pervert the incentives, and, you know, your higher calling, and wh- how do we really pay this forward in the best way, and so on and so forth. And what it comes down to, in some ways, are an operational set of principles. Like that you need some hard and fast rules, you need to actually put some bright lines in the sand and sort of draw those around you. And, um, I've got it in my head sort of thinking about, uh, people for whom that approach is very seductive. Uh, I would probably put myself in that category, that, um, again, if I just have the perfect to-do list template, then all of my problems will be sorted, et cetera, et cetera. Let's say that somebody is operationally pretty effective when it comes to that sort of stuff. What are some of the practices that you like, that you use the most yourself, to get you out of that kind of mode? To get you out of the mode of logic, of reason, of rationality, of logistics, of operations, and get you into a more embodied or dread/joy kind of sense? Because I feel like that's important.

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:11:15

       So, uh, we've been talking, this ultimately goes back to (sniffs) sort of a compilation put together by Nathan Vanderpool, who I was worth- working with. We talk about DIME, uh, we talk about these four dimensions. Um, uh, the dialogical, what... I'll come back to each one in a minute. The imaginal, which I've been talking about a lot. Uh, the mindful, both meditation and contemplation, sitted and, and moving, and embodiment. Um, so, uh, you need these four dimensions, or you need practices in all four of these dimensions. And you need, you need sets of practices, because there is no panacea practice. Uh, pr- practices have, uh, uh, strengths and weaknesses, and you need to align them so they're correcting and compensating for each other. So one of my standard examples is meditation is training attention. Meditation is you're stepping back and looking at the lens through which you're normally looking through at the world. You're trying to pay attention to your mental framing. This is meditation. The problem with that is you need to determine if any intervention, while I stilled my mind, well, does that allow you to see better into the world? Then you have to do contemplative practices where you look out and see if you're seeing the world more deeply and more clearly. The... You have to to-and-fro between them. You have seat- seated practices where you're sitting, right? But then you should do moving practices where you're trying to carry mindfulness into your movement. So I do, like, Tai Chi Chuan, um, and things like that. You need imaginal practices where you're engaging your imagination not...... in, for entertainment. Uh, but you're doing that serious play that allows you to taste what, what it might be like to be somebody other than who you currently are, and, uh, what, uh, how you might, um, what, uh, how you might ident- uh, identify with that. Um, and, and those are very important practices. Uh, so, um, dialogical practices, we have a bunch of those. We have, um... Oh, let me give you an example of, uh, an imaginal practice. Lectio Divina, which is reading a text in an imaginal fashion. You're not just reading it to get information. You're trying to create the, you're trying to take up the text as a serious play, as something imaginal through which you're trying to see the world differently, take a different way, taking perspectives you haven't taken before, and what, and, and taste what the transformation mi- might be like that, that text is providing you, that other voice, that other perspective. The sage that you're reading is like a parent to a child, as the adult... as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. And you're doing this imaginal work, uh, in, in order to try and undergo a transformation. That's, that's a kind of an imaginal practice, Lectio Divina. Uh, you wanna do dialogical practices, we have a whole bunch. We've been teaching on, um, the Awaken to Meaning platform, uh, where you can go now, and there's a whole, uh, website where, yeah, where you can do all of the practices, you can take courses, there's drop-in things. Um, my good friend, Taylor Barrett. By the way, that is now running autonomously separate from John Vervaeke. I get nothing from that other than the satisfaction of knowing that, uh, some of my ideas have been put into practice. Um, and Taylor is a good friend of mine. Um, and so we have, what, a practice called Dialectic into Dialogos, which is how can you talk... how two, how can two people enter into this mutual midwifing, this fellowship where they're trying to give... I'm trying to help you to give deeper birth to yourself, and you're trying to help me. We're trying to do that in a reciprocally opening fashion. And how can we do it with, like, s- three or four people so that sort of gets into a shared flow state where we start to be drawn into those kinds of life-giving conversations, which we've all had, that, that because they take on a life of their own and they take us to places we didn't think we could go to. We don't necessarily end up agreeing, but we all say, "Wow, I never thought I could get here and I couldn't have got here on my own." Uh, we, we... those kinds of practices. Uh, we're, we're just putting the final touches on a practice we've been working on, cultivating, developing for the past, uh, year or so, uh, in which you teach people a Socratic practice of go into something, a deeply personal problem you're having, and then how can you go through a set of, with the help of other peoples, a set of transformations on your perspective and also on your sense of identity, so that you can go from it being your personal problem that's just, just yours to an existential dilemma that is probably shared with many people? And then once you get at the level of existential dilemma, the tradition can talk to you and tell you what virtue might be relevant to the existential dimension. And then you can then address that part of it and then, then you bring that back into and transform your personal problem. Uh, we're doing, uh, things like that. Uh, so those are-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:16:15

       Where can, where can people go? Where should they go if they wanna check out more of that?

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:16:18

       Uh, awakentomeaning.org. It's a, uh, a platform. That last thing, which is called the Socratic Search Base, we're just gonna roll it out in the next month or so. Uh, the Dialectic and the Dialogos, you can do that. Philosophical Fellowship, you can do that. You can learn about Lectio Divina, meditation, contemplation, uh, various other kinds of practices.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:16:41

       That's so awesome. John,

12. 1:16:43 – 1:22:59

    What‘s Next for John?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:16:43

       I appreciate the heck out of you. I really, uh, have to say as well, it's, it's beautiful to see you smitten. Uh-

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:16:49

       (laughs) .

    3. CWChris Williamson1:16:49

       ... and, uh, it's-

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:16:50

       (laughs) .

    5. CWChris Williamson1:16:51

       It's re- it's really lovely. It genuinely is, mate. Uh, you know, and I think, uh, good people deserve good relationships, and I'm very glad that you've managed to find yours. So, um, what can people expect next? You've kind of rounded out this chapter. You... I mean, how, when was the first Meaning Crisis video put on YouTube?

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:17:09

       Uh, February 2019.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:17:12

       Okay. Yeah, so a good half decade's journey on one thing.

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:17:17

       Right.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:17:17

       Have you got-

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:17:18

        Well, well, the book is only part one.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:17:20

        Right.

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke1:17:20

        Uh, there's part two coming out, uh, which is the second half. Um, that'll have even more revisions in it, because all the scientific work on relevance realization has gone through a lot of revision and, and collaboration with other people, publishing papers, like, this year, um, and stuff like that. Um, the ne- uh, the next thing is, um... Well, I've got a bunch of books coming out. I've got a book, uh, is, uh, well, I'm working on S- uh, Einstein and Spinoza's God, um, and then a book called Reimagining Religion. Um, and then, uh, a book by Greg Enriquez, uh, where w- we got a lot of that written on, um, uh, on consciousness. That's coming out. Uh, the big project is, um, the Philosophical Silk Road, which is gonna be my next big multimedia endeavor. Um, it's gonna be sort of at four levels of prenta- presentation. One is... Well, it, it's based on this thesis. This is what's next. I, I made a fundamental mistake in, uh, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Um, I thought, you know, the, the solution was to engineer an ecology of practices, a religion that's not a religion, failing to realize that's exactly the framing that I was criticizing, uh, throughout (laughs) . So I felt, righto, a very serious performative contradiction. Um, because I realized, like, me- like, like that example of (clears throat) the living conversation. The, the sacred, you can't manufacture it, you can't engineer it. It has to show up with a life of its own or it's not the sacred. It's not that, that fount of rejuvenating meaning that is deeply transformative of individuals and communities. But what's happening...And what I've s- seen s- since all of the connections we- that were formed by Awakening From the Meaning Crisis is communities around the world, and, and things happening i- in academic, uh, cognitive science and philosophy and psychology and, and biology. What I call the advent of the sacred, it's like sacredness is trying to be born in a new way for us, I think as a response to, uh... it's the v- I'll be Hegel here for a second, so this is my only technicality. This is the Weltgeist, the spirit of reality that's challenging the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times of the meaning crisis. And so, I wanna do this. (clears throat) I wanna... in fact, uh, uh, n- it's not that I wanna do this. I feel called... to do this. One of the things I'm gonna do is, um, I, I, I wanna try and... teach by undergoing a pilgrimage. I wanna go to the various places in the world where the sages of three great traditions that sort of built comprehensive ways for people to deeply dialogue with each other, the Neoplatonic tradition that runs through Christianity and Judaism and Islam. So, I wanna talk about, right... you know, I wanna talk about, you know, M- m- m- m- Maximus the Confessor or Nicholas of Cusa, and I'm gonna go there. Or Clement of Alexandria or Suhrawardi the, the Sufi, right? I'm gonna go there and I'm gonna walk an- and talk and live, um, and, and really undergo and try and make myself vulnerable to hearing these people. I'm gonna go to India, where, you know, with all of the, uh, the Vedanta and everything wrapped around it, and Vedanta is, like, wrapped with tantra and Jainism and, and original Buddhism. And then, uh, I wanna go to Japan, uh, 'cause there's zen, 'cause zen integrates Buddhism and Taoism and Shinto, and, and get all three of these... like, what would it be like to do the philosophical Silk Road? Create a lingua philosophica so we could engage in these, not just an ecology of practices, but an ecology of tra- traditions where we could really deeply talk to each other, and people can travel, e- and transform, and m- maybe return and recover their home or tr- travel and find a new home. That's gonna be the up- the upper level. Then below that is gonna be a lecture series, like Awakening From the Meaning Crisis where I go through each one of these thinkers, uh, and, and explain them in great detail. And then below that is going to be specific video essays on, uh, more technical topics like comparing the non-duality in Vedanta to the non-duality in do- uh, i- in, in zen for example, or Neoplatonism. And then below that we have what's called the codex. We have a whole bank of volunteers taking all of my language and they're creating like a, uh, a Wikipedia of it, where there's... and it's at, it's, it's being written at multiple levels of accessibility. Somebody in grade 10, uh, completed high school, all, you know, a- all these levels. There's cross-referencing, there's diagrams, there's practices that you can undertake to get a deeper understanding of the concepts. And so there's gonna be these four tiers, and there's gonna be like a narrative structure and an argumentative structure, right, and a reflective structure, and it's gonna be this. And, and, and the hope is that, that and th- m- uh, a lot of the teaching will not go just in what I'm saying, but what I'm undergoing a- and how I'm being transformed. Um, there's gonna be people that are gonna travel with me in various places and meet me at various places. Um, and the hope is to open people up to the advent of the sacred so they can, uh (coughs) properly orient to receiving it, so that we can, um, really, uh, transformatively trust each other in the way we need to in order to address the meaning crisis.

13. 1:22:59 – 1:23:44

    Where to Find John

    1. CWChris Williamson1:22:59

       Well, I'm glad after taking on such a medium-sized topic you're taking it a little bit smaller for the next one.

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:23:04

       (laughs)

    3. CWChris Williamson1:23:05

       Very, very reassuring that you're gonna keep it, keep it nice and niche. Uh, John, I appreciate the heck out of you, mate. I can't wait until you get whatever you've got coming out next out, and I would love to bring you back on whenever you're ready.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:23:16

       Uh, I'll always come back a- and talk to you, Chris. Uh, thank you for, very much, and thank you for allowing me to shamelessly plug my new book, which, uh, I really appreciate.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:23:25

       Everyone should go and check it out. I appreciate you, mate. Thank you.

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:23:28

       Thank you so much, Chris.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:23:29

       (music) Do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a god? Is it able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself? Well, the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you, bespoke. So, go and, go and check it out.

Episode duration: 1:23:44