John Vervaeke
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 well uh i have to tell you that um i've been 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Yeah, and I think when you, as soon as you talk, I think that's exactly right, journey rather than destination. I think, and playing the infinite game rather than the finite game, Kars's notion, I think that's exactly what I'm trying to convey. What also comes up when you get back to the notion of orientation is, You start to connect what can be isolated by the term purpose.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And that brings with it its own special problem that my friend Greg Enriquez made sort of prevalent. We developed the superpower of connecting and coordinating called language. And language is something really, really powerful in helping us coordinate. But it also does something really novel. It makes the content of our minds accessible.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
You start to connect back to, well, what ultimately orients you is what's true, what is good, what is beautiful. Whereas purpose can be very egocentric. It can be what I most want to have. 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, with the world?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And see, a lot of people have kind of, and you see this in sort of the rampant rise of cynicism and nihilism in popular media, because of massive senses of burnout and betrayal and bullshit, people have sort of given up on the world in some ways. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And so, So the degree to which we find the world an incredibly scary place is the degree to which we create sort of an insular model of ourselves. We withdraw, and we withdraw, and we withdraw, and we withdraw. The problem with that is that's the behavior ultimately of an organism in pain and in distress. And the fact that we don't recognize it as that behavior isn't of central importance.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
We're withdrawing, and 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 manner.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
So Chris and I, Christopher Maciapietro and I, we talk about three kinds of responses to the meaning crisis. One is just a reactive response a sense of despair.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
We're sort of exposed to each other in a way in which no other organism is exposed to its fellow 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
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Excellent. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And you see, the self-centered orientation is extremely problematic. Obviously, there's ethical problems, and we get the increasing... growth of spiritual bypassing as a growing psychological problem. So people pursue spirituality as a way of avoiding their important economic and ethical responsibilities and obligations.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 in both of those domains to massive self-deception. I don't pay attention to the right things. I misframe you. I'm biased in my attitude towards you. And so we have to do a lot to correct that.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 on spiritual but not religious, like people who do the anthropology and sociology of religion, what they'll tell you is spirituality means the religion of me. That's what it means.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
You're doing all the standard religious behavior, but you're doing it for you and towards you and by you and evaluated by you. And that's extremely problematic because autodidactically, we're really bad. So If you notice, for example, you're very good, and this shows up metabolically in terms of even of cognitive effort, you're very good at pointing out the biases in your friends and other people.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
That doesn't remove the responsibility for addressing those from me. Of course not, but I'm not saying that. We are still always individually responsible for our vices. So I want that clearly stated.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
But what it shows is, and this is something that we've known since Socrates, and we emphasize 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And so the degree to which we become withdrawn and self-centered is the degree to which we are going to fall prey to self-deceptive behavior and the degree to which we might not pay proper attention to the deep interconnections between our spirituality and our responsibilities.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Yeah, but we're also really good at determining it in other people. That's the counterbalance. So you have to practice a lot with other people. And then you have to imitate what it's like with other people, with yourself, until you get good at doing it by yourself. And then there's a lot of things you can do that do that.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
That's metacognition, to use the technical term. And that's what you're exercising in mindfulness. But that's a broad lesson to be learned. You practice dialogically with others until you can do it internally and reflectively. It's the whole point of Socratic philosophy. You hung around with somebody like Socrates
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
and you did all of this Socratic 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 forefounder of Stoicism, 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, because we do that automatically all day long.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
He meant that he had so practiced it and imitated it so that he had internalized it. So he had an inner Socrates that was quite competent at pointing out to him his own bullshit and self-destructiveness.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 is most beautiful. And 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 of these things are all important dimensions in
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
That's a good question. Rosa talks about the fact that we're in kind of what he calls dynamic stability. I talk about it as a frenetic frozenness. We 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. Of course, and this is what's predictive of the massive amounts of burnout.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And Han talks about how we've become, we're not so much oppressed and exploited by other people as we are exploiting ourselves and oppressed by ourselves. It's the Red Queen fallacy, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And And so I think, again, if you asked people and you use the standard metrics, they'll tell you, well, I know I have connections.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
So I care a lot about my kids and I care a lot about my friends and work's important to me, you know, and so you'll get that. But if you ask them like, And we know burnout is arising. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
You have to ask this question really, really carefully. And I think around those issues of burnout and being busy unto death and sense of ever-increasing bullshit and betrayal. I think that, or if you want to put it the other way, a famine, a famine of wisdom, scarcity. We don't know where to go. We find it very difficult to get into healthy flow situations.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
We have addictive and maladaptive forms of flow generation like video games. we lack fellowship. Fellowship isn't friendship. We've lost the whole category of getting together with people 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And again, we've lost faithfulness we become increasingly short-term, and so it gets harder and harder for us 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Why we have to pursue meaning in life. I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the standard psychological construct called meaning in life to measure and talk about all those dimensions in a coordinated fashion.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Yeah, first of all, excellent question, Chris. Eberstadt and How the West Really Lost God talks about the fact that the countries that are the most secular in their orientation is predicted by how much people are living atomically, individually, alone. Whereas more religious communities tend to be related to people who live in more extended family kinds of situations.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
This goes towards a lot of research that I think puts to nail – in the coffin of the idea that people are religious because they're stupid and intuitive and not rational. So 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 religious.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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, analytic thought is more predictive of being religious than non-religious.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And so the whole enlightenment mythology still espoused by people like Dawkins and others 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 metacognition? You have to trust, right?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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, right? And what seems like senseless behavior to you actually has a deeper meaning to it, a deeper function, right?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And that requires, typically, we've relied on families to give us those kinds of entrusted relationships, but we've narrowed the family down to the nuclear family, the nomadic nuclear family. And that has seriously eradicated a lot of ways in which we could get meaning in life.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I think your friend is right in the sense that children are very powerful indicators, especially of how meaning in life is not about wealth, because you have a child and your wealth goes down, man. The other one is it's not about subjective well-being, especially at the beginning. Having a child crushes all the measures of subjective well-being. You're not sleeping, you're not eating.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
You're wet all the time. You're under high stress because the baby's crying. The person who you thought loved you the most in the world hates you right now, your partner. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Yeah, so the standard metrics are around sort of four dimensions, really three. One is coherence, which I mentioned, which is does your sense-making make sense to you? Another one is purpose. That's not well posed, because if you think standardly of how people think of purpose, purpose is you're working towards some ultimate goal.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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, that's, those are important moves, uh, for meaning in life. Uh, although as I, as I've been arguing, not captured by the current, uh, psychological measures, um,
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Now, I would say he's wrong and you're right about we can turn our children into idols too, and we've done that. Jonathan Haidt has made a good career out of pointing out how an idolatrous relationship to our children
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
in which we made them the be-all and end-all of existence, and helicopter parenting, and trying to wrap protective layers around them so they never suffer hurt or pain, has actually 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, but... It seems to be the case. And so we have to be careful about that.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I think having children is a powerful way of reorienting you. I think our meaning in life, the way I've been talking about it, evolved out of our capacity to be parents. 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 children and not really...
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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. And then that's my final point, which is being able to care about things in the right way and really focus on what's the really real. I mean, that's wisdom. And
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Your friend sounds like a good person, so for whatever set of reasons, they probably were wise parents, or at least wise enough. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Okay. Well, that's a tall order, but, uh, I, I, I, I, I do want, I do feel I have a responsibility to respond. Um, You have to be careful about this notion of truth. It's very one-dimensional that's being used by Dawkins. It's about evidence that convinces you that a proposition should be believed. I think that's important.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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. So I think what they're talking about more is orientation. And then orientation is a more important way.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I'm a scientist, and that's what theories are built out of, scientific theories, 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, those are not the primary ways we feel in contact with reality.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
So evidence isn't the same thing as relevance. So Your skills, they have to be true to things. Your aim has to be true. It's a different sense of truth. You have to be able to make things present to yourself, and you have to be able to interact with the world in a way that reliably... gives you some degree of agency in the world. That's really important to you.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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. 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 this is important. We also have
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
What I call perspectival knowing, what it's like to be you here now in this situation, in this state of mind. And that is a different set. This is knowing by noticing. It's knowing by being present. It's how you're sizing things up, what's your take on things, how you're framing things, all that sort of stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Now, notice, so my partner, she was gone recently because she was at a yoga retreat getting her certification to be a yoga instructor. We're going to run retreats when we're both retired. And so, now, I still had all my beliefs about Sarah. I still believed that they were all true, right? And I still have all my skills for interacting with her in place and everything. But she wasn't present to me.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And she, that's, oh, and there's a sense of that lack of presence really matters to us. And there's a sense, and 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 that matters to us. That's not captured by propositions. I could state all of the propositions all day long about Sarah that didn't make her present to me.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
At one level, meaning has to do with sense-making. It has to do with how we 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. And that's one aspect of meaning, that sort of agentic aspect.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And then beneath it is this This is what I've called participatory knowing. This is knowing by sort of emplacement, being in place. Like you belong. 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 this is often very unconscious, but you lack it. For example, when you're homesick,
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
People have to feel not disoriented, but oriented in the world. And then the next one they talk about is significance, that you have things in your life that aren't transitory, ephemeral, shallow. But that seems to be just sort of one side of this deeper thing, which is called mattering. You need to feel connected to something deeper. People typically use the metaphor bigger than yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
or your lack of a certain version of it when you're lonely. And this really contributes to your sense of real. Have you ever gone 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're getting a bit of culture shock, and then it starts to feel less real to you. It starts to feel surreal to you.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
So what Dawkins is forgetting, he's forgetting all of those other aspects of realness. that matter if what we want is to be in contact with reality. And secondly, it's not 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. So, for example, I'm present to you, I hope. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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're looking through your imagination because you're trying to have the insight look into my mind. Now let's make it even more freaky.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
That space inside your head where you're aware of yourself, is that a literal space? Nope. Is it just a fable? Is it just false? No, because you get 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 model of the atom.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 scientific kinds of claims.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
No, I mean, especially if 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 going to work. As I said, most of what 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 now.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
in 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 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?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And you sort of remember, and you sort of relive it for a moment, right? That's different from your knowledge of, are cats mammals? You don't relive that, right? There's whole aspects of you that you can't get access to unless you're doing it imaginatively. And that means embodied. This is all dependent on the fact that you're embodied.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
The view that this is just sort of a matter of not having the right propositions. Look, here's how it's fun. 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. This came out in – I think the movie is really good, by the way, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
But all the arguments in there are, well, everything, everywhere, all at once. That makes your life meaningless. Well, how? Well, because there's so much that makes this insignificant. But if it makes each part insignificant, how can the whole have significance? That doesn't make any sense. Do you understand?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
If all these little individual parts are made insignificant by this huge collection of all the parts, how does the huge have a better standard by which it renders all the parts so meaningless? Like, 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 won't matter a million years from now.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I want to be connected to something larger than myself, right? They don't mean that literally because that would be ridiculous. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
When you have this, Thomas Nagel 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, because we couldn't carry our telephones around with us. And he tells this thing about Tom who realizes he loves Susan.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And he calls Susan up and he hears 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. 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 life and the impersonal perspective of the machine.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And there's a clash there. Humor is when you're on the cusp of authority. And I got to meet John Cleese, by the way. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
But if you can't relieve the clash between perspectives with an insight, because 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?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Well, have you ever needed an insight? Yeah. and realized it just wasn't coming? Yes, many times. 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 parts that are responsible for insight and the parts that are responsible for inference are kind of like an opponent processing with each other.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Let me tell you why I say that. When we're 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Insight has to do with 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 receive an insight. You participate in a self-organizing process. So this is why you can't think your way through these things. Thinking matters. Don't misunderstand me. Propositions matter.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I'm not saying they don't. But it's not just a matter of running good arguments because that's not where the primary problem lies.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And let me try and give you an everyday example of this. 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. Notice we have all these waking up metaphors and enlightenment metaphors.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 in you trying to 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
That's powerful. I like that. Yeah, L.A. Paul's work on transformative experience. 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 gone through the transformation. So we can have all the propositions we want.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
We can even have some relevant skills, but the perspective, the 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,
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
that truths are just accessible to calculation. We should just be able to calculate all possible truths. 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. I think that's deeply right.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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? 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 they really don't help that much, right?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And you can even practice some skills sort of in your head or on your friends or something. 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 a pretense because it's actually a dog.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
It's an intelligent living being that needs your attention and your care, and it's very demanding, and it I'm helping to raise a dog right now. And so they get a dog and they treat it like a little person.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Winnicott talked about this as this transitional place where we're neither fully apparent, but we're not just single anymore. We're in this like liminal place where we're doing this very serious play by this kind of imagining through the dog Not imagining a dog, but imagining through the dog what it would be like to have a child that I'm responsible to.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Now, the thing about the dog is it's still an element of pretense because it's not a human child. And so you can do things with the dog. Like you can say after three weeks, no, 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And it's this sense of realness, which I don't think is properly captured just by the psychological notion of mattering. And here's the fundamental thing. I mentioned that meaning has to do with being connected to something that's more real. than yourself in some important ways because it helps make you feel more real to yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I'm going to find another. Here, do you want my child? People think there's something, and as they should, there's something dramatically wrong with you. So we need serious play, which is an imaginal practice in order to try and get a taste so that we can properly commit ourselves to the transformations that will disclose those unteachable truths.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
So let me give you a more concrete example that goes back to your first thing. I'm going to use myself as an example, so I'm going to make myself vulnerable here. I've not been what I would call successful in my romantic life. I've had lots of relationships, some of them very long-term, but in many ways they... They did not bring out the best in me, and I did not act my best within them.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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, but— 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 not go towards the women that immediately were salient to me, sort of physically. And instead, I tried to break against my type.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
which wasn't easy, by the way, especially when you're feeling so vulnerable and that you'll never be loved again because the relationship has ended and all that crap that that little thing says in your head. And I found this woman when she found me, and she wasn't my type.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 joy, do I realize she's actually a very physically attractive woman.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And my type that I find attractive has completely shifted because of that. And That was powerful for me. And I'm not holding myself out as any kind of exemplar for relationship advice. I'm saying that sometimes we have to be willing to overcome our automatic salience. salient, what grabs our attention, what arouses us, right? If we want to actually find deeper connection and meaning.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And this woman and I, Sarah and I, we have made a lifetime commitment to each other because we have found that we reliably bring out the good in each other. which is actually the basis for a relationship. And we realize that that is what you should base a commitment on.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Not is this person satisfying all of your wants and needs, not is this person helping you with all your projects and helping you to self-actualize and all the stuff that we say in California. But are the two of you reliably bringing out the good in each other such that I texted her today and I said, I love that I get to know you more and more while realizing that I'll never completely grasp you.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And so that is something I did not have access to as long as I was going according to what I typically found salient.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Now, that's a problematic notion to think of as just purely, I'm just describing something like a standard psychological phenomenon. This is actually, if you'll allow me one technical term, this is a normative term. Meaning is, a meaningful life is not, 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Yeah, thank you for saying that. One of the hallmarks of modernity given to us from the period of the European Enlightenment is this sort of putting on a pedestal enfranchising autonomy, self-government. It's Kant's biggest virtue. And there's value in that, again, because autonomy reminds us that we are simultaneously our best friends and our worst enemy, and that we are responsible for
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
the content of our behavior and our thoughts and our affect. And so that's important. 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. And that's simply not true. In fact, we are really bad at discovering our own self-deception.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
We are really bad at what's called affective forecasting. We're really bad at predicting what will make us long-term happy and what will make us long-term really, really sad. We're really bad at that. We're really bad at it. We're really bad at it because we fall prey to hyperbolic discounting. That's a fancy sounding term.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 kinds of other things because the chocolate cake is there or the party is there and health and the exam are off in the future. And by the way, you can't argue yourself away from that hyperbolic discounting. It doesn't help.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Giving people lots of reason and evidence for, 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 save for the retirement kind of thing.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
So there are lots of ways in which we are not the best authority. We have to become adults 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. John Rusin, I think, is right when he talks about the main part of maturity is facing up. I like that phrase, it's beautiful. Facing up to reality.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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. So for example, As things started to succeed for me, I had the Vervaeke Foundation, but I was blessed by terrific people.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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. That's one of my two main criticisms. Um, and, and so in a very deep sense, the meaning and the standard meaning in life, um, psychological model is completely divorced from the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
But I asked them to act as a constant check on the fact that I could fall prey to self-aggrandizement all hubris, arrogance, all the proclivities we see in social media people. And I committed them to this because I did not trust that I would be a good enough person person for determining that issue.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And we've done things specifically, like we pivoted away from Voices with Revaki, and I was doing all these videos, and we just do now a couple videos a month. 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'm teaching. That's my role. That's who they are.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And I'm emphasizing quality over quantity. A lot of things to try and prioritize virtue over success. And that initiative wasn't my initiative. It was the initiative from Ryan Barton and Christopher Mastepietro at the Verveke Foundation. But as soon as they said it, I recognized that it was true. So thank God for that.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
So we've been talking, this ultimately goes back to sort of a compilation put together by Nathan Vanderpool, who I was working with. We talk about DIME. We talk about these four dimensions. The dialogical, which I'll come back to each one in a minute. The imaginal, which I've been talking about a lot. The mindful, both meditation and contemplation. Sitted and moving. And embodiment.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
So you need these four dimensions. You need practices in all four of these dimensions. And you need sets of practices because there is no panacea practice. Practices have... 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And if you look across all the religion and philosophical traditions, that's not the case. They're deeply wound together, bound together. The cultivation of meaning and the cultivation of virtue and the cultivation of wisdom are profoundly intertwined. Stoicism, in fact, said they're exactly identical, which tells you how strong some positions have been on that.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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, well, I stilled my mind. Well, does that allow you to see better into the world?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And you have to do contemplative practices where you look out See if you're seeing the world more deeply, more clearly. You have to to and fro between them. You have 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 and things like that.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
You need imaginal practices where you're engaging your imagination, not... for entertainment, but you're doing that serious play that allows you to taste what it might be like to be somebody other than who you currently are and how you might identify with that. And those are very important practices. So dialogical practices, we have a Oh, let me give you an example of an imaginal practice.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Lectio Divina, which is reading a text in an imaginal fashion. You're not just reading it to get information. 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Take a different way of taking perspectives you haven't taken before and taste what the transformation 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 child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. And you're doing this imaginal work. in order to try and undergo a transformation.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
That's a kind of imaginal practice, Lectio Divina. You wanna do dialogical practices. We have a whole bunch. We've been teaching on the Awaken to Meaning platform where you can go now and there's a whole website where you can do all of the practices You can take courses. There's drop-in things. My good friend, Taylor Barrett.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
By the way, that is now running autonomously separate from John Dravicki. I get nothing from that other than the satisfaction of knowing that some of my ideas have been put into practice. And Taylor's a good friend of mine.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And so we have what a practice called dialectic into dialogos, which is how can two people enter into this mutual midwifing, this fellowship where 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 three or four people?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 because they take on a life of our own and they take us to places we didn't think we could go to. And 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. those kinds of practices.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
We're just putting the final touches on a practice we've been working on, cultivating, developing for the past year or so, 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
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
with the help of other people's set of transformations on your perspective and also on your sense of identity, so that you can go from it being your personal problem, which is just yours, to an existential dilemma that is probably shared with many people.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And the psychological model is missing all that. The second one is The psychological model, and this is ironic because it's talking a lot about connectedness, but it doesn't talk about the connectedness. What I mean by that is it only talks about the individual agent's attitudes. It doesn't talk about how the world is showing up for them. So let me give you an example of how this can go wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 that you bring that back into and transform your personal problem. We're doing things like that.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Well, the book is only part one. There's part two coming out, which is the second half. That'll have even more revisions in it because all the scientific work on relevance realization has gone through a lot of revision and collaboration with other people, publishing papers like this year and stuff like that. The next thing is... Well, I've got a bunch of books coming out.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I've got a book, well, I'm working on Einstein and Spinoza's God, and then a book called Reimagining Religion. And then a book by Greg Enriquez. We've got a lot of that written on consciousness that's coming out. The big project is the Philosophical Silk Road, which is going to be my next big multimedia endeavor. It's going to be sort of at four levels of presentation. One is
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Well, it's based on this thesis. This is what's next. I made a fundamental mistake in Awakening for the Meaning Crisis. I thought 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 throughout. So I fell prey to a very serious performative contradiction.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
But consonant with that is 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... Sense-making dimension, this is often talked about as sort of coherence in the meaning in life literature. It's your world. Is your sense-making making sense to you, is how I sometimes put it.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Because I realized, like that example of the living conversation, 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 fount of rejuvenating meaning that is deeply transformative of individuals and communities. But what's happening is,
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And what I've seen since all of the connections that were formed by awakening from the main crisis is communities around the world and things happening in academic, cognitive science and philosophy and psychology 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... I'll be Hegel here for a second.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 want to do this. In fact, it's not I want to do this. I feel called to do this. One of the things I'm going to do is I want to try and teach by undergoing a pilgrimage.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I want to 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 want to talk about, right,
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
You can ask somebody, you know, how And you ask them the standard sort of questions on meaning of life. And they have friends and they have family and they have work projects. So their life is pretty meaningful, above average. But you ask them, 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?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I want to talk about Maximus the Confessor or Nicholas of Cusa, and I'm going to go there, or Clement of Alexandria or Suravardi the Sufi, right? I'm going to go there, and I'm going to walk and talk and live and really undergo and try and make myself vulnerable to hearing these people. I'm going to go to India with all of the Vedanta and everything wrapped around it.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And Vedanta is like wrapped with Tantra and Jainism and original Buddhism. And then, I want to go to Japan because there's Zen, because Zen integrates Buddhism and Taoism and Shinto and get all three of these.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 traditions where we could really deeply talk to each other and people can travel and transform and maybe return and recover their home or... Travel and Find a New Home. That's going to be the upper level.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Then below that is going to be a lecture series, like Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, where I go through each one of these thinkers and explain them in great detail. And then below that is going to be specific video essays on more technical topics, like comparing the non-duality in Vedanta to the non-duality in in Zen, for example, or Neoplatonism.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 Wikipedia of it where there's, and it's being written at multiple levels of accessibility. Somebody in grade 10, completed high school, you know, all these levels.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
There's cross-referencing, there's diagrams, there's practices you can undertake to get a deeper understanding of the concepts. And so there's going to be these four tiers, and there's going to be like a narrative structure and an argumentative structure, right, and a reflective structure. It's going to be this.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And the hope is that that—and that a lot of the teaching will not go just in what I'm saying, but what I'm undergoing and how I'm being transformed. There's going to be people that are going to travel with me in various places and meet me in various places.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And the hope is to open people up to the advent of the sacred so they can properly orient to receiving it so that we can really transformatively trust each other in the way we need to in order to address the meeting crisis.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I'll always come back and talk to you, Chris. Thank you very much. And thank you for allowing me to shamelessly plug my new book, which I really appreciate.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Is the world presenting itself with a lot of beauty and depth to you? And you'll get no. You'll get people saying exactly the opposite. And see... And then if you ask people, is your meeting in life actually bringing you a lot of peace? Is it really integrating you well as a person? Is it reciprocally opening you to reality? It's a no, no.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 there's a famine of people being able to get into the flow state and able to have that basic trust and forgiveness with others, fellowship, and a sense of faithfulness is massively diminishing.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I just saw a report that...
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And so I think the meaning in 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 Rosa calls this relationship that is so centrally lacking in most of our life.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Does your meaning in 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? That's resonance. And then resonance also needs to be transmuted into reverence.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Because that's the judge behind everything else that we're evaluating. So sorry, that was a long question.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
The sense-making is what you're doing sort of automatically, and when you reflect on it, you go, yeah, that makes sense. My world isn't absurd or things like that. And then, um, we need to feel connected to other people because most of our, um, problem solving, uh, is done via other people.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I think that's important. I think that is the thing that's quintessentially missing from the psychological construct. That's the sort of ultimate norm within the normative dimension. Because you can undermine any of these relationships that are giving people meaning, and life can be immediately undermined if there's a sense of betrayal or that that was an illusion or they were being deceived.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
So there's a standard one I use. So, and I've done this multiple, multiple times and it's never failed to work. So it's not quite a scientific study, but it's pretty good. So I asked 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
idolatry sort of gets forgot and culture and virtue. You're supposed to find the one and they're supposed to do everything and you're supposed to transcend yourself and find familiar fulfillment. Which of course leads to the weird thing that people value romantic relationships sort of most of all right now, except maybe with their kids.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Yet romantic relationships are the source of most suffering and a lot of mental health disorders. Um, and so that tells you where 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 cultures tells you, this is where it is at. This is where you find it.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
I asked them, okay, how many of you are in such really satisfying or magical? And they put up their hands. They 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.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
But for those of you who put up your hands, how many of you would want to know 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?
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 postmodern nihilism and everything and all this sort of stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 in life for them. That's the example of what I mean.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 so our superpowers, we can coordinate together, um, and, uh, And train some of those dogs and sharpen some of those sticks and then kill anything on the planet. And so we need to be connected to other people.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
Nozick, Robert Nozick.
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
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 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 to break through the wall um and and 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
Modern Wisdom
#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life
And the villain, of course, Cypher, which means a symbol without any depth, he wants to go back to the Matrix. And we know that's why he's a villainous person, because he's betraying the commitment to reality and to his own humanity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think the metanarrative isn't self-sacrifice. I think it's sacrifice in service of getting to what is most real.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Totally. Because you're negotiating, which is this combination of of navigation and narration. You're tracking, which is navigation, and then you're keeping track of your tracking, which is what narration is. This is the theory of how narration probably works.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So I want to say two things about two of your main points. The first is I want to explore conscience because... I mean, there is conscience that I think is the call to something higher, but I think there's also conscience that can be pathological because it's the internalized voice of authority figures who have punished us or who have traumatized us. That's like the harsh Freudian superego.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, I tend to have a sadistic superego. Right. So there's that. And then the other thing you said about self-sacrifice, but you said something that maybe qualified it because this is a qualification I would make. I think the metanarrative, I'll challenge you. I think the metanarrative isn't self-sacrifice. I think it's sacrifice in service of getting to what is most real.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I agree, but what I'm scanning at is I think what, perhaps, I guess, because we're talking about conscience, and conscience is a normative self-knowing, knowing yourself normatively rather than descriptively, right? That's what conscience is. Okay, why normatively? Because, as you said, what you're doing is you're knowing yourself through a normative lens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
What is true, what is good, what is beautiful. So it's con-science, knowing of yourself, but what you're doing is you're reflecting on yourself through a normative lens.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Well, this is what I wanted to—I agree. And what I would say there is that—but that's the normative. But that's showing up in perspective-taking as opposed to rule-following. What you're doing is you're doing that, like Jordan P. said, I'll have to do Jordan P. and Jordan H. The dance, right? The dance of the perspective-taking. Yeah. So when I mean normative, I don't mean like a Kantian code.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I mean the very sort of sets of constraints that you put on yourself so that you shape your behavior according to what you're trying to get at what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful. That's what I meant by normative. So why normative then rather than ideal? Because I, okay, so I use ideal in a technical sense, which might be valuable to us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So John Keeks makes a distinction between goals which are states you can realize and ideals, which are constraints that you bind yourself to. So for example, like a clear goal state when I'm thirsty is to drink water, but honesty isn't a state I get to, right? It's a constraint I'm putting on all of my behavior for the rest of my life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So he calls those, he says, and one of the mistakes we can make is we can confuse
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
goals and ideals ideals are ways of being and goals are states so an ideal is like a meta goal is that a reasonable but then where does normative fall into that so normative what normativity is is normativity are use that language normativity are ideals ways in which we constrain our behavior so that we can shape it so that we can get in contact with within and without with
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I would argue with what is most real. That is Plato's proposal. That's what is ultimately we're driving for. It's a grand act of optimal realization.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, so social norms are supposed to be justified by their appeal to what you might call ethical norms. But The approximations of the ideal? Yeah, but I don't like the doing that because normativity for me, ethics is too limited a sense of normativity. It's about the right thing to do. It doesn't cover everything that's covered by trying to make your thoughts as true as possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Trying to make your experiences as tracking as what is beautiful as possible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think this is very close to the point I wanted to make, was that for me, the normative, it doesn't just encompass the moral. Because, for example, for you to get the common thing between Jordan and I, you have to get, first of all, a shared meaning structure. Yes. And I don't mean just semantic meaning. I mean... Embodied. Embodied meaning.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right. And so you could think of a life... right, that is very ethical and yet is quite meaningless. Somebody who is leading a very, these are tropes in literature, the person who is very honest and very kind, but is lonely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, so the reason why I think of normativity as a broader notion is it includes this idea of connectedness to what's real, meaning that I think is actually more foundational than our moral decisions. Our moral decisions, I think, are ultimately regulated by what we find meaningly most real. I think that's what ultimately orients us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Because you need some touchstone that tells you, well, how do I know when this is true? How do I know when this is good?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Because I think what we're talking about is, the metaphor is contact with reality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
There's two points. It's contact and comparison. So think about this. Our judgments of realness are, right? This is from Spinoza, basically. Think about when you're waking up. You're in this small world and you're in the dream, right? And then you wake up to a bigger world. And from that bigger world, you can see the limitations and the biases of the smaller world.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And you judge the bigger world to be more real than... This is what people mean when they want to be connected to something larger than themselves. That's more real.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Of course it is. Of course it is. And then... But how do they know that that's the case? Well, they know it's the case because they make a contrasted comparison. So... Notice that I used the length of the stick to explain the length of the shadow and not the length of the shadow to explain the length of the stick. One thing explains the other.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
One is a source of intelligibility for the other and it's not reversed. So we judge things in terms of a comparative contrast of increased realness. And that is a matter of, you have to do this, you have to transform. That's what you were saying earlier, Jordan. You have to transform. You have to wake up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Ultimately, the truths are not truths that you can get to without having undergone transformation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think it's the axiomatic assumptions, but I think it's woven with, I don't know if you'll allow me to extend it, axiomatic skills, axiomatic states of mind. Yes. Paradigmatic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's right. There's paradigmatic.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's right. Right. Absolutely. The touchstone is I want to be in contact. I want to do this comparative reflective thing that makes me aware of the inexhaustible intelligibility, that which is most real. So compare a real object to a dream object. The dream object – Like, you could do some Jungian analysis, but the number of properties are limited.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You get the real object, and think about the number of, the amount of information I can extract just from this thing here. That's what makes it real. It's this inexhaustible realness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Right, and I think that, well, I think you have a fount of inexhaustible intelligibility, and I think that is ultimately the touchstone. It's the sense of contact, and it gives us the comparative reflective judgment of what is most real.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Origin.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, I think it's not power. I think it's this, like love, beauty, reason, play are all what Frankfurt calls voluntary necessities. They're compelling, but they're not compulsive. We say, I would do no other, but I feel totally free in doing it. So when you read a good argument and you come to the conclusion, you go, yeah, I get that. But you don't feel like you've been bludgeoned into it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception. So if at the heart of evil is self-destruction, why would any system destroy itself?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think it's the definition of the genus that play belongs to. Nice. Okay, okay. And I think they're all ways of tracking. I'm proposing the alternative to power. Yeah. Which is to come into contact with reality is there is an element of we have to exert some control. And this is the notion of resonance. Think about the moments when you feel called.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You come around the corner as you're tracking through the wilderness and unexpectedly, uncontrollably, there's the sunset that's beautiful. And you enter into a moment of resonance and you feel that you're in contact with something more real. See, reality has to have an element that exceeds us, that is beyond us. And we have to have a responsivity to it, a faithful openness to it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Who's that? Gibson.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, I think, I agree. I think the... If reality, if the experience of realness is the experience of inexhaustible intelligibility, the inexhaustibility points to the fact that we cannot make it determinatively intelligible. We can't fully grasp it. I think that's the ineffable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And I think what that does is, and this is what my proposal, what I think existential conscience is, as opposed to pathological psychological conscience. Existential conscience is to realize our correct attitude, our correct comportment towards the fact that reality shines in intelligibly, but it also withdraws in mystery. And I think that, and this is Plato's central argument, which I just...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Sorry, I had a really sort of powerful realization that this is... I finally understood what Augustine meant when he said that Christianity was the continuity, the continuum, or even the completion of Greek philosophy. The correct comportment Plato talked about was finite transcendence. You have to hold like this tonos, like the tension of the bow.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You have to hold that we are simultaneously finite and transcendent. We are finite in that we are capable of failure and sin and decadence. But if you just identify with that, you fall prey to despair and you become servile and manipulatable. You have to remember your transcendence. You're capable of orienting towards the true and the good and the beautiful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
But if we identify just with our capacity for transcendence, we fall prey to hubris and then we become tyrants over others. We have to hold the two together. And I think existential conscience is the call to constantly re-inhabit and re-identify with holding both remembering, that reciprocal remembering of your... Finite and your transcendence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And I think the incarnation and the crucifixion are the enactment of finite transcendence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, you don't have to point that out to me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
acceptance of that finitude is not merely acceptance of mortality it's also grappling with the reality of evil i agree i agree i think and and and first of all i'll i'll say something i want to be quiet because i want you to talk more uh um because i value what you have to say um I think Whitehead, he said, you know, the defining, the central thing of evil is self-destructiveness.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And so I see evil, there's malevolent evil, of course, but I think evil gets its home in the fact that we are all prey to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. And I think that's how transcendence offers us a response to our finitude, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think you need both. I mean, I find both. I find the temptations of despair and the temptations of hubris are constant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And you're gifted at that. There's lots to be said for listening. I'm also aware of the fact that there's an opportunity here for you. Sometimes I say things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So my response to the situation that you were describing with the architect, what I do, what I've learned to do is I ask the source of the normativity of the judgment that's being rendered against me. The voice is saying, whoa, that's not real. Okay, tell me what real is then. Tell me what your standard of realness is. I get it to commit to a normativity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And then once it commits to a normativity, then I can bind it to what I was talking about earlier.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think so. I don't know if that's the point I was making. Oh, okay. No, let's not lose that point. It's a good point. Let's put a pin in that point. The point I was trying to make is the pathological conscience isn't consistent about normativity. What it does is constantly invokes normativity that it refuses to submit itself to. Okay, so it's not playing by its own rules.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
It's not playing by its own rules. Is it incoherent? It is, and this goes towards Whitehead's idea. I find that which in it, which is ultimately self-destructive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
It is, and so what I've learned to do is to challenge that and say, in addition to whatever pain it might be inflicting, and pain can be born if you understand it, right? Yeah, it can be salutary as well if it's appropriate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
What conscience gets is the claim, often implicit, that there's an authority behind the pain, that the source of the pain has the right to inflict pain on you because it has an authority, because it's speaking according to some standard that you should be following. And what I try and do is get it to tell me what that standard is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And very often that I can then bind it to, wow, the thing you said, well, what's the point of this? Well, give me a clear example of something that has a point. Voice, if this is pointless, give me a clear example of something that has a point. Because if your point is that nothing has a point, you are engaged in self-destruction. Because there's no point in me paying attention to you either.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So what is something that actually has a point, voice? And then it will, if it's genuine conscience, if it's calling me to finite transcendence, it'll say, blah. And it'll call me to a virtue. If it's this pathological thing, it will start to thrash. It'll start to flounder because it will realize that... It doesn't have an up. It doesn't have something that it can actually bind me to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
It can inflict pain on me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So that's my personal answer to your question. But that therapeutic intervention, if I can call it that, is coupled to the philosophical reflection that finite transcendence is what I am most called to identify with. That is what I am. That is what my humanity is, is to hold together, reciprocally remember and recognize my finitude and my transcendence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah. The person, like, oh, it's all meaningless. It's like, well, you feel the call to speak that because you are actually committed to the truth. You find the truth intrinsically valuable. So your actions are based on you holding things to be intrinsically valuable, which you actually, is in contradiction to what you're actually saying. Right, right. Right? This is the Socratic move.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
It's a point of non-contradiction. Well, but then the point is if they're trying to, I mean, if they're just being violent, that's the idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if they're trying to be coherent. Right, if they're trying to persuade me, then I can appeal to the normativity that is intrinsic to any act of persuasion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So cognitively, I would say... Yeah, this is right. There is no self-transcendence, which is a form of self-correction, unless there is a deep... And I don't just mean propositional. I mean a deep... ownership and responsibility to one's capacity for self-deception.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, well, okay, so why bring in the theme of self-deception? Because I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception. So at the heart of evil is self-destruction. Why would any system destroy itself? I mean, this is a platonic argument. I think at the heart of it is self-deception. I mean, this is, to use a Christian source, this is the epistle of John.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
We are prone to self-deception, and that's what keeps us from the love of God. in a profound way. What's the motivation for the self-deception?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Here's a specific, sorry, I'll use my name as an adjective, Vervakian proposal, that the very processes that make us intelligently adaptive, relevance realization, which means we have to frame, we have to ignore, we have to prioritize, we have to orient, are also the processes that make us prone to self-deception because we might be- Because we can lie. Think of sin. We miss our aim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, I agree.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I think even animals... I agree they don't lie. I think lying requires a reflective commitment to the truth of what you state. But I think animals can deceive themselves because they can be deceived. So one organism can mislead. Like chimps do this to each other all the time. And my capacity to deceive you is dependent on your capacity for self-deception. Okay, fair enough.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, it has crossed multiple times.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, it's omission. That's what I was just saying. Yeah, exactly. I omit. So I think- Yeah, I fail to explore.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So it's an omission of insight. So think about the insight. Yeah. I thought he was angry, but it turns out he's afraid. That's an insight. And I realize that I have oriented the wrong way. Right, now I have to reconfigure. Right, right. But think about certain egocentric bias or proclivities or whatever that makes me the opposite of prone to insight that makes me resistant to insight.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And what we do is, I think there's an omission. We make ourselves resistant to insights that we might have intimations of.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And you just made Iris Murdoch's argument in The Sovereignty of the Good. She talks about the example of the mother-in-law who has this attitude towards her daughter-in-law. She's coarse. Yeah. And then she realizes, oh, she's not coarse. She's authentic. She's not rude. She's spontaneous. And then she does the thing you just did. And then she thinks, oh, but maybe this isn't an isolated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Maybe there's a systematicity. Think Piaget. Maybe there's a systematicity to my error. And then she faces the choice. The choice is, do I change in order to properly address that systematicity?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's that descent into chaos. Well, you see that in insight. Entropy goes up first before you get the reduction.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So it's been demonstrated the work of Stefan and Dixon. It's very complicated, but what you can do is you can use sort of state space math to translate like where somebody's looking or pointing a finger into like a measure of the entropy of the cognitive processes that are producing the orientation. The math is well established.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So excess neural activation, is that associated with that increase in entropy? It depends because that's hard to measure, right? Because it could be, you know, it could be excitation or inhibition. And so you can't just track, right? And so, but what you get is you get a significant increase in entropy and then you get with the insight the decrease.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I'm going to bet it'll look a lot like what we saw on Twitter around the H1B thing for the past three days, if you were able to measure. Yeah. That's interesting, because I've been toying with that idea, Jordan, of being able to see the insight mechanics in distributed cognition, not just in individual cognition. Absolutely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I want to pick up on the humility thing. Yeah. So... One of the things Kaplan and Simon found that was predictive of insight is a thing they called the notice invariance heuristic, which is what you have to do when you need an insight. So the advice we give people isn't actually the best advice. Think of previous instances where you solved an analogous problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's actually not the best because what you need is you need to think of previous instances where you failed to solve the problem. Now, why? Yeah, yeah, good. That's exact. Because what you do is you look for what you have failed to change, what you kept invariant across all your failures. And that's the thing you should probably change in your current situation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
I just want to make one point. I think humility is the virtue of identifying with finite transcendence. Humility is not despair and it's not hubris. Humility is a confidence in a recognition of a reality that transcends you, but a confidence that you can nevertheless address it. You can be in contact with it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's your metagame argument.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So you do this, you do this, you know, by asking, you can even do this with like individually. The Solomon Paradox, Igor Grossman's work. Somebody, get them to describe a problem they can't solve. They will inevitably describe it from the first person perspective. Ask them to re-describe it from the perspective of a friend or somebody who knows them well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And when they re-describe it from a perspective other than their own, they'll often get an insight into that because it breaks them out of the fact that they're... That's interesting because you may know that there's no difference between being self-conscious and being in a state of negative emotion, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Throw an insight, too.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Okay. I will. I'll throw an insight, too. So, I think this goes back to, there seems to be evidence that dating is... Questionable, somewhere between 120,000, 70,000 BCE. We're facing, it looks like, the possible end of the species. It's under tremendous pressure. It's bottlenecking. And it looks like the innovation that we happened upon, again,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
you have to be careful because the evidence is very undetermined when you're talking about prehistory, but was expanded trade networks, where not only trade of good, but trade of information. So what seems to have happened is human beings figured out if they could
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
create larger networks of information gathering and good distribution, they could deal with what looks like... Probably there might have been challenges to the food supply. We don't know. Now, the problem with that, though, the problem with that is... Okay. How do you do that? How do you actually, like, you can't make it teleological. Well, we need to set up trade networks. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And so one of the proposals, which I find very powerful and interesting, is that you need individuals who are capable of being liminal and willing to undergo significant self-transformation and move between worlds. And so you get the proposal of the invention, notice I'm doing it this way, of shamanism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That what the shaman is good at is the shaman is good at actually mediating between different perspectives and different groups. And what the shaman starts to do is you start to create- Right, well, he is a border dweller. That's right, he's a border dweller.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, and he can move between communities and he can negotiate it. And he can also deal with any of ways in which the foreigner has introduced social disharmony to the group because that's one of his or her skills too, right? But what the shaman has to do, right, is the shaman has to somehow translate their capacity for, like,
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
this cognitive flexibility into something that can be learned by other people. And the proposal is that we get the invention of important sets of rituals, that you get the invention of something perhaps even like the handshake.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
which is a ritual which is designed to try and speed up the process by which you and I, who are strangers, might be able to recognize each other as at least potentially trustworthy. So you have outward-facing rituals like that, and then you have inward-facing rituals of initiation. Like, okay, we have to tighten our identity, so we...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
In order to be willing to interact with them, we have to know clearly better who we are. And so you get the initiation rituals, you have interaction rituals, and then in connection with that, you have rituals that have to do with enhancing the cognitive flexibility that makes that kind of ritual possible. Now, here's the connection. Ritual is play, right? It is a profound kind of play.
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Because what I'm doing in ritual is I'm engaging the imaginal. So the Corbin's distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal. So the imaginary is when I picture things in my mind and I'm taking myself away from reality. The imaginal is when a child is playing at being Superman. They're not picturing Superman. What's it like to look at the world like Superman?
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
What is it like to try out this identity? That's what a ritual is. A ritual is a way of what's it like, play, serious play. What's it like to look at this person as, although they're a stranger, they're trustworthy. What's it like to be a person that can enter into recognition with you?
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So I think hospitality is a name for a set of rituals that were invented and discovered to deal with this problem of how do we expand our networks, right?
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
When was this published? October it came out.
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yeah, I mean, so I've actually been doing a lot of work around that right now. with respect to what I call perspectival knowing, knowing what it's like and being able to take a perspective and some sort of a confluence of things. I mean, first of all, we are talking about basic relevance realization, like what do we ignore, what do we pay attention to?
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And then within that, I think what you're talking about is there's three interlinked things. There's origin, orientation, and ostention. Origin is where am I? And this is very much the vertical dimension, right? It's where am I? Who am I? What kind of thing am I? Where am I in the environment? Think about it very concretely. You're lost, you first have to, where's your origin, where am I?
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Then once you have your origin, you do orientation. And orientation is kind of like this. Here's the proposal. So, we've talked before about Marlon Ponti's idea that relevance realization cashes out an optimal grip. Getting the right trade-off relations between being too close, too far away, too loose, too tight. You're constantly doing that. Now, I'll use an analogy.
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
When I'm sparring, I take a stance. I don't actually fight with that stance. That stance doesn't, you don't do anything with it. The point of the stance is to get me sort of at this nexus place so that I got the best access to all the specific optimal grips.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You're right.
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
So orientation is this stance taking. So this is my stance.
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
Yes. Right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
The orientation, the origin has, there's a technical term called indexicality, which is like me here now. That's what you're trying to find. Who am I? What state am I in? Where am I? Where am I actually standing? It happens when you wake up. Right. So you have your standing, and then you have your stance, and then you have a stare, which is you stand, you point, right?
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532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
And then all of those are what they're doing is they're configuring a perspective. what is being foregrounded, what is being backgrounded. Yeah, right. And then now you can begin to do... And that's a world creation. But it's what you said. It's like, it's what Hartmut Rosa calls, you're looking for moments of resonance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
You're looking for moments where, right, you are directing yourself to the world, but the world also, as you said, is calling to you. You say, oh, there is a way I can... It calls out to you, right? And so if you're optimally oriented, you're both controlling, you're finding that sweet spot between control and responsibility.