American Thought Leaders - How to Recover From the ‘Crisis of Meaning’ in the West: John Vervaeke

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“People don’t know where to go to cultivate wisdom. I will ask my students: ‘Where do you go for information?’ They‘ll hold up their cell phones right away. ‘Where do you go for knowledge?’ And they’re ... a little bit more suspicious. They’ll say, ‘Well, the university, science …’ and then I'll say, ‘And where do you go for wisdom?’ And they don’t have an answer.”John Vervaeke is a professor of cognitive science and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He is the creator of the internationally acclaimed lecture series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.”“There’s no possibility of truth without trust,” he says.Mr. Vervaeke’s work merges science and spirituality, and reaches into the past to understand the history of ideas. He has developed a set of practices to cultivate insight in the quest to regain meaning.“On social media, you have connections, but you don’t have actual social relationships with people. So people pile up the number of connections they have, but they’re not actually connected,” says Mr. Vervaeke. “The deepest truths are not accessed by us. They don’t get disclosed by us unless we’re willing to go through transformation, and unless we’re willing to grow our personhood.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

People don't know where to go to cultivate wisdom. I will ask my students, where do you go for information? They'll hold up their cell phones right away. Where do you go for knowledge? And they're sort of a little bit more suspicious. They'll say, well, the university of science. And then I'll say, and where do you go for wisdom? And they don't have an answer.

John Vervaeke is a professor of cognitive science and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He's the creator of the internationally acclaimed lecture series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. There's no possibility of truth without trust. Rewicki's work merges science and spirituality and reaches into the past to understand the history of ideas. He has developed a set of practices to cultivate insight in the quest to regain meaning.

The deepest truths are not accessed by us unless we're willing to grow our personhood. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year. And Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is telling Americans to brace themselves for potentially more pain ahead. But there is one way to hedge against inflation. American Hartford Gold makes it simple and easy to diversify your savings and retirement

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John Vervaeke, it's such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders here at Dissident Dialogues. Thank you, Jan. It's a great pleasure to be here. Well, you know, I've been following your work. You've, of course, been looking at the meaning crisis. I think you actually coined the term, and it's been making its way into our overall cultural zeitgeist, which is, I think, incredibly important. But let's start here. Why are we so obsessed with zombies? So I think the work that I did with my two co-authors in the book we wrote, my two co-authors are Christopher Mastropietro and Philip Misovic.

We wrote the book on zombies. We were basically arguing that the zombie is a new myth. And it's not that old. It's one of the rare new myths of the 20th century. And we argued that the zombie actually portrays, exemplifies the meaning crisis. If you think about the zombie, they lack a sense of meaning, but they're hungry

for the organ that makes meaning. They like to eat brains, which is really weird, right? They move around, but they have no purpose. They have no goal. They drift. They hang out in groups, but there's no community, right? And they're driven by this sort of insatiable need to consume that nevertheless never satisfies them. And so we thought, wow, why is this myth speaking to so many people, and why do they want all these shows and movies, and why do people go on zombie walks? And it's like, oh, because this is touching a nerve.

It's doing what all great myth does. It gives people an image to take something that's otherwise incchoate in their experience and put it in front of them so they can look at it and go, yeah, yeah, that's what's happening right now. I find it deeply disturbing that this is the case. Because if this apparition, if these monsters really exemplify how we in this manifestation of Western cultures somehow imagine ourselves or somehow it speaks to our culture today, this is obviously highly problematic. So there's a couple of times in The Walking Dead where they very famously say, we are The Walking Dead where they very famously say, we are the walking dead.

Because the idea is the zombies are just, you know, us, decayed and fallen apart and drifting and homeless. They're not like vampires and werewolves, right? They're us. The fact that we are now seeing ourselves through this image is very symptomatic of a lot of things that are happening for people. We've got this sort of spike in areas of affluence among the younger generation in suicide. And the age at which people are committing suicide is dropping into childhood. We've got a mental health crisis that seems to be just spinning out of control. We have a loneliness epidemic that is getting worse and worse, measurably, decade by decade. The number of close friends people have is going down each decade, and on and on and on and on. I can give you more

and more symptoms. We are losing a way of being in the world that supports human flourishing. And you can see all the symptoms of there's something going on that is putting us tremendously under stress. And the very fabrics by which we understand ourselves and each other in the world seems to be falling apart. One of the things that I've become aware of through the pandemic time is how callous people in power can be in some ways with other people's lives. The work of Porteus and Smith, we made use of this in the book, this notion of domicile, which is the killing of home, that people feel they don't have home. And one of the symptoms of domicile is that people feel that they are becoming increasingly distant and disenfranchised from the people, the power holders. And so if more and more people feel that they have less and less connection impact on the political system, the corporate system, the legal system. So the loneliness isn't just personal loneliness.

It's this kind of cultural loneliness, this profound sense that it doesn't matter if I'm here or not, because I make no difference and nobody cares. Right. And so I think it was really surprising. A lot of people thought I made Awakening from the Meaning Crisis during the pandemic. I made it three, two years before the pandemic. Right. And people like, what? Because one of the things the pandemic did was just show how much domicile people really have. When the busyness and distraction was removed and people were thrown back onto themselves and their own life, many of them panicked or went into despair or relationships fell apart. It was very destructive precisely because the pandemic just exemplified and magnified the meaning crisis. You're right,

the people in power in no way took this at all into consideration. The policies magnified it. We took one thing, sort of physiological health, and we made it paramount at the expense of everything else, which is a hallmark of the loss of rationality. A rational person understands that relationship is made of these inevitable, complex, nuanced, dynamical trade-offs. We're now seeing that there's this long-term negative consequences across many dimensions of people's lives that have

been negatively affected by the way the policies were imposed and the way they were communicated. People were not given a sense of participating in this. They were just mandated what to do. Let's come back to the meaning crisis. They were just mandated what to do. Let's come back to the meaning crisis. Some people describe—I think the term is there was a religion-sized hole left in people's hearts as we became a more secularized society. That might not be the whole story. I know it isn't because I've been reading a bit of your work, but that's part of it. Yes. I know it isn't because I've been reading a bit of your work, right? But that's part of it. Yes.

Right? I think it's a big part of it. Right. So we're using this term meaning and we're using a metaphor. We're saying there's something about the way our lives, our experience is organized that is like the way a sentence is organized and means something about the world. Like if I say there's a cat over there, the sentence has a meaning and it connects you to that situation so that you can determine what's real in that situation, whether or not it's true or false. And we say, oh, there's something about our lives that has that connectedness.

That's what it turns out people are talking about when they're talking about meaning life is this sense of, well, there's a coherence to my life. My life hangs together in such a way that I feel that I'm deeply connected to myself, to other people, and the world. Now, the thing about that is human cognition is so dynamic and complex. The processes that make that connectedness possible also make us perennially prone to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. So we need practices, and not just one practice.

There's no panacea practice. We need a whole living system. I sometimes call it like an ecology of practices for ameliorating this self-deceptiveness. I'll use an older term, the foolishness of our lives, and enhancing the connectedness, the flourishing. We need a way of cultivating wisdom. And the problem is that for a very long time, the places that were like the gardeners,

the tenders of these ecologies and practices and homed them and gave them an overarching justifying worldview were the religions. And as we've lost the religions, for a lot of good reasons by the way, what nevertheless has happened is we lost this baby with the bathwater. We've lost all of these ecologies and practices and a philosophical framework that helps people put it into their lives so people don't know where to go to cultivate wisdom. I will ask my students where do you go for information they'll hold up their cell phones right away. Where do you go for knowledge and they're sort of a little bit more suspicious they'll say well the University of Science and then I'll say and where do you go for wisdom

and they don't have an answer and so so that's the whole, that's the whole. People sense that they're not connected, they're losing touch, they're beset by this self-destruction. I'm going to use this term in a technical sense, like the way the philosopher Frankfurt does. They're beset by bullshit. There's so much bullshit in their lives. There's so much bullshit in the media.

But they don't know how to cut through it. They don't know how to train themselves. They don't know how to connect to other people. So as a group, they can cut through this and get at what's really going on. And so this is not optional. Wisdom isn't optional. So people struggle and they get into weird rabbit holes and they try this and they try that. And so they suffer. They suffer. So the loss of the religious worldview, what Peter Berger calls a sacred canopy, has opened people up to this preventive sense that they're beset by they know not what, and they got a sense that something needs to be done, something's wrong, but they know not what it is, and they know not how to address it.

You know, you're just reminding me of something that you articulate, which I thought was really interesting. The distinction between lying and BS, as you say. Now, it's very interesting because lying, it turns out, is a lot simpler to deal with. But explain this to me. Yeah. So this is deeply influenced by the work of Frankfurt. He wrote the famous book essay on bullshit. The liar is depending on your commitment to the truth. So if you believe something to be true, that will affect your behavior. So the liar tries to get you to believe something that isn't true by the very fact that you're committed to pursuing what you believe to be true. They will manipulate your behavior. That's very, very clear. Now, the thing is, we have this metaphor,

well, that person's lying to themselves. Well, you can't really do that. You can't really say to yourself, hey, you know, believe this, even though it's not true. That's not how belief works. Belief isn't a voluntary act that way. But the bullshit artist, the bullshit artist isn't trying to manipulate you in terms of your commitment to the truth. The bullshit artist is trying to get you to be disinterested

in whether or not what's being said is true. They're trying to sort of unplug you from your commitment to the truth and plug you into what is something else that motivates your behavior. And that's how salient something is, how much it stands out, how catchy it is, how much it grabs your attention. This is how advertising works. You watch a shampoo commercial. This person is using the shampoo. For some reason, they're in this beautiful botanical situation and the sun is shining and they're happy. You know that's not true. You know it's not true. And they know you know that's not true you know it's not true and they know you know it's not true and it doesn't matter because they have made this wonderful emotional association with the product that makes it salient so when you go into the store without realizing it it jumps off the shelf at you and you buy the

shampoo and this is what bullshit is it disconnects you from the truth. And this is what bullshit is. It disconnects you from the truth and gets you caught up. This is why our social media is all about clickbait. It's all about salience. It's all about getting you not caring about the truth. And here's the important thing, Jan. You can't lie to yourself, but you can bullshit yourself. Because I can make something salient just by giving it my attention. And then my memory will remember that that was salient for me just because I paid attention to it. And so when I'm looking around, I'll be drawn back to that.

And then it becomes more salient for me again. And then I get looped in, and I slowly, slowly start to forget that there's other alternatives. There's other things to look at. I find what you're saying very moving. I mean, in a, again, very disturbing way because it just struck me what a cesspool of BS we are stewing in. I mean, we are constantly assaulting.

In fact, the whole project of information right now seems to be to push as much BS into the system as possible. It is very easy, if I can get you to stop caring about bringing careful, reflective attention and, you know, dialogical conversation and thought about whether or not something is true and instead get you, hey, look at how shiny that is. Look at how fast it is. Look at how, look at the rhythm. Look at the beat. Look at how much it's catching your attention. It is so much easier, faster, and effective to manipulate you and control you. And then the problem is you start to do that with other people because the only way you can get their attention in a market or a world that is

beset by BS is by really pumping up the salience. I know this. I'm on YouTube and I'm constantly struggling with, okay, you have to make this accessible. You have to get people's attention. But it's like, yeah, but I don't want to do that at the expense of calling them to the careful attention and reflection that is needed for the pursuit of truth. So you said something very profound just now. And I know this is, of course,

central to your thinking as well. You mentioned this idea of a dialogical conversation. I'm going to get you to explain that to me in some detail. But the bottom line is that it's a relationship. It's a relationship that's forming. What you're talking about here is the absence of that relationship. It's like a mirage of a relationship with these sort of quick click. It's like on social media where you have connections, but you don't have actual social relationships with people. So people pile up the number of connections they have, but they're not actually connected with.

Well, so this idea of a dialogical conversation, I mean, earlier today we were at a small private event, and you talked about how that is central to the process of real education, right? And so explain, and dialogical, explain to me exactly what that means. Yeah, and I mean, this goes towards the heart of education and also towards the heart of how democracy is supposed to work. And when this gets undermined, both education and democracy get seriously undermined. So here's the basic idea and there's lots of scientific evidence for this and it's mounting. So have you ever noticed that if your friend is doing something sort of foolish you can be so wise you can say hey blah blah blah blah you're doing that thing you do and you're making that

mistake and you ah but when you when it's you that's making the mistake, it's so hard for you to see your bias, right? So when you're outside someone's perspective, it's very easy to see the way that bias is, you know, that perspective is biasing them. But when you're within a perspective, it's very hard to see it. So here's the thing. You are actually my best chance of me correcting my biases. And I am your best chance for you correcting your biases. And what we have to both do is commit to, we're going to trust each other. We're going to entrust ourselves to each other. And we're going to commit to a shared process. Instead of you and I'm right, you're wrong. It's like, I want to get closer to the truth. And so I'm going to pay very careful attention to you on the understanding that you are probably seeing mistakes in my thinking that I can't see.

And all I ask from you is that you do the same for me. And then together, what happens is we enter into this mutually reinforcing, opening up, self-correcting. We move together. we enter into this mutually reinforcing, opening up, self-correcting. We move together. We don't necessarily have to come into agreement, but we can both get to a place closer to the truth than we could get to on our own. That's a real relationship. Yes.

You know, it's very interesting because you're kind of, you know, codifying things which are just kind of natural or should be natural or are so basic to the human experience. But are absent for so many people. And I think leading precisely to all of these terrible statistics that you were citing earlier. Well, that's exactly it. Because remember that meaning in life is actually a sense of connectedness. And I'm trying to get at the sense of the connectedness, not just being a simple, you and I are here and involved in some exchange. It's like, no, no, no, I'm making a commitment to you. You're making a commitment to

me. And we're both making a commitment to the relationship between us. And we're going to say, it is going to take us places that we couldn't get to on our own, and we can't even foresee. Those life-changing conversations that you're in that take on a life of their own and take you beyond. I use a Latin word that is one of the proposed etymological origins for the word religion. It's a religio. It's a connectedness, this living connectedness that really makes us capable together of doing so much more than just exchanging viewpoints or me trying to convince you of mine

and you convince me of yours. Let's put religio off to the side for a moment and talk about religion. Sure. Because the common thing people will say, at least around me, Put religio off to the side for a moment and talk about religion. Sure. Right? Because the common thing people will say, at least around me, is there's this religion-sized hole left in people's hearts. Yeah, God-shaped hole. Yeah, yeah.

Right? So how does that fit in into that very human connection that is central to our experience? Yeah. So, for example, I think, you I think the Christian framework of Western civilization, well, I should say, I would argue it's the Christian platonic framework, but we don't have to get into that. Look at the word dialogue or dialogical. In it is this notion of logos. We get the word logic from it, but we forget the original meaning.

The original meaning is like this living word. It gathers things together so they make sense. So when you and I are gathered together, we're gathered together by a conversation, and it starts to open us up and we're making sense together, that's the logos. But in it is also what Christianity talked about. There's agape. This is not the love of Eros where we want to be one with something by consuming it, or a philia, where friendship or fellowship, where we reciprocate. This is the love you have for a child.

It takes a living creature that can't talk, can't reason, can't drive a car, can't vote, can't learn science, and turns it into a full-fledged cognitive person that has moral rights and responsibilities. And that's agape. And if we are going to genuinely get at the truth, we need logos and we need agape. Here's why. The deepest truths are not accessed by us. They don't get disclosed by us

unless we're willing to go through transformation, unless we're willing to grow our personhood. Think about this. You know, you know, you give agape to the child, right? The four-year-old can't understand Heidegger's philosophy, but if you love them and you do logos with them, they can come to a place where they could understand Heidegger's philosophy.

That's what maturation is. Maturation is a growth through logos and love, agape love, so that deeper and deeper truths become available to you. Maturation is to be able to face. Look at the word face. We don't say see. We don't say grasp. We say face reality.

And so when you lose that religious framework, when you lose religion, when you lose, like, and I think other religions talk about this. I'm just using Christianity as an example because of its prominence in the West. And I keep saying it's also platonic and Socratic. to logos and love and therefore meaning-making, person-making in a coordinated fashion. You lose all of that. And the other machinery that we've tried to put in its place, like education, education eventually loses that because it loses.

We were talking about that earlier today, right? It loses its purpose that our humanity is ultimately grounded in logos and love, and it drifts into ideology and indoctrination and BS. And we turn to the state. Well, the state will do it. And the state goes to—that's what we're doing. All of these things, we try to make them take the place, the functionality of what religion did for us, but they have not succeeded. They fall prey to the very meaning crisis that's at the heart of that hole you're talking about in people's heart.

There's been multiple films over the years which involve someone being raised by a robot nanny or sort of non-human. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, yes. This kind of theme has been coming into cinema and I guess... Yeah. Yeah, and for good reason. I mean, because the potential advent of artificial general intelligence

looks like it might be on the horizon for us. They're already... We're already cyborgs. We're both carrying around these smartphones and we have these tablets. I think the reason I started thinking about this is that those nannies, for lack of a better term, cannot do the agape thing. I would say they can't even do the logos thing. I mean, they're logic machines, and even the sophisticated ones go beyond that. But I won't get into the technicalities of cognitive science right now but what i mean by that is so much of what goes on in making a communication that's got communing

in it where we're not just sending signals we're actually trying to create this living relationship between it that has to do with a lot of the scientific artwork. I talk about relevance realization, and it turns out that that process is not well captured by a lot of these robotic and AI models we have. So I would agree with you. I think these machines don't care, and therefore they're not capable of agape. But that also means they deeply don't care about the truth, and they don't care about being in deep connection, religio, to reality, since they also don't have logos in a deep and profound way. I'll share with you something I was just discussing with a good friend. Please. He reminded me, we were having a conversation as we were up to late night on the phone, And something struck me about the nature of thinking about the world from a Marxist perspective.

All of these cultural derivatives of Marxism, right? The idea is that the dominant or almost like the only real interaction that's happening between us is me trying to exercise power over you or you trying to exercise power over you, or you trying to exercise power over me. And that happens at various scales. And really, all of this high-minded thinking about logos and agape that we're just having right now, all of that is just a subterfuge as a way of you trying to actually manipulate me in some way, right? Because you're so learned on these issues. I'm embellishing here a little bit. No, and of course, that is utter crap. And it's obvious. But what struck me is, okay,

one day as we were talking, I was like, my God, if you really believe that, if you really view the world from this Marxist or Marxian perspective, Isn't that what psychopathy is? Doing things purely in terms of exercising power? Yeah, I would hesitate to sort of tolerate all Marxists with the same brush, but I understand your point. Because I think Marxism and Nazism were examples of pseudo-religious ideologies in which people tried to create ideological systems of belief in a hope that by manipulating belief, you could actually manipulate religio. And of course, what we're seeing is we've got machines now, social media that can manipulate belief way better than any totalitarian state. And we can see that doesn't give people religio. It doesn't. That was the

promise of social media. We were going to all feel so connected. This view, it fails because it thinks that, well, what is primarily driving people is their assertions of their beliefs. And like you say, that the idea that all that's behind this is a power relationship. Now think about, there's a notion called a performative contradiction. A propositional contradiction is when you say two propositions that contradict each other, like this is a square and this is a square. This is not a square at the same time. That's a propositional contradiction. A performative contradiction is when you say something, right, and the place from which you say it is in contradiction to what you're saying. I'll give you a non-controversial example.

I am fast asleep right now. If that sentence is true, I couldn't be in the state to utter it. Yes, I got it. Okay. So, well, I believe that power is all that there is that's going on. Well, there's two things that's going on there. First, you have what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion. There's a cynicism in the modern sense that everything that John is doing to you is actually some, there's a secret agenda behind

it. There's a secret meaning, you know, and you get all that, you get like Freud and Marx and Nietzsche and the hermeneutics of suspicion. The problem with the hermeneutics of suspicion is it can't be fundamental. And I'll get to the otherutics of suspicion is it can't be fundamental. And I'll get to the other point in a sec. It can't be fundamental. Here's why. To say that appearances are distracting or distorting or misleading, you can only say something is an illusion by pointing to something else that is real. Real is a contrastive term. It's like tall. It makes no sense to say everything is tall. You can only say this is tall relative to that. To say this is an illusion is to point to that and say this is an illusion because it fails in comparison to that.

So underneath the hermeneutics of suspicion is a hermeneutics of beauty. Not beauty in the sense of pleasure giving, but beauty in this idea, this ancient idea. Beauty is when appearance discloses reality, when a deeper reality shines through appearance. So that's the first problem with that view, right? You're buying into the hermeneutics of suspicion. The second is, what do you mean by power? Well, I mean the ability to manipulate a person. Oh, so there are really people, and there are really causal factors, and there's really psychology. Oh, so you actually have to commit to a whole bunch of things you think are really true, and that you care about, that matter to you. Do you see what I'm saying?

This person is standing from a place in which being connected to reality is what really matters to them. That's why they want power. And then you say, well, if you really want power because you want to be connected to reality, let's talk about what it is to be connected to reality. And then we're back to religio. And why do things matter to you? And how are you connected to reality? You see what I'm saying? This position is a position that actually undermines itself as the person is enacting it. But it seems to be a powerful, powerful, intoxicating way of thinking about the world. Well, it is. It is. It's super salient because here's the, I don't want to err on the other side. You know, Aristotle, there's errors of excess and there's errors of deficit. Power is one of the ways in which we sense reality. Look, we have different ways of knowing.

And one of our ways of knowing isn't our propositions, our beliefs, our statements, it's our skills, right? I aspire to be a powerful martial artist. Power is an indication when your skills, your sensory motor interactions with the world are working. Power is one of the ways we judge realness, but it's not the only way. We need our propositions to be true. We need our skills to be powerful. We need our perspectives to give us a sense of presence. I'm taking a proper perspective on you if you can come to life within it. And then, of course, there's participatory

knowing. This is the knowing by flowing with reality. I know, but because of the kind of self I am, the kind of agent I am. And that has a different sense of realness. That's the sense of belonging. That's the sense of being with you and being with this table and being with these other people. We have all these senses. Now because power is one of the senses of realness, it has an evolutionary marker on it. It's salient to us. But it's been made salient at the expense of other things that are also real genuine markers of realness. The word trust and truth and troth, like in betrothal, they have the same etymological origin. They all port to the same thing. The word belief didn't initially mean to make an assert make a statement. It came from beleben, to belov, to give your heart to something.

I would make more extensive arguments, but just picking up on this point, there's no possibility of truth without trust, without a betrothal of both people to a shared commitment. Look, when you're betrothed to somebody, the two of you are committing to a relationship that's going to take on a life of its own. You said that education in itself, right, is inherently dialogical in exactly this sort of way. We wonder why all these kids can't do the basics. It's because they're not actually experiencing education as inherently it needs to function in this dialogical way.

Yeah. I mean, there are lots of good teachers. I know lots of good teachers at the University of Toronto. But they're good teachers in spite of, not because of. I think educational psychology is far too much driven by ideological concerns rather than good cognitive science and psychology about how human beings actually learn, how they actually mature. And I think we have given into, and this has been very much the Promethean utopian model given to us by Nazism and fascism and Marxism and also by the liberal version of the Enlightenment, which is the idea that what we can do is we can shape people for this particular political vision. And that's the main thing we're trying to do in our education.

What we'll do is we'll make this world come about. And that is to make human beings instrumental. It is to say they don't have value as persons. They have value insofar as they will take up membership in some particular political cause because that's what actually has the intrinsic value. And as soon as you instrumentalize people, you immediately dehumanize and depersonalize them. And soon as you instrumentalize human thought, you remove it from a commitment to rationality. You remove it from a commitment of seeking the truth for its own sake. So you undermine things in a profound way. You

dehumanize the students and you de-incentivize them about caring about the truth and about caring about the process. You just get them focused on, you have to have these end results. The hallmark of rationality is when people step back and say, wait, how am I coming up with these ideas? Maybe I could come up with this better. I think racism is an issue. I share the goal of trying to ameliorate

it. I don't think we can eradicate it because it's a trade-off relationship. Look, murder is a horrible, horrible crime, but we don't want the state to be given the power to eradicate murder because it would be overly totalitarian intrusive in our lives. So we have to ameliorate racism. Now what we can do is we should be able to ask this. We should be able to ask, what are the best possible ways of doing this? Here's a proposed method. Well, let's investigate it. Let's see if it actually works. That's not what we're doing. We're leaping to, we're going to eradicate it. And then what that means is everybody has to automatically, often unquestionably, commit to these interventions that we don't have good evidence are working. And we might have some

evidence that they're actually counterproductive. They're actually driving the kind of separation between racial groups or ethnic groups, that we have good evidence, increases hatred and racism. And so, like, this is the hallmark of irrationality. We can say, I actually want that goal, but I think the way you're trying to do it is actually taking us away from that very goal. Could we at least step back and question the method? And that is becoming increasingly impossible to do. And that is part of the problem with education. You would expect that education is the place where people are most

open to self-correction and is becoming the place that is least, less and less open to self-correction. And it breaks my heart because I love being an educator. I love being the teacher. I love my colleagues. And the university being the teacher. I love my colleagues. And the university I work at, I love it. It has treated me well. But I do not like the way things are going around this. You know, John, I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours. As we finish, I think the thing I want to talk about is, you know,

you're one of the ways that you identify as tackling this meaning crisis. You describe using immersive practices. This speaks to me because it's something that I do myself and I found a lot of, let's say, solutions to meeting crisis in my own practice. Why don't you tell me about that? Well, first of all, Jan, what you said is really instructive. Notice that when you're suffering from a lack of religio, getting new beliefs isn't the answer. You have to engage in practices because you have to transform all these other things. You have to engage in practices because you have to transform all these other things. You have to cultivate some skills you don't have that connect you to the world. You have to cultivate different states of mind so you can take new perspectives on the world.

You have to cultivate a new identity. You have to cultivate your character so you can be with the world in a fundamentally different way. Because all those non-propositional ways of connecting, those are actually the deeper places where religio is to be found. And so practices, individual and collective practices, as you said, immersive, they're not just about informing you, they're about transforming you, are absolutely indispensable for people recovering religio. At the Verveke Foundation we have built ecologies of practices because practices have these trade-off

relationships. Well, you do a meditative practice. Yes, a meditative practice. You step back and look inside. But you should counterbalance that with a contemplative practice that teaches you to look deep out into the world. Oh, I'm doing a still, seated practice. Great. You should also do a moving mindfulness practices because they counterbalance and correct each other. All of these individual practices you're doing,

you should counterbalance them with dialogical practices with other people who are also doing an ecology of practices. And all of this creates this rich, living ecology by which at many levels of the psyche and in many ways reaching out and reaching in, we can ameliorate our foolishness and afford our flourishing. And so, you know, we have quite a number of our viewers who are religious, Christian and otherwise, and they would say, well, we kind of need to stick to one practice, many of them. So how would you respond to that? Well, first of all, I'd say, I don't know what your religion belongs to, because let's

take Christianity. You have multiple practices. You probably pray. You probably go to church. You probably sing hymns. You probably do Bible studies with other people. You're doing multiple practices. Right. So now I'm understanding what you mean by practices.

Yes, that's what I mean. And notice that there is a mixture of things that put a lot of emphasis on propositions, and then there's ones that are much more about how you're paying attention. There's ones where you're doing something that's very much about paying attention and participating. The Eucharist, that's a deeply immersive participatory practice if you're a Christian. Then you balance that with private prayer, but you also have communal prayer. Do you see what I mean? There's all this rich trade-off because no one of these practices is sufficient. They all have strengths and weaknesses, and they have to be brought together. Now, what the religions did is they've got a lot of experience cultivating this ecology. That's why I use the metaphor of a gardener,

right? Cultivating this ecology. And that's why it's valuable. John, a final thought as we finish from you? I do want to speak to the people who are the NONESs that do not have a stated religious home. I want you to know that there are a lot of good faith people who are creating a colleges of practices often by entering into good faith relationships with people from the legacy religions and I'm saying this because I don't want people to give up hope. Don't give up. There's a lot happening.

There's a lot of creativity and effort. Yes, there's a lot of BS and there's a lot of charlatans and there's a lot of people out there. So you have to cultivate discernment. You have to be careful. But there's also a lot of people of good faith and good talent out there as well. Well, John Vervaeke, it's such a pleasure to have had you on the show. Thank you, Hans.

It's been a great pleasure to be here. Great pleasure. Thank you all for joining John Vervaeke and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.