Minter Dialogue with John Vervaeke

I had the pleasure of speaking with John Vervaeke, a professor at the University of Toronto specialising in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. We delved into the meaning crisis, a concept John has extensively explored in his work. We discussed the disconnection from reality that many people experience today, and how this relates to the loss of shared sacred frameworks in our culture.

John shared insights on the importance of pilgrimage and spiritual initiation in becoming a man, and we explored the need for intergenerational mixing and service to community. We touched on the challenges of individualism and the search for authenticity in modern society.

The conversation also covered the relationship between meaning, wisdom, and waking up to reality. John emphasised the importance of facing both our finitude and our capacity for transcendence. We concluded by discussing the potential role of psychedelics in addressing the meaning crisis, with John cautioning against a ‘magic pill’ attitude and stressing the need for broader sapiential practices.

Overall, I hope you’ll agree that it was a thought-provoking discussion that touched on fundamental questions of human existence and our search for meaning in today’s world.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with John Vervaeke:

• Check out John Vervaeke’s eponymous site here
• Find/buy John Vervaeke’s book, “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis – Origins,” here at Amazon
• Subscribe to his Youtube channel here, where you can find a lot of great content. YTou can also sign up for his online courses.

Other mentions/sites:

• Book “The Immortality Key” by Brian Muraresku here
• My body magician: Matt Martin, who introduced me to John Vervaeke, is practising Active Release Therapy and more at Active Backs – find him at his practice on King’s Road here

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on my Youtube Channel, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. And if you’ve ever come across padel, please check out my Joy of Padel podcast, too!

Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: John Vervake. I have been looking forward to having this conversation for God knows how long. I’ve been listening to your work. It’s amazing. Your body of work is outstanding. And I have to thank Matt for putting me into you and now getting in touch with you for to be on my podcast. But as I like to start off, John, just for, you know, kickers. Who is John Vervaeke? Football.

John Vervaeke: First of all, thank you for that wonderful introduction. Who is John Vervaeke? That’s interesting. And I don’t mean to sound like a character from a teenage angst movie, but that’s very much in question for me right now, I think, in a good way. As I mentioned to you before we began, I just returned from, I think, what is, I can properly call a pilgrimage. That’s what it was intended to be, and that’s what it’s becoming, the philosophical silk road to try and be properly responsible to the advent of the sacred. The way the sacred is trying to show up in new ways for us as a response to the meaning crisis. And that, as a pilgrimage should do, has, you know, challenged me as to.

Minter Dial: You know, who are you?

John Vervaeke: Who fundamentally am I? Now, that can be narcissistic and ridiculous. And I have no doubt that there’s elements of that in me because I’m not a saint or a sage. But I do think it’s fair to say that the pilgrimage did nurture a Socratic part of me that’s asking that question very deeply. So, I mean, I can give you the standard facts. I’m a professor at the University of Toronto in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. I do work on the nature of meaning and mindfulness and mystical states and flow and intelligence and rationality and consciousness. That’s sort of my shtick. And then my public work has been around trying to address the meaning crisis, which is, in a nutshell, the. The vacuum that has been left in our culture and in our cognition, perhaps even in our consciousness by the retreat of a shared sacred canopy, a shared sacred framework. I’m not advocating for some simplistic nostalgic return, but the point I’m making, not just me, lots of people are making, is when we chose to disenfranchise from religious institutions for a lot of very good reasons, we kind of threw out a very important and functional baby with that bathwater. And we’ve been trying to fill that hole with politics and with popular art and popular music and also more noxious things like spirituality and all kinds of things. And so, that is eroding out our mental health. It’s causing loneliness, fragmentation, collapse in trust, collapse in a sense of connectedness. And so, I’m trying to make people aware of that, try to bring the best of the cognitive science to bear on that. The best philosophical reflection, with the help of other people, created an ecology of practices to help people individually and collectively address that. And then, like I said, I’ve committed myself to trying to be in service, try to amplify, try to, you know, helpfully, you know, strengthen the signal for the way that people are in many ways being drawn together towards a new way of relating to what’s ultimate and how it can be sacred and transformative for them as a way of trying to get us out of the meaning crisis. And so, that’s who I am. That’s. I. I’m sort of caught up in that. And I think this is such a deep and pervasive and profound issue. It’s. It requires something profound from us, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can have a merely theoretical knowledge. You have to put yourself through it if you’re going to have any deep knowledge of it. So, that’s what I’m doing. That’s what I’m undergoing.

Minter Dial: You’re a pilgrimage. There are many things that I want to relate into that. But maybe just pick up on this idea of the pilgrimage. John, is I, from my vantage, much less academic, but in every one of my books, the notion of meaningfulness has been pregnant within it, Whether it’s about the meaningful life and death of my grandfather, Second World War, putting meaningfulness into tech and. Or being a meaningful leader. So, it’s something that I’ve been exploring, but very much from a different angle. And what one of my observations we’ve talked about. You’ve. You mentioned this idea of. We’ve chosen to walk away from spirit or religiousness or religion, but I also feel like, especially for men and boys, we’ve walked away from having a moment of becoming man. And. And I was wondering to what extent that resonated with you. And. And to what extent maybe a pilgrimage like the one you’re doing, or maybe others doing the Camino de Compostela, what sort of processions we can have that will help us return to some sense of meaning as men.

John Vervaeke: I think that’s right. I think one of the most important philosophical questions, And so, I’m going to. And I intend what I say to be taken that way is what is it to be a good man above and beyond being a good person? There is, of course, the important question what is it to be a good person? And we all share that.

Minter Dial: But.

John Vervaeke: But there is also a particular question about what it is to be a good man. Women, of course, and I’m not saying that women haven’t had tremendous disadvantages. I’m just pointing out something right now. Women have a philosophical movement, feminism, for all its criticisms. It also performs a very valuable function of constantly bringing up this question and addressing it with a lot of deep, reflective thought. What is it to be a good woman above and beyond being a good person? Men don’t have the equivalent of that. They don’t have a culturally, you know, promoted movement that is about raising that question. Now, I, you know, I understand what some women might say, that that’s because men dominated just what it was to be a person. And I agree with that. I agree that we should have separated those questions. What is it to be a man? From what is it to be a person? I agree. I’m not disputing that. But that doesn’t mean that question, what is it to be a man above and beyond being a good person? Doesn’t need to be raised and addressed. And I think that is properly one of the most important questions of our time. Because one of the important aspects of meaning, of the meaning crisis, is that men are bereft of that kind of identification that properly takes place into account our biological agency, our particular mindedness in our selfhood, and the way we enter in as persons to our community. What does being a man mean in a community? The models we have of what a man should be on popular media very rarely have to do with, you know, what is, you know, how to enter into community. They’re very much heroic. The heroic, right. And that’s the only myth that’s being offered to people. You know, the hero that goes out and fights the dragon. That’s very problematic. And it’s, of course, it’s degraded considerably in popular culture. So, I think that question, Sorry, I’m going on about it, mentor, but I think that’s a really important question, and I think we need to be raising it in slow, careful, reflective dialogos, because if not, the question is not going to remain unanswered. But what we’re going to get are basically popular cultural answers that are at best nostalgic and misplaced and at worst, manipulative of us in profound ways. And a lot of young men are being manipulated by all kinds of things. Now, on the other hand, you see that for, I think, the first time in measurable history that men are starting to exceed women in terms of religious participation. Men are sort of leading the charge of some of the return to some of the legacy religions, because I think they’re starting to. For me, that’s a sign of hope that this question is being raised properly. Now, to your question specifically, yes, I think that the issues of pilgrimage and spiritual, philosophical, psychological initiation are central to what it is to become a man. I think part of what is happening in me. It sounds like a silly thing to say for somebody who’s had kids and it’s, you know, 60, 63. But part of what the philosophical Silk Road did for me is to actually raise that question. And here’s the one thing I’ll say, and then I’ll be quiet again because. But we have to give up the idea that we get done at some point. The ancient idea, as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. And I think, you know, there are multiple periods of initiations, and we need to have a necklace of such pearls, and they need to all speak to each other in a resonant way. And I think part of what pilgrimage does is recall and remind of us of two earlier callings to initiation and also set us aspirationally towards the current initiation that is needed by us and for us.

Minter Dial: What that makes me think about your connection of pearls is the lack of intergenerational mixing that’s now happened So, that you. You don’t have grandpa or grandma living in the house with the grandchildren or even. Even more like they used to, especially when there were many more children. And we. We on top of that, we don’t have this notion of. Of service to community. It seems to be all focused about me, eventually an extension of me, my family, since I only have one or two kids, I put everything of value into them. And in that process of parenting, then we lose ourselves and. Or at least we think we’re promoting ourselves, but we tend to lose ourselves thinking that we’re being of service. And ultimately, what I feel is that we’ve lost this idea of belonging to. To a bigger cause without it having to be sort of Gandhisque. Can we not return to maybe even national service or other things where we show that man must be subservient to some kind of bigger thing or must be, I don’t know, but could be subservient to some bigger thing?

John Vervaeke: I think that’s fundamentally right. I think that this, you know, the scientific work on the psychology, meaning of which I have scientific and philosophical critiques, nevertheless, there’s also good theoretical and empirical work. One of the main factors that contributes, well, two of them, and this is one of, part of the problem, they’re in two separate sub disciplines in psychology that should be talking to each other and aren’t really talking to each other in one. It’s called mattering, which is a sense of being connected to something, as you said, larger than yourself. We have to return to that metaphor because obviously it’s a metaphor. If I chain you to an ocean liner, you’re not really satisfied with your life. And then the other one is belonging. That’s largely the work of Kelly Allen and her colleagues. I think these are, are, are two sides of the same coin. This is part of what’s called the jingle jangle problem in psychology. I think they’re two different names for the same phenomena, slightly different emphases, but I think they both part, but they point to this need to be connected to something larger than ourselves. And what this means, I think is the following. Now I’m going to give you, I could give you a larger, more, you know, more complex argument, but I’m going to just sort of try to intuitively gesture towards it. Think about, think about some of the metaphors that have been used for a sudden sense of, a deeper sense of belonging or connectedness to, to the world, like enlightening or awakening. Well, think about what happens when you awaken. You’re in a dream and the, the dream is this little world and it’s very self-contained and very self ref. And then you wake up to a bigger picture that, right, a more encompassing framework and you have an asymmetry of sense making this bigger picture can make sense of the smaller picture and not vice versa. And because of that you realize how the smaller one was biased, self-deceptive, egocentric. And I mean, it may give you useful information. I’m not sort of slagging Jung here or anything like that, but you realize, oh, this is the real world and that’s the dream world. What I’m saying to you is this. The sense of meaning as mattering and belonging is also connected to the sense of being connected to something that’s real, that wakes us up, that matures us. If what we mean by maturity, which is what I think we mean by maturity, this is John Dewson’s work, is the ability to face reality in a better and better way. And you can think, well, why would that matter So, much to us? Because everything you value and do depends on it being real and you genuinely realizing its reality and its relevance. This is to say Something the ancients kept saying, which we don’t, by the way, which is there’s a deep connection between the cultivation of meaningfulness and the cultivation of wisdom. The ability to wake up, to move from being completely egocentric, to overcome bias, to overcome self-deception in a systematic and systemic way. And this goes towards something like the following. I’ll ask my students, you’ve perhaps heard me tell this, but I do it. How many of you are on deeply committed romantic relationships that you’re finding really satisfying? And a certain number put up their hands because this is our replacement, as you said, for God and history and intergenerational culture and large, you know, socioeconomic cultural projects. What we’ll do is we’ll find the One, right? And of course, no person can bear this. But then I asked them, how many of you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you, even if that meant the complete and utter destruction of this satisfying relationship? And 99% of them put up their hand. I always talk later to the 1% who don’t, and there’s usually some. And then I asked the 99, well, why do you want to know that if it’s going to destroy something that you’re enjoying So, much, much? And they say, they forget all the postmodern stuff and all the cynicism. They say, well, because it wouldn’t be real. It wouldn’t be real. And this is, I think, one of Plato’s great insights. There’s deep connections between meaningfulness, realization in both senses of the word maturation. And that’s why for. For me, I’ve been trying to argue for a deep connection between meaning and waking up and where. And let me put this all together, meaning and wise waking up.

Minter Dial: In your book Origins, which is, I must say, at the very beginning, I didn’t. I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it, John. It, it was. It was So, far back and, And a lot of heavy stuff. But the more I got into it, the more I started getting turned on and starting needing to go back to it and reread pieces and dive in and, you know, I. I’ve now spoken about it to many people because I think it’s. It funnily then wakens up a lot of things about how we’ve got to here, I’m going to guess, or at least I believe, because, I mean, I’m not fully, you know, compass mentis on everything you write and are saying, but that you’re. In this regard of detachment from reality. We’re talking about the Disembedding. Yes, yes, that’s totally related.

John Vervaeke: Yeah, very much. I mean, what we did. So, yeah. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis – Origins. Thank you for the book club and notice it’s called awakening. That’s deliberate, given what I was just talking about, that this is not a matter of getting just some new theoretical beliefs. This is a matter of an individual collective transformation that is needed.

Minter Dial: Presumably it doesn’t mean being woke either.

John Vervaeke: No, no, no, no, no. I mean that. That’s one of my sort of diagnosis. A symptom of a maladaptive, an unhealthy response to the meaning crisis is the attempt to make the political arena the place that will give us what we’re looking for. And the political arena is exactly the wrong place. It frames everything in the wrong way in a profound. Not that politics aren’t important, but politics isn’t the right place to try and solve this kind of problem. So, please remind me of the question.

Minter Dial: Getting back to disembedding.

John Vervaeke: Oh, yes, disembedding. Thank you. Sorry for that. Yeah. So, when we did what Charles Taylor, Canadian philosopher, had a huge influence on me, continues to calls the great disembedding, we moved out a particular way in which we were very much like deeply participatory in the natural world. We move to a model for a lot of very good reasons, which I call a two-world mythology, which is this world that we’re in is a world that is in some sense decadent, fallen, illusory, because it’s the world of our. It’s the world that is beset by all of that self-deception, all of that illusion and delusion, all that mendacity and manipulation and. And so, it’s a world of violence and suffering and ignorance, anger and hatred. And you can see this across all of the legacy religions. They’re wrestling with this and they posit an alternative, which is what happens if we cultivate wisdom is we can wake up from that individual and collective self-deception and we can come to be in relationship to the real world and live as we really ought to with each other. And this of course, is heaven or nirvana or being one with the dao and things like that. Now this is powerful. And this, you know, this is where we get notions of transcendence going up and over the mountain and things like that. This is powerful and it’s important. The problem is that we then bound, like the legacy religions and the project of wisdom cultivation and meaning cultivation is bound to this particular model of reality. And that model has collapsed. That model has collapsed because of what happened in the, you know, in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific revolution, the Industrial Revolution, such that for many people that the idea of another world seems scientifically implausible and it seems to just be now a way of engaging in fantasy or escapism. And the problem with that is this, is this was Nietzsche’s great critique, is if you think of this world as somehow decadent and only important as a springboard to the real world, and then you lose the sense of the real world, you’re then stuck in this world from which we have been deeply disembedded and which we regard as having no intrinsic value or function and is ultimately not real. And that’s kind of where we are at. I hope that answered your question.

Minter Dial: Well, it does in the end of the way. Oh, and it sparks a few more ideas, John, because I’m far less read, well read. But it does also bring up, I feel, notions of the alienation that Marx would talk about. Alienated from their existence, from work. And as soon as you’re alienated from your. The only existence you have, or then if there’s no choice or, or option for something bigger, better, it just seems like a grind down, especially as we’ve gone from the Enlightenment, which in, in all, you know, sense of proportion probably brought lots of great things.

John Vervaeke: It did.

Minter Dial: However, it, it tended to focus on or give higher value to the individual. And as we’ve gone down this slippery slope, hit the 60s, liberty and the individual. With only two children, one children 1.4 in Europe, we sort of, we’re whittling it down and it seems like it’s not very fertile ground anymore to come back.

John Vervaeke: I agree. Chris. Master Pietro and I, co-author. Yeah, co-author. We talk about. And also Madeline. We had a lot of help from Madeleine Abraham. We talk about alienation. Thing about Marx is Marx is an attempt to render purely politically, economically, Hegel’s vision. And Hegel’s vision explicitly, by the way, is an attempt to somehow integrate what was the grand sacred vision given to us by, you know, the Judeo Christian and Greek heritage, integrate that into a post European Enlightenment world. That’s what Hegel is. So, this, this is why Marx, it’s what I call a pseudo religious ideology. It’s attempting, it’s a grand attempt, as totalitarianism always is, to do the comprehensive functioning, the sacred canopy and guidance. And that’s why, of course, it can be So, incredibly bloodthirsty in some ways. Doesn’t mean the critique isn’t important. But I would add to alienation, a couple of other A’s. One is absurdity. The, the sense that reality is fundamentally absurd. And that can either be a sense of it being sort of weirdly surreal, or it can be weirdly aerial People, they sort of bounce around. That overlaps, of course, with a lot of mental health issues, as you can imagine. And then that overlaps with another A, which is addiction, which is not like a disease. It is a disorder of learning in the domain of meaning and belonging. That’s what addiction really is. And then you also have anxiety, both the psychological one, which is spiking, and you also have the existential one in which you have that sort of nameless sense around the penumbra of your experience that things aren’t right. Things aren’t right. And that shows up. All these show up in the increased sense of burnout that vacillates noxiously with boredom. We vacillate between boredom and burnout. We feel there’s So, much bullshit. And I, I use that in a technical sense. And so, I think it’s all of those A’s, that and all of them. And this is exactly to your point, bespeak the fact that we are, we think, in fact. So, if you interview people, oh yeah, my life is meaningful because they have a couple of connections and a couple of projects, but they don’t address these deeper issues of waking up, of overcoming self-deception, of having something we can share. Look, meaning has to be shared or it’s not meaning. There’s no such thing as a purely private meaning. It doesn’t make any sense because. Because meaning is a praise word. When I say your life is meaningful, I’m praising it, I’m recommending it, which means it’s meeting some standard or failing to meet some standard. And we have to, we have to be able to criticize each other and correct each other. But we have this notion, like you said, we’re So, autonomous. We’re So, this is the watchword of the Enlightenment. I’m autonomous. I’m completely self-governing. I decide. I decide. Well, you can’t right imagine if I started using words that had no shared meaning. Nobody could understand me and I couldn’t even understand past versions of myself. Like. And so, we’re in this state where we are deeply disconnected. We’re cocooning and trying to hang on desperately to. Well, this is my, like you said, here’s my little cocoon and bubble. I don’t trust anybody. Massive trust collapse. I’m not connected to anything big in intergenerational I try to sometimes connect by consuming political stuff and getting all upset about it, but that’s just an emotional thing. I’m not really making a difference. I feel insignificant. I feel like I don’t. So, I desperately cling for any kind of story that will make me feel like I have some significance or matter. Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. That’s exactly it.

Minter Dial: This is very much the topic of mine. My new writing, which is the Avatar trap and how we grab onto causes or other identities and attribute an external, extreme, extrinsic meaning which doesn’t come from within. And that is the detachment that I tend to focus on because people are running after illusory dragons to slay in their cause. Running. It’s illusory only because it’s really not germane to their deeper sense and without having done the harder work. The pilgrimage that you’re talking about, which people don’t want to do because what it actually includes is meeting the bad side of who you are, accepting that you have foibles rather than labeling it as a disease that you can get a pill for. You actually just have to say, oh, that is me.

John Vervaeke: Yes, I think that’s right. I think. And I think this is also part of the problem with the. The Enlightenment, especially Kant. But, you know, you can see it in Descartes. I think, therefore I am of the autonomous, isolated atom self. The autonomous atomic self. Atomic in the sense of, you know, isolated unto itself, not in the, like, nuclear powers. Nuclear, yeah. Yeah. And I think. I think that’s right. We. So, we have the notion of. That we. That this. Our. Our self is something that we possess that we have to be true to. This is why we have really warped the notion of authenticity. If you think about how Heidegger talks about it and how we talk about it, it’s this strange bizarro version of what Heidegger was. Heydrich was talking about what you’re talking about. He’s talking about facing up to your mortality, facing up in the ways in which you give away your agency. So, I think that’s right. I think that what we’re doing is we are. We have lost the Socratic notion that our true self is something we become through aspiration and the cultivation of virtue. Instead, it is a possession we protect and advertise about by adopting various, as you said, external strategies that are basically markers of the true self that we are and that we’re being true to by advertising this identity that we possess. And of course, that’s not the Nature of the self. The self is. It’s at three levels. Your agency, your selfhood and personhood. And these are all intrinsically, inherently dynamical, relational And therefore, inherently, inherently aspirational. And aspiration means you want to become other than you are by deeply facing who you are. Right. Like genuine education, which is not just the consumption of information. Educe meant to draw out. That’s actually what it meant. Educe. Right. It’s like. No, no, no. See it in the Socratic dialogues. Let’s. Who do you think you are? Who do you think your identity is? Let’s call it into question and let’s midwife you So, you can give birth to the self that you are not yet. This is the notion we’ve lost. And I think if I’m understanding you, Minter, that’s what one of the things you’re emphasizing in your new book is that stop shopping for an identity. It is not. That’s a modal confusion. You don’t have an identity. You become someone. And the only way you properly become a self is dynamically, relationally, by maturation. And that means facing up to the reality without and within and how they relate to each other. I totally agree with you. Sorry, I’m getting passionate about this, but this is, this is, this is the message.

Minter Dial: Please do not be sorry, John, on my podcast, if I can have some excitement and passion. I think that’s sort of what also the world needs within. Within reason at least because there’s some lot of passion. It’s gone crazy. Bunkers.

John Vervaeke: Yes.

Minter Dial: But this idea of reality, the way I look at it, and this is sort of how I feel like we’ve disengaged is we. We’ve. We’ve been talking about goodness before and, and transcendental and. And I, I feel like we’ve lost touch with beauty and truth.

John Vervaeke: Yes.

Minter Dial: And. And have sort of put everything in the basket of goodness and forgot all about badness and, and in the chasing and marketing of my goodness. Look at me. I’m a. I’m a hero. Look at me. I. I did this. I’m. I’m on this. Cause I’m. I’m existing through these other good things and, and hopefully you’ll think of me forever and that creates my legacy. And maybe why not spend $640 billion on immortality as we’ve come to believe we’re allowed to. But reality is. Includes of course, suffering, pain, failure and death. And our society in the me world is trying to do everything to occult this part or death anyway, in dialogue or in our conversation, in our existence and everything else, we try to take a pill to get rid of it. And the hubris to think that we can cure death as if it were some kind of illness is, I mean, such an epitome of our complete loss of being in touch with reality.

John Vervaeke: Wow, you’re sparking So, much of me. That was beautifully said. First of all, hubris. We have forgotten that for every Greek myth of heroism, as you mentioned, there is a Greek myth of hubris. And the reason for this, and this is one of Plato’s great insights, and another one of his insight is above and beyond. Whatever we want, we want that satisfies our desires to be real. And we want it to integrate us, not fragment us and set us against ourselves. He has the third insight. Drew Heinlein brings this out. And this has to do with the hubris and the heroism in a proper tonos, a creative tension, which is Plato’s argument, is we have to hold together, like, with two hands or like our stereoscopic vision or our two fields that give us depth perception, our finitude and our transcendence. If we just get. So, you see, our culture has severed these, and our culture vacillates between. I’m just finite, I’m just an animal. I’m just significant. And there’s nihilism and nihilism and nihilism. And then if you’re just that, you’re beset and you fall into servitude and manipulation on the other side, you can. I’ll just be transcendent right now. Instead of falling prey to the tyrant, you become the tyrant. You become the narcissist. You inflate and inflate and inflate and you try to escape the defining features of your finitude. You know, you’re going to escape into the cyber world, or you’re going to escape to Mars, or you’re going to. You’re going to put magnets in your fingers and chips in your head, like. And all of this is like, you’re trying to escape from the limitations that are actually constitutive of your being, like an agent in the world. And what does that mean? What is going to be your relationship to the people who can’t afford. Like, what is going to be your relationship to the people that can’t afford all your transhumanistic machinery? What are you going to do with them? Well, you’re going to be tyrannical over them, right? And. Well, not necessarily. Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. Right. You have to hold them together. You have to hold the hero myth. Yeah, your transcendence, but also the hubris myth. Your finitude, your transcendence will never and should never liberate you from your finitude. Your finitude should never cause you to despair and forget your capacity for transcendence. You hold them together in humility and notice that we don’t have a positive word for humility. Humiliation is purely negative in our culture. There’s no positive sense of I was humiliated and that was good.

Minter Dial: Beautiful. I, I, I feel like I wanted to take it on because you’ve mentioned this idea of, of dictatorship or imposition of, of the strong-minded politician. It feels, and you know that saying that good times, well, what is hard times create strong men, strong men create good times And so, on And so, forth. Is that a quip that relate, you relate to. Or do you think that’s hokey pokey?

John Vervaeke: I think it’s a mistake. I think we, I mean this is another platonic proposal that we don’t deliberately do evil. We do evil because we mistake a lesser good for a greater good. People who have no sense of good aren’t evil in the typical sense. Depends whether or not you think somebody who’s a true psychopath is evil or just, just horrifyingly amoral. And we don’t have to do that philosophical debate right now, but let’s just say what I. So, strength is not itself a virtue. I think strength is a capacity to overcome obstacles, but it can be used for vice. I think what people are meaning is, I think they’re meaning what virtue originally meant. Virtue was a power to orient and to realize the good cognitively in behavior, collectively, et cetera. That’s virtue. Virtue is a, a power, a possibility. It still shows up in our idea of virtual reality. We’re playing with powers and possibilities. And I think what, what we mean is, and the problem is we’ve tended to equate virtue with meekness. This is also something of a misreading of Christianity that has entered into the culture or, or, or victimhood. That’s So, those are the, the, that’s also, we vacillate. No, those people are weak. Right. And that’s sort of the right, right? A weak, weak, weak, weak, weak. And then the left is, oh, but they’re, they’re like, they’re So, good because they’re victims. They’re victims or victims. And, and that’s, and, and again, I think that’s because they’re, we’ve pulled apart, holding together the, the finite and the transcendent. But what I think we really want is virtue. And virtue isn’t meekness. It sometimes, it might mean being meek. What virtue is is the power to be wise in a way that belongs to, is meaningful to, fits this situation. So, being wise here might be being kind. Being wise here might be being courageous. Being wise here, and this is Aristotle, might mean being angry, being angry at the right time, to the right degree, for the right reason. Like this is the notion. And I think what I would argue for is what we want is we want virtue. We want good people living good lives that are models and exemplars and lead by being exemplary. And that we mistake that again for merely being a strong person, which I think is problematic. I think it’s to. There’s a distinction in philosophy between the criterion and the goal. Criterion is something that helps you get to your. It’s a marker that you’re moving towards your goal. So, for example, you don’t eat for pleasure. Pleasure is a criterion that you’re eating something that is good. And now it might not be healthy good, but it might be filled with sugar and that’s good for your brain and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? So, I think strength is a criterion of virtue. Somebody who’s virtuous is the capacity to be strong when strong means remaining true to what is good, what is true and good and beautiful. That’s the kind of strength we’re talking about. And it, it survives in the word virtuosity. Right? That ability. Oh, to. So, I think what we’re after is virtue and virtuosity. And we, we, we, I think we rightly say we should follow people that we, you know, in that we individually, collectively and, you know, test of time in different contexts regard as being more virtuous and having more virtuosity, simply being stronger. I mean that. I, I don’t, I, I don’t, I, I. So, I think we’re after something real, but we’ve misframed it.

Minter Dial: Just to push back a second, John, the idea of being a strong person, I get that, but I also feel like it’s a little bit errant to be seeking or proposing to merely be a good person. Because if, if good is what we’re after, then bad has no place. And I, I put a big quotient of reality in bad. In other words, if we strike from all persons all that is not good, therefore we are leaving out things like getting pain, suffering, old age and death.

John Vervaeke: I think there’s a difference here. I think there’s a Difference that I’m not making clear. And so, I understand your pushback. And this, again, is a Nietzsche distinction. Those things are bad. I don’t think they’re vicious. Thinking them as vices that have to be eradicated is a mistake. They’re bad in the sense that we don’t have pleasure or enjoyment in them. But I don’t think it is vicious to suffer. I think it is. I think it is vicious to willingly suffer for no good reason. I think that’s why, like, sadism and cruelty are wrong, but you are. I mean, I. I intended to suffer on the pilgrimage because I think that suffering was good. Was it? Was it good? I mean, this is the problem with the word good. Is it good in the sense of virtuous or good in the sense of pleasant and pleasing? Well, it wasn’t pleasant and pleasing. It was often arduous and painful, and I got sick. Do I regret it? No, because I think it was virtuous. So, that’s part of the distinction I would want to make. I think there’s a lot of confusion. There’s confusion on both sides. That’s what I’m saying. We’re confusing strength with virtue or pleasantness with virtue. And we’re confusing things that are unpleasant and painful with vice. They’re not. We have to be willing to. I think I’m agreeing with you. Tell me if I’m not.

Minter Dial: But. No, I’m good with you.

John Vervaeke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we have to be. What I hear you saying, to use some of my language, is part of what we call bad is those criteria that tell us we’re finite and we have to listen to them on a regular basis. That’s what I hear you saying, and I’m in absolute agreement with that.

Minter Dial: Amen. Well said, John. Just in the last space, I like to spend a little bit of time talking about psychedelics.

John Vervaeke: Sure.

Minter Dial: I’ve had many psychonauts and specialists and PhDs and doctors in. In all the amazing research that’s being done in psychedelics. I’m more just a. A pastime having fun. And I’ve observed, and I feel that psychedelics has been a tremendous part of my exploration of meaningfulness, smallness in the universe and. And a few other things. And in your book, I kept on thinking the. So, in. In Awakening for the Meaning Crisis, where you. You really plunge into the history of how we got into this sense or this meaning crisis that we are continuously living today. I was expecting you to have a section about the. The Kykeon, the. The former Psychedelic mixture that is believed to existed as the. The immortality key. The key. Immortality, yeah.

John Vervaeke: I, I always. I just.

Minter Dial: Muraresku. Yeah, Brian Muraresku. And. And the kooky.

John Vervaeke: Yeah, I’ve met him. We’ve had a good conversation. He likes my work too.

Minter Dial: Well, I bet he does.

John Vervaeke: Yeah. Yeah. So, I didn’t talk about it specifically because, I mean, I tried to talk about it as a continuous theme. Right. So, you have shamanism and then you have higher states of consciousness. And I was talking mystical experiences and I talked about that. I also have a lot of online videos and, you know, and. And publications I’m working on right now around psychedelics. I think the psychedelic renaissance is again, a symptom of the meaning crisis. People are trying to wake. They’re trying to find a way to wake up. They’re trying to find a way of challenging systemic and systematic bias that they, in their normal states, they can’t see because it’s So, automatic. Like, my glasses, I’m wearing. I agree. I think there’s dangers. And more and more of the research is now pointing out to that. What we’re doing in psychedelics is we’re putting ourselves into a state of what’s called epistemic vulnerability. These are states. I’m being persuaded, I’m not totally convinced, but I’m finding it plausible that the evolutionary functions of these states, which we can endogenously induce without chemical substances, we can do other things, breathing or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That what they are is that they are states that are states of rapid. In which rapid learning, rapid deep learning is available to us. So, they’re called states of epistemic vulnerability, which I’d love to have that on a T shirt. I’m in a state of epistemic vulnerability.

Minter Dial: I’m going to make that for you, John.

John Vervaeke: And so, what that means is what they do is they are tremendous. Like, they’re a tremendous opportunity for learning and for something even more for learning to learn, not just evolving a new trait, but evolving your evolvability itself. And I think this is really crucial, but like a state of vulnerability is exactly that. It’s a state that can be like. So, I’m worried, and I’m not accusing anybody. I’m stating a concern. And because I do research on this. Right. I’m worried for that. I’m worried about the magic pill attitude that you criticized earlier about psychedelics, right. That we’re disembedding them from how they have been used cross, culturally, cross historically, indigenously, which is, okay, set and setting Those are not enough. You need sapiential practices. You need to be doing a lot of other pract So, that you don’t go down rabbit hole.

Minter Dial: Sorry folks, I think we have a little station identity break and hopefully John will reappear. So, John, a time is of the essence and I always like to have an on-time departure. You’re a busy man doing a lot of great work. Carry on doing all that. Where can somebody get in touch with you? Follow your readings, sign up for your courses, buy your books. Where’s the volumes of John Vervaeke?

John Vervaeke: Oh well, the book is available on Amazon. The books that and the book on AI mentoring the machines and the book on the zombie myth as the myth of the meaning crisis is also there. You know, just go on my YouTube channel, you can sign up, you can get in contact with the Vervaeke foundation, you can join the Lectern, which is my online platform for there’s free videos. You can also take courses with me. The courses are not free. I put out hundreds of hours of free content. But if you want to like take a, you know, an eight-week course there, you can do that. I have one running right now. You know, you just Google Scholar me for all my academic work. Yeah.

Minter Dial: And.

John Vervaeke: But the YouTube channel is probably the best place to get a start. Although I would recommend if you’re watching Awakening from the Meaning Crisis that you read the book. If you say, well, I can only do one, then read the book rather than listen to the video series because I think the book is better. But if you can do both, do both.

Minter Dial: Well, for having done both, I would agree the book is a great read. John, many, many thanks. Keep up the good work and I hope to see you maybe on your trip to Cambridge.

John Vervaeke: Yeah, I’m hoping to come to London and hopefully we can grab a meal together. Mentor. Thank you. This has been a great, a great time. Sorry about the signal dropping, sorry about that. Technology is the God that limps, So, indeed it is.

Minter Dial: But it was fun dialoguing with you, John.

John Vervaeke: Very much. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you So, much.