Full Summary of John Vervaeke’s “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”

John Vervaeke’s 50-episode lecture series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” tackles our modern-day sense of despair, depression, and meaninglessness, which seem especially pervasive.

(Now, trying to summarize 50 hours of lecture content into one article is probably a fool’s errand, and I think Vervaeke would appreciate my use of the word “fool” here, but it’s the most reliable way I have to metabolize information for myself, and I certainly wanted to deeply internalize the lessons from this series. I hope it’s a helpful summary for you too.)

EPISODES 1-25 – Mythos and Historical Factors

Mythos and crisis

A mythos is a story you tell yourself about the world that shapes the relationship you have with it – that dictates how you make sense of things and what projects you find meaningful. But a mythos is not a myth, as we’ve come to understand it; a mythos is a worldview. Consider these: the world and its resources belong to man, or the world and its resources belong to all living things. You can see how the mythos the modern Western world occupies is the first (but many cultures have and do occupy the second). A mythos, then, is not a set of false beliefs, but rather a cosmic perspective that deeply shapes how we connect to the world and ourselves.

The first step in creating a meaning crisis is to disrupt the mythos of a culture, to make it untenable or unlivable. Vervaeke argues the mythos under pressure in our present meaning crisis is our two-worlds mythos, given to us and shaped by the Axial Revolution. Prior to the Axial Age (the Bronze Age and earlier), humans lived within a one-world mythos, where the divine and natural realms were united (think back to our ancestors who believed that Gods lived among us, that spirits inhabited places and objects and animals). The Axial Revolution dis-embedded these realms (for several interesting reasons that you can discover in the series), separating them into the everyday world and the higher-order world. It was the latter that was the truer reality, which we could only reach by overcoming the self-deception that kept us tethered to the former. To illustrate, think of the Axial religions, like Buddhism and Neoplatonic Christianity. In Buddhism you have man living in a world of suffering created by his own self-deception, needing to awaken to reality, to enlighten himself. You see it in early Christianity too: the earthly realm is not our true home; to re-home ourselves within the divine realm, we need to be radically transformed by love and humility. Even on the more secular plane, the two-worlds mythos reverberated. We see it exemplified by the Greek philosophers, who advocated several ways to self-liberate through rationality and wisdom. (For these philosophers, you achieved enlightenment using reason; there was no disconnect between rationality and self-transcendence). One world was split into two, but these two worlds existed on a continuum, one you could move along from deception (our ordinary, everyday experience) through to a truer, more ultimate reality, if you were wise enough.

We continue to see the two-worlds mythos today in our aspirations toward self-actualization and becoming our “best selves.” We see it in the resurgence of interest in mindfulness practices, transcendental meditation, and psychedelic use. It even saturates our media and entertainment (think of the plot for The Matrix: what we think is real is an illusion, but we can “awaken” to reality and re-discover our truest selves).

The practices legitimized by this mythos

What the Axial religions and secular Axial philosophies gave us were practices to overcome self-deception and become liberated – to grow, and transform, and self-transcend (all anchored in and endorsed by the two-worlds mythos). These practices were designed to foster insight into the systematic cognitive/spiritual errors that kept us tethered to a false reality, that kept us from self-actualization and achieving our highest potential. These were practices like Buddhist meditation and like Christian Agape; secular exercises like community dialogue (Socrates) and rational argumentation (Plato); practices that fostered higher states of consciousness, flow, and deep self-reflection.

What these practices all have (and had) in common is helping us achieve a deep understanding about ourselves and the world. They help us toggle between the features (details) of a situation and the gestalt (the bigger picture), constantly breaking and re-making our frames of reference. They help us enhance our salience landscaping, what we’re finding relevant, what we should be paying attention to. They create fertile ground for insight, for “aha” moments where we feel we have grasped something true and significant about reality. These practices are not just about having propositional knowledge (knowledge about facts), they are about participatory understanding… a knowing that comes from being (what Vervaeke calls the difference between the existential Having Mode and Being Mode).

And what do people who participate in these practices report feeling? People in meditation say they understand themselves and the world more deeply. People in flow say time drops away and they achieve a state of effortlessness and selflessness. People on psychedelics say they feel cosmic connectedness. These practices give us a deep sense of connection and coherence; we feel like our being in the world is optimized. And, most importantly, people practicing in these ways are more likely to report their lives as meaningful. We’ll return to this in the back half of the course, but to sum so far: people from the Axial Age on lived within a two-worlds mythos, one that legitimized historical practices (secular and religious) that focused on participatory knowing, self-transcendence, and insight – a mythos that legitimized the cultivation of “wisdom” as seeing through illusion to true reality. Additionally, these practices increased reported feelings of meaning in life.

Domicide and other historical factors start to erode the fabric of meaning

A number of historical factors are going to happen now that begin to undermine our mythos and our feeling “at home” in the world. Alexander the Great plunges much of the world into “domicide,” the destruction of the physical and cultural home. Our world changes radically… people travel far and wide, begin living alongside others who don’t share the same politics, language, religion, etc. Cultures thin and lose their depth. This growing disconnect between ourselves and the world leads to an uprooting. Vervaeke goes into detail about how critical our environment is to our sense of embeddedness, our sense of fitting in and meaning (we’ll see this more later). You (the agent) and your world (the arena) co-identify, you are built and sustained by and through each other. Disrupt the environment and you confuse your existential identity. Philosophical movements like Stoicism attempted to highlight the importance of this co-identification (interestingly, Stoicism arose to address the meaning crisis caused by the fall of Alexander the Great’s empire). Gnosticism also saw the situation clearly… the existential entrapment we found ourselves in.

Then, the Roman empire falls, and we are plunged into a state of despondency that will take more than a millennia to emerge from. Add to this a changing Christianity that becomes less about Agape (a profound, creative love) and more about redemption. Thomas Aquinas observes (with growing concern) that people are becoming more science-minded… that they want things to be logical. Aquinas attempts something genius, but ultimately destructive: he uses the two-worlds mythos to re-state the separation between the natural and divine worlds, but he further asserts that we can no longer ascend to the divine realm through logic, but rather only through faith. He breaks the continuum between science and spirituality, breaks the belief that you can use rationality and reason to overcome self-deception and touch ultimate reality. Now, that “higher world” is touched only through faith – and it can only be believed, not experienced. Martin Luther will further this idea in the Protestant Reformation and convince millions that they have no agency to change their situation, that all they can rely on is faith.

But let’s back up and look at what’s happening in the secular realms. Along comes the bubonic plague, which kills a third of Europe’s population and creates incredible suffering and distress. It also produces a huge labour shortage, which empowers people to sell their labour. We can, for the first time, elevate our power, wealth, and prestige through our own willpower (no religion needed)! Trade and commercialism rise to prominence. Better sea navigation is needed, so our mathematics improve. Copernicus says: “the math works better if you put the sun at the centre,” and so we do. Galileo proves that the stars and heavens move by random forces, and, further, that mathematics is the best language to explain and understand reality. We move even further away from feeling we can participate in any ultimate reality (religion and science now agree on this, but for different reasons). Descartes adds to the growing divide by giving us a new cultural grammar, one that says there are two standards of realness: subjective realness and objective realness, and that they don’t interact. He’s giving us the cultural consensus that only science can come into contact with true reality, not our participatory knowing, not our sensory experience – not the practices that formerly encouraged and allowed us to grow, transform, and self-transcend.  

By the turn of the 18th century, we are ontological orphans. The universe is lifeless, cold, and indifferent. Only science and math can make sense of anything. Beauty, meaning, goodness, and purpose aren’t felt to be features of the real world, the world of objective reality. God is more and more a matter of faith, and we have no agency to save ourselves nor to connect with any absolute reality (save for the subjective reality of what’s going on inside our own heads). Meaning has withdrawn into our own minds. Throw in two World Wars, socioeconomic, political, and environmental upheaval, and you’ve got a meta-crisis on your hands.

To sum the first half of this lecture series: certain aspects of Western religious movements coupled with an increasingly scientific worldview have collapsed two worlds back into one… either because the second world cannot be accessed, or because the second world does not exist (most of us live within the scientific worldview now, and this is the one Vervaeke is most interested in re-homing ourselves within). We have, for all intents and purposes, returned to a one-world mythos because we find the other untenable and unlivable (but that other mythos was the one that legitimized the practices that cultivated meaning). Historical factors like domicide and war have further disconnected us from a reality that feels stable and secure, a disconnect that engenders meaninglessness and a sense of nihilism. But something more is happening here, and that something has to do with the nature of meaning and the features of a relationship with the world that make it feel meaningful. What we’ll discover in episodes 26-50 is that humans experience perennial problems, problems which provoke meaninglessness – problems that were ameliorated by the practices legitimized in a two-worlds mythos, and practices that (for reasons we’ll see), use the same cognitive machinery as meaning-making.

EPISODES 26-50 – Perennial Problems and Solving a Meaning Crisis

So, our two-worlds mythos is no longer a livable worldview, but it was the two-worlds mythos that gave us an account for self-transcendence, insight, wisdom, meaning, etc. In an increasingly scientific worldview, the conception of these, and the pathway to achieving them, is no longer clear (no longer legitimized in any way that grounds itself in objective reality). Vervaeke spends the rest of the series deep diving into a review of cognitive science and his own research to help provide a scientific explanation for insight, wisdom, self-transcendence, and meaning. His goal is to re-legitimize (within a scientific framework) the projects that enhance the cultivation of these things, and that’s the first step to solving the meaning crisis, to give us back a natural worldview that can afford deep meaning in life. The second step to solving the meaning crisis will be to re-engineer enlightenment, which Vervaeke conceives of as an ecology of practices that can reliably ameliorate our perennial problems, those persistent vulnerabilities that make us constantly susceptible to meaninglessness.

We’ll start with the second step first, which takes us to Vervaeke’s theory of Relevance Realization, one of his core research focuses. Vervaeke (accordingly) spends an incredible amount of time over several episodes describing this cognitive machinery (which is far more technical and detailed than I am qualified to dissect). Here’s what I boil it down to (and this is vastly over-simplified): Relevance Realization (RR) is the dynamic cognitive machinery that helps us decide what is relevant from a combinatorially explosive set of possibilities. How we do that is still somewhat mysterious, but it is a mutually constraining and affording system that integrates features like general problem solving, working memory, and consciousness to best frame our experiences. RR is how we connect with the world, how we co-construct the agent:arena relationship, and therefore how we make sense of the environment. What’s important to highlight is that your RR is not about having propositional knowledge, about having facts, or beliefs, or information, it’s about connecting and cohering with reality in a way that is skillful and participatory. One of Vervaeke’s critiques of secularism and modern religion is that they focus too much on the propositional knowing, the having of beliefs and information. What the classical Axial religions and philosophies appreciated was the importance of other kinds of knowing. There’s procedural knowing, knowing how to do something, how to enact a skill. There’s also perspectival knowing, knowing how to perceive the world… knowing how things fit together and what a situation calls for. RR is facilitating these two kinds of knowing, but RR is also a skill that we can liken to participatory knowing… knowing the right relationship with the world and having optimal fitted-ness with the environment. To illustrate with an example: Propositional knowing is knowing the rules of tennis. Procedural knowing is knowing how to swing a racket. Perspectival knowing is knowing whether to forehand or backhand. And participatory knowing is getting into the flow of gameplay, where you’re not thinking, you are just being. It’s clear why RR and participatory knowing are also about optimal connectedness. 

Why does Vervaeke spend so much time developing this RR theory, articulating the different kinds of knowing that exist below the level of propositional knowledge, and emphasizing the difference between having and being? Because RR is also the machinery of meaning making. RR is the machinery that helps us make sense of the world, and that’s what meaning is, it’s sensemaking; it’s a feeling of deep connectedness, of optimal fitted-ness, of at home-ness, of belonging, of coherence… RR is the machinery of meaning-making because it’s the machinery of us, of the self, of the self and the world participating in co-creation and co-emergence. Modern ideologies and belief systems are attempts to create meaning, but they fail for an important reason: they fail because your “meaning-making machinery is not occurring at the level of your propositional knowledge, your beliefs and assertions of which beliefs you adhere to.” It’s not beliefs that give you meaning. Meaning is happening below this level, and so you cannot recover meaning by way of propositional knowledge. When we fail to appreciate that meaning is not about having but rather about being, we experience meaninglessness.

The why and how of meaninglessness – perennial problems

The confusion of being vs. having is one element of meaninglessness, ‘modal confusion,’ and this modal confusion is what Vervaeke calls a “perennial problem,” something that makes us constantly vulnerable to meaninglessness. Modal confusion falls under the functional category of perennial problems; other functional perennial problems include ‘parasitic processing,’ our predisposition to negative cognitive spirals (think on the self-destructive feedback loop of depression, how that engenders feelings of despair). Another is the ‘reflexiveness gap,’ where we are behaving impulsively or with wantonness and therefore losing our agency, our ability to be a different kind of agent that couples more cohesively with the environment. The functional perennial problems of modal confusion, parasitic processing, and reflexiveness gaps all make us susceptible to meaninglessness, are a misuse (and inherent vulnerability) of our RR machinery.

Then there’s the structural category of perennial problems, and these you’ll recognize from the historical factors we discussed (like war and domicide). Structural problems threaten connectedness, the agent:arena relationship. They come in three flavours: absurdity (feeling disconnected from the world), anxiety (feeling disconnected from ourselves), and alienation (feeling disconnected from others). These are aggravated by external environmental factors that destabilize our arena (think climate change, war, pandemics, food and water shortages, the threat of nuclear catastrophe, etc.).

What happens when you take a tennis player and drop them on a golf course? The agent (tennis player) and the arena (golf course) no longer connect, no longer cohere. Any intelligible connection to the environment is gone (absurdity); there are no shared goals or codes of conduct (alienation); their sense of themselves as a significant player with a rational purpose is destroyed (anxiety). That’s the structural contribution to the meaning crisis… it’s when your environment no longer makes sense, when you no longer feel how you fit in or how you belong. We’ve illustrated this through domicide, the destabilization and destruction of your physical/cultural home, but you can see it in other (more transient) real-world examples like homesickness or culture shock. Meaning, like biological fitted-ness, is a relationship between agent and arena; it’s not a property, it’s a relational interaction that is co-constructed. Remember, our agent:arena fitted-ness is afforded to us by our RR (re: the skill of participatory knowing), so this category of perennial problem also connects back to the machinery of meaning-making.

The last category of perennial problems (also connecting to our RR/meaning-making machinery) is the developmental, and this is when existential inertia and existential ignorance combine to create existential entrapment. Existential inertia is when you feel stuck in an agent:arena relationship you no longer want to occupy… maybe one where you feel you’re always picking the wrong kinds of relationships, doing or saying the wrong things, or failing to live up to expectations. Existential ignorance, on the other hand, is when you don’t know which agent:arena relationship would make you most happy, would be most meaningful. Should you have kids, or travel the world? Should you live a bustling city life, or a quiet country life? Should you become a composer, or an astronaut? Existential inertia and ignorance combine to create entrapment, a state where you feel stuck, wanting to be some other way, but 1) unsure how to make that “other way” viable to you, and 2) uncertain about which way is even the right one, which existence would most fulfill you. Existential entrapment causes feelings of meaninglessness, like we’re not living the way we’re meant to be living. This can be understood within the context of our RR machinery too, because what’s missing is an “other” perspectival/participatory knowing – the failure to play at inhabiting a different worldview, a different agent:arena relationship.

How to solve the perennial problems

So, meaninglessness is provoked by historical factors (like domicide) and perennial problems (the vulnerabilities, especially in our RR machinery, that make us perennially susceptible to meaninglessness). We’re nearing the end now and ready to tackle the question: “how do we awaken from the meaning crisis?” Atheists and other skeptics may be slightly let down that there is no turnkey secular solution available at present (and, of course, that’s not Vervaeke’s fault), but Vervaeke can articulate what is required, and that’s: an ecology of practices that address the perennial problems, set within a mythos/worldview that legitimizes and encourages these practices. This ecology of practices is what Vervaeke calls “enlightenment.” Even though there’s no modern turnkey option, here are some examples of practices (secular and religious) that have been used to ameliorate the perennial problems (use this not as an instruction guide, but rather to approach an understanding of the ecosystem required):

·         Parasitic processing – practices that give you optimal fitted-ness (e.g., the Eightfold Path of Buddhism).

·         Modal confusion – practices that help you rediscover the “Being” mode (e.g., mindfulness meditation).

·         Reflexiveness gap – cultivating flow and applying it to the right domains of your life.

·         Absurdity – practices that help you achieve a state of non-duality (e.g., Spinoza’s “Scientific Intuitiva”, Buddhism’s “Prajna”).

·         Alienation – re-establishing community that shares attention and spirit, getting into flow with others (e.g., Plato’s authentic discourse, the CirclingTM Method).

·         Anxiety – practices that help you internalize/indwell the sage (e.g., Plato’s inner dialogue, Christianity’s “Lectio Divina,” Carl Jung’s “active imagination”).

·         Existential entrapment – practice that helps you “occupy” another worldview, that helps you embody a different reality (e.g., Gnostic practices, psychedelics, higher states of consciousness, certain therapeutic exercises like the empty chair technique, etc.).

Re-legitimizing spirituality within a scientific worldview

What’s needed to awaken from the meaning crisis is, in part, to re-establish a fully secular ecology of practices (a re-engineering of enlightenment) that can help us overcome the perennial problems that provoke meaninglessness. The practices must be secular, because we can no longer occupy a two-worlds mythos; our realities have forever converged on a single, brilliant, natural world, with no place for celestial spookiness. And the perennial problems, too, must be describable using scientific concepts of cognition, which Vervaeke has tried to do with his theory of Relevance Realization.

Vervaeke thinks we can (and must) go farther, though. It’s not enough to describe meaning, we must also have a scientific account for other spiritual elements, like wisdom, self-transcendence, and insight, all of which are tied to meaning, and all of which exemplify optimal functioning of RR. There’s an abundance of info to dig into from the series, but here are some of Vervaeke’s high-level proposals: knowledge is overcoming ignorance (propositional knowing), while wisdom is overcoming foolishness/self-deception, which is all about transframing (a perspectival/participatory skillfulness). Insight is converting ill-defined problems into well-defined problems with the right formulation and framing, such that you shift your salience landscaping and make novel connections that afford a new reality. Self-transcendence is the wise use of perspectival knowing to step outside self-referential framing.

Without a scientific accounting for these spiritual features, they run the risk of getting lost in the wash, of being de-legitimized. And seeing as how they all connect to the machinery of RR, and therefore the machinery of meaning… if we want meaning, we need them – not supernaturally conceived, but rationally realized.

The religion of no religion

We’ve seen why a belief-oriented return to religion won’t work, but when we rejected religion for its unscientific propositional dogma, we also lost the functionality of religion… the ecology of practices that helped us address our perennial problems… we lost the community, the forum for existential dialogue, and the legitimization of all this within a cohesive worldview (proper nod to the ancient philosophical movements that accomplished the same). What we need now is a religion that’s not a religion, a “Religio,” a pre-Cartesian approach that resurrects the other kinds of knowing, that re-instates the importance of being, that retains and encourages the critical facets of spirituality. Beliefs won’t be enough, because meaning doesn’t come from having beliefs, it comes from being in an optimal relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with the world. All of this speaks not to an objective reality or a subjective reality (like Descartes proposed), but a transjective reality, one in which the agent and arena can never be separated because the agent and arena are co-created, co-identifying, and fundamentally indivisible. It speaks to an appreciation of our meaning-making machinery as something with transjective value, something that is valuable because it is constitutive to valuing anything at all.

Recapture this – recapture wisdom, insight, and self-transcendence – re-engineer enlightenment, address the perennial problems, illuminate it all in the light of secular thinking, re-situate it within a world we want to belong to, strengthen it with community, and then we can awaken from the meaning crisis.