John Vervaeke: The Meaning Crisis and Beyond

Elizabeth Rovere:

Hello and welcome to Wonderstruck. I am your host, Elizabeth Rovere. I’m a clinical psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. I am really curious about experiences of wonder and awe and how they transform us.

My guest on this episode is John Vervaeke. John teaches perception, cognition, and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Toronto. He has reached a global audience through his YouTube channel, where nearly a million viewers have watched his 51-part series, Awakening From The Meaning Crisis. Last summer, John took part in Wonderstruck’s first-ever symposium held in Buonconvento, Italy, in partnership with Five Books and Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. Our interview is recorded on location there. Listening to John is an act of open-mindedness and ambition, and every time I hear him, I take away something new.

Coming up, it’s a powerful one as John proposes structures for enhanced communication, relationships, and introspection that all lead to a more profound engagement with compassion-based tools and that tap into wonder to create a deeper relationship with reality.

So, John, you created a YouTube series called Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, and it’s about how to cultivate wisdom and reclaim our ability to derive meaning from our lives and how we as humans arrived at this point of crisis. What events in your own life led to this topic?

John Vervaeke:

In my own life, I was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian family that gave me a taste for the transcendent, but also traumatized me significantly. So, I left that version of Christianity, and I was hungry and I started looking around at… this was sort of a personal meaning crisis. I was in my first year at university and I encountered the figure of Socrates in Plato’s Republic, and for me that, ‘Oh, that’s what I’m looking for.’ I’m looking for this very powerful integration of philosophy and spirituality and the cultivation of wisdom. The problem with that is that the topic of wisdom, even though it’s in the name of the discipline, you know – philia sophia, the fellowship love of wisdom – the topic of wisdom drops off the table. So, I continued on with the academic philosophy and then later cognitive science and psychology, because I was very interested in the tools it was providing for me.

But my hunger for what I saw exemplified in Socrates was still not being satisfied. So, there was a place down the road for me, literally down the road, called the Tai Chi Meditation Center.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Interesting.

John Vervaeke:

So, I went there and I started doing tai chi, vipassana, metta. That’s where I first, what I would later call, encountered an ecology of practices. So, it made a profound impact on me not only in terms of the content, but also in the manner in which I was being trained.

Now, I was running these sort of two lives in parallel – this life of the cultivation of wisdom and this academic life – but cognitive science took a turn, I think, for the better, and went into what’s called 4E cognitive science, that cognition is inherently embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. And I found people there wanting to talk about transformative experience, mindfulness, wisdom, et cetera. And so, I started to connect my professional life and my personal life. And when I made those connections and talked about them, my students, their eyes would light up and I realized, ‘Oh, there’s something more general going on here.’ So, then I started to study in order to, first of all, teach them better. What’s the background? What’s going on? Why is this happening so pervasively? Well, that’s how I got into this argument around – arguments in the good sense – around the meaning crisis and what we can learn about meaning, about participating in the generation of meaning, such that we can ameliorate it.

And then what happened is I was doing this and one of my former students came to me and he said, “Why don’t you turn it into a video series?” And that’s how it started.

Elizabeth Rovere:

One of your students said this.

John Vervaeke:

Yeah, one of my former students. Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I love it. That’s fantastic. You know, when you were just saying that, as the four Es and moving into cognitive science and blending, you said, academics and this and tai chi and meditation, it seems like you’re connecting these processes. It’s like in metaphysics, almost.

John Vervaeke:

Yeah. I mean, that’s a good way of putting it. What I had to do, and I was getting help from both sides, is I wanted to create a worldview – a scientific framework, that could bring those two things together.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes, exactly.

John Vervaeke:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s funny. It almost seems like, ‘How can we not have it?’ It almost seems commonsensical that we should or would.

John Vervaeke:

Yeah, that’s, I think, a really good question. It’s often caused me to wonder, and that’s part of what drove me to the first half of Awakening From The Meaning Crisis. ‘How did we get to be in such an estranged place in which we have this scientific worldview that explains everything except our capacity to generate science?’

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes. Yeah, exactly.

John Vervaeke:

And so, we probably do not fit into that scientific worldview, and that’s a kind of cosmic loneliness.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes, yes.

John Vervaeke:

And so, it does need a kind of ontological answer to it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes. It leads me to my next question, but I also just have to underscore, when you said you would talk about these things and your students’ eyes would light up…

John Vervaeke:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

…and then, you know, you create this series that is – it’s 50 hours, right?

John Vervaeke:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

52 hours.

John Vervaeke:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And people are compelled and they’re watching it and their eyes are lighting up because we are in some ways hungry for this. Which leads me to this question of, you know, you cite a global mental health crisis as an impetus for your series and discuss therapy as a modern mechanism for humans to reclaim their sense of knowing, and that also psychedelics can help this. And then it’s kind of going back to that question: when did we lose our sense of knowing and how do we come back to it? And part of it is through, actually, your YouTube series, and part of it is for us to start generating these kinds of questions…

John Vervaeke:

Right.

Elizabeth Rovere:

…and becoming aware of it.

John Vervaeke:

So, in order to answer that question well, I think what we need to do is make some distinctions between different kinds of knowing.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Okay.

John Vervaeke:

Because what I want to say: we lost awareness of three of the four kinds of knowing, and those three are the ones that are most responsible for that sense of connectedness that we experience as meaning in life.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah.

John Vervaeke:

So, the first kind of knowing is the one we’re most familiar with, because of the way our culture prioritizes it, which is ‘propositional knowing’. This is knowing that something is the case, knowing that cats are mammals, and you have a specific kind of memory for that, semantic memory. So, if I ask you, “Are cats mammals?”, you’ll say, “Yes”. If I ask you, “When did you learn that?”, you’ll go, “Well, I don’t know. I just have it as a fact. I have it as a proposition.” And it comes with it a certain notion of truth, truth as this gathering evidence and argument that leads to the proposition as its conclusion.

And of course, this is predominant in science. It’s predominant even in our cultural attitudes. We think that if we know somebody’s beliefs, we know all we need to know about them. This is why ideologies are so powerful right now.

So, this is kind of propositional tyranny…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. Yes.

John Vervaeke:

…the fact that this kind of knowing is given prioritization. And what we tend to exclude are the other kinds of knowing. So, just to briefly go over them, ‘procedural knowing’ is knowing how to do something. It’s a skill. Knowing how to swim, how to catch a ball. It’s in a different kind of memory called procedural memory. You don’t really ask if your skills are true or false. You ask if they’re powerful or weak, and so it has a different set of criteria.

Then below that, making it possible, is you have to have a kind of knowing that tells you which skills to acquire or activate. This is ‘perspectival knowing’. This is due to this interlocking system between your state of consciousness and how the world presents itself to you as a situation – how you are situated in it, how it discloses. So, you are in a particular state of mind right now, and what’s that’s doing is it’s calling out, making certain identities very salient to you, certain facts, certain salient; other facts, like what’s going on behind you right now on the wall, that’s not in your perspective.

And so, the point about perspectival knowing is ‘How are you finding things salient and obvious, so that you know which skills to apply?’ So, perspectival knowing is knowing what it’s like to be you in this particular state of mind here now in the corresponding situation. And it has [it’s] own kind of memory, episodic memory. So, unlike when I asked you about, “When did you learn cats are mammals?”, I can ask you, “Can you remember your wedding?”

Elizabeth Rovere:

Mm-hmm.

John Vervaeke:

Yes, you do, and that’s an episode. In an episode, what your episodic memory does is precisely… doesn’t store all the facts. It stores how things were salient to you, the salience landscape around that event. And again, perspectives aren’t true or false. They’re not powerful or weak. They come with a capacity of really being there. It’s called presence. We know about this in virtual games. What the designers are after is a sense of presence, of really being in the game, being here now as you, right? That’s perspectival knowing.

And then beneath this is ‘participatory knowing’. Participatory knowing is the way you and the world have been co-shaped by physics, by biology, by culture, so that you fit together, you belong together. You are an agent in an arena, and they fit together and they make sense. So, for example, the fact that I and the environment are both shaped by gravity helps to make this chair work for me. This chair would not work for me in space. The fact that my biology has made me bipedal also influences whether or not I fit the chair. Culture has taught me how to sit in chairs and what chairs are. So, all these ways in which the agent-arena relationship is generated by you and the world. So, that has a particular kind of memory attached to it. It’s this weird particular kind of memory you call ‘yourself’. Yourself, your sense of identity, which is different than your episodic memory, different than your procedural memory, different than your semantic.

Now, why did I go on about all of those? Because the procedural, even more so the perspectival, even more so the participatory, those are the kinds of knowing that bind you to yourself, and to the world, and to other people. And when we lost contact with them, we lost awareness of how to participate in those processes – those embodied cognitive processes – that generate meaning. So, while our brain is still doing it, our embodied brain is still doing it, we are sort of severed in terms of the way we are reflective agents from that machinery within our psyche.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Say that last part again. We are sort of separated.

John Vervaeke:

Yeah, severed. So, what it means is, if you don’t have a way of talking about and understanding these kinds of knowing, you have a tremendous difficulty in integrating what they’re doing for you into your scientific world view. Let me give you an example. Music. People find music incredibly meaningful. It’s the thing they most associate with the sacred. What’s going on in music? Well, propositionally, almost nothing. And so, people are thrown into, “Well, music is about my emotions or my feelings.” Music isn’t about your emotions or feelings. It might do that, but music is more about shaping your perspectives, changing your identity.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Sometimes listening to very profound music can feel almost like a transcendent experience in that way of connecting with others and connecting with something more.

John Vervaeke:

Right, but given the dominant way of talking about things, how do you make sense of this connection?

Elizabeth Rovere:

About music?

John Vervaeke:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Do I have to stay within the dominant way of talking about things?

John Vervaeke:

Well, no, you can break out of it, and that would be interesting. How would you break out of… Right, so the dominant language is: there’s subjective reality, there’s objective reality, and there’s a propositional connection between them. That’s how we bridge between them. And that doesn’t really work for music, because music’s inside you and outside you at the same time. It’s playing with your salience, landscaping. It’s playing with your identity.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, the problem is, John, is that we’ve sort of been immersed in these conversations today. And so, I’m sitting here thinking like, ‘Well, but it’s part of the harmony of nature. It’s the part of an attunement with something that’s inside, that’s also outside, that kind of connects to the whole.’ I mean, that would be probably how I… because again, probably going back to that other way of explain… because that is how I sense that I feel it, when I hear that kind of music and I’m just somewhere else, or it does evoke a sense of compassion or can bring me to tears or I’m moved. So, maybe that… Am I too stuck in the emotions saying it that way?

John Vervaeke:

Well, I mean, I don’t want to deny that emotions are playing a central role, but you… It’s ironic, right? You relied on a musical metaphor to try and actually explain. You talked about attunement.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, and harmony.

John Vervaeke:

Right, attunement and harmony. And this goes back to Heidegger’s notion of a deeper sense of truth, which isn’t the propositional representation that bridges between subjectivity and objectivity. This deeper sense of truth – Aletheia – is what I call the transjective.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Aletheia.

John Vervaeke:

Aletheia. It’s the Greek notion for truth. It means unconcealment. It means remembering.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Unconcealment and remembering. Wow.

John Vervaeke:

Right, so the idea is there has to be something deeper than the subjective and the objective, and they have to be in the right relationship for subjectivity and objectivity to possibly connect. And that’s what we’re talking about here.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. Yeah, that’s cool. And that’s called Aletheia? That’s what…

John Vervaeke:

That’s… Yeah. Some people call it Aletheia, but that’s what’s basically going on.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Is that related to gnosis…

John Vervaeke:

I think…

Elizabeth Rovere:

…of non-rational knowing?

John Vervaeke:

Well, or alternatively rational.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Alternatively rational. I like that.

John Vervaeke:

So, we have… corresponding to the sort of propositional tyranny, we have reduced rationality – ratio, which is proper proportioning – we have reduced it to logical coherence. That to be rational is to be logical. And this is to miss the rationality of your skills, the rationality of your perspectives, the rationality of your identity – and do those things properly attune you to reality? That’s the question.

Think about this. But think about before you could ever wield a logical argument, you have to be paying proper attention to the right things. You have to properly apprehend them. You have to properly take up the right role and identity. You have to properly find what is salient, irrelevant – and then you could start marshaling the propositions and the argument. So, this is a deeper kind of ratio: reason, proper proportioning. And the point of that ratio is to properly proportion your attention, your consciousness, et cetera, your character, so that you are in that deep state of connectedness to reality.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, and that’s really beautiful, this deep state of connectedness to a reality, which is this aspect of, or this is a deeper sense of reason, that is not necessarily just logic. And it does seem like we just put them in the same basket: logical, rational, reason. It’s like it’s all this very, kind of, almost concretized.

John Vervaeke:

So, why you get this reduction of ratio to the logical is two things. First of all, there was the preponderance of propositional tyranny, and the relationship between propositions is a logical relation, which is unlike the relationship between skills or between skills and states of mind or traits of character. So, virtue drops off as an important feature of rationality and all that’s left is illogicality.

Now, Descartes is seeing the scientific revolution and he’s seeing… I need you, in fact, to reimagine the terror of the Copernican Revolution. The Copernican Revolution, we all can be stone-cold sober. There’s nothing wrong with how our eyes are working. We can all agree that we see the sun rising in the east, passing overhead and setting in the west, and we’re all wrong. So, three of the most powerful tools we have for determining if something is real are all being satisfied, and yet we’re hearing it’s an illusion. This is coinciding with the Protestant Reformation that’s saying that the church is no longer trustworthy and its worldview is no longer trustworthy. So, Descartes’s looking at all of this, and he says, “Well, what’s the one thing that’s connecting us to reality in the new science?” It’s math. It’s doing computational processes over proposition. So, he says, basically, that is where we have to place all of our epistemic bet. So, rationality gets reduced to the kind of logic you’re using when you’re doing computation, the inferential manipulation of propositions, and you’re trying to achieve something like certainty, and that this will give you the missing connection through illusion to reality.

Now, the problem for us is we really adopted that model, even though we now know that that attempt to come up with a purely complete computational account of reality is sort of doomed to failure, and the attempt to find certainty is equally doomed to failure. So, we still are trapped within the Cartesian mode, even though in many important ways it’s bankrupt for us.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And we’re stuck because it gives us a sense of security, even if it’s illusory?

John Vervaeke:

Yeah. It’s because we haven’t generated for people alternative proposals to ‘How do you find the connection trustworthy?’ And what we have left is, well, logical, deductive certainty is how we get the connection to reality – and we can trust it because it is a computational machine that will never work improperly or imperfectly.

The problem with that is that is not an account… And, I mean, this has been going on for a couple hundred years in philosophy. That’s not a viable account of how we generate knowledge. So, think about an alternative, which is the connection to reality isn’t one of certainty, it’s one of faithfulness. I’ll presume you’re faithful to your partner. Does that mean you have absolute certain beliefs about them? Of course not. They are still beyond whatever cognitive grasp you have of them. There’s still something ultimately mysterious about them that nevertheless intrigues you, or the relationship would start to grow stale. So, what is it that you’re doing? You’re not getting a final certain picture. What are you doing? You’re trying to transform as they do so that you are maintaining a continuity of contact rather than a certainty of your propositions, and…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

John Vervaeke:

Right? And so, notice how I’m bringing in the other kinds of knowing to describe this way of finding a trustworthy relationship. Now, what I’m proposing to you is that kind of ‘faithfulness within love’ is a kind of ‘trustworthiness within relationship’ we can find with ‘being’ itself.

Elizabeth Rovere:

With being.

John Vervaeke:

Yeah. We can fall in love with reality again. I think one of the things that people have meant by the term God is the beauty of the depth of what is most real and how it calls us to faithfulness. It calls us to love and to faithfulness.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes. That’s beautiful and it’s well said. So, if I’m understanding you right, you’re saying in the way that we are in a relationship with someone that we love, it sort of provides this kind of continuity and mystery. It’s not some sort of calculated, reductionist sort of fact.

John Vervaeke:

Yeah. Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Because who wants to be in that relationship?

John Vervaeke:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Right, it’s done. It’s over.

John Vervaeke:

Yeah. Yes, yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And to the next, and to the next calculation. And it’s like, we’re not robots.

John Vervaeke:

No, exactly.

Elizabeth Rovere:

But we sort of reduce ourselves in that way because of… I mean, it makes me think that we reduce ourselves in that way because somehow it’s like we’re too afraid or it’s not safe. Because when you’re in that other realm, that kind of ongoing connection, you’re in the mystery. And maybe that’s scary?

John Vervaeke:

It is. I mean, so Gabriel Marcel made a very famous distinction in his essay, Ontological Mystery, between problem and a mystery. A problem is you put a particular frame around it of what’s relevant and important, what your background and foreground, and then you solve it. A mystery is there’s some issue that’s challenging me. I put a framework around it to try and render it a problem, and the framework itself becomes problematic and comes into question. And so, I move to a more expansive framework to try and get something that will turn this into a pro… and that fails because it becomes equally problematic and so on and so on. So, the proper relationship to mystery is not to seek conclusion, but to, again, find that through line so you can be carried through it in a trustworthy manner.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that feels exciting. That seems very exciting.

John Vervaeke:

Well, what happens is you get a reciprocal opening. So, let’s go back to people. How do people fall in love? And of course, there’s idiosyncratic things that are going on, but the work of Aaron, that’s the person’s last name, and other shows, this is how it goes for all the kinds of love. I disclose something about me and instead of you reading that manipulatively or destroying it as a memory, you reciprocate by divulging something about you, and then I open up more because of that and then you open up more, and we reciprocally open. And then we find that we are in that relationship because that reciprocal opening takes on a life of its own. We feel it is ratio – reasonable – to be, right, to trust it and to be faithful to it. And what I’m proposing is we can do the reciprocal opening with ourselves, with other people in the world, such that we get that deep kind of connectedness again.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. You know, my association goes to group psychotherapy, because you’re in this group of people and you’re having those kinds of experiences back and forth in a new opening here. And it’s within this frame of relationship, and it’s within a frame of, ‘Even if I’m going to argue with you or I don’t like what you said or I’m going to still get somewhere else because I’m in the frame of relationship, I’m not going to walk away from you.’

John Vervaeke:

Right. So, with the help of my good friends Guy Sengstock and Christopher Mastropietro, we have been trying to take Circling practices that bring about these kinds of interpersonal intimacy in communication and take people through a progression inspired by the Socratic and neo-platonic tradition. So, in Circling what people discover is they discover a kind… They do this reciprocal opening because they learn a particular style of communication. They’re communicating in order to commune.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes.

John Vervaeke:

Right? Right.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Communicating in order to commune. That’s great.

John Vervaeke:

And so, what happens is they discover a kind of intimacy, and they’re lit up by it. They very frequently say things like, “I’ve been hungry for this kind of intimacy, but I didn’t know it because it’s not sexual intimacy. It’s not familial intimacy. It’s something else.” It’s this other… It’s fellowship intimacy, right? It’s philia… the Greek term. And then what we wanted to do and what we’re working on is, okay, can we generate… to use Circling practices and mindfulness practices to generate a very powerful dynamic of philia and then can we turn that onto sophia?

So, you get people first experiencing this intimacy, and then what will often happen is they’ll talk about the third. They’ll talk about, in addition to all of us, there’s this ‘we’ space that’s taking on a life of its own, the logos, and it’s gathering us together and unfolding, and we’re being drawn along. And so, what happens is they start to take – if they’re properly educated, which we try to do in these workshops – they can take that interpersonal intimacy and they can turn it into ontological intimacy. They can start to… First of all, they’ll be intimate with each other, and then they’re intimate with the logos. “What’s going on there? I’m so connected to it.” And then they share that. They commune not only with each other, but with this logos, the way the conversation is taking on a life of its own and opening them up and opening…

And then they can proceed to intimacy through that logos to what is most real. It gives them that kind of sense of that kind of connection. It’s not that it’s producing profound propositions, but they get, ‘Oh, this is the kind of connection that will take me deep into reality,’ just like you know in your partnership. ‘This is the kind of connection that will take me deep into the reality of this person.’

Elizabeth Rovere:

And that’s the way of getting out of the despair.

John Vervaeke:

Yes, yes. And so, what happens is that people that are by self-identification, self-reference, not religious at all, not… some of them, not even the catchphrase ‘spiritual but not religious’, they’re just… But as soon as this starts happening, they start spontaneously to use religious language to try and talk about what’s emerging for them. They get this sense of a spirit that takes place in the group, and then they get the sense that they’re being led – listen to how the language sounds religious – being led by the spirit into a deeper connectedness to reality.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Mm-hmm. But you’re calling it logos as well.

John Vervaeke:

Yes, yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So, I’m also wondering, I don’t know if people listening will actually understand what you mean by logos…

John Vervaeke:

Oh.

Elizabeth Rovere:

…but what does that actually mean?

John Vervaeke:

Sure. So, this is one of these really powerful terms from the Greek philosophical tradition that gets taken up into Christianity. So, logos is often translated as ‘word’, but it can also mean reason. It can mean formative principle. And it comes from a verb, which means to gather things together so they belong together. And Heraclitus used this metaphor of, you know, you gather the logs, but the fire has to catch of its own and grow of its own, or it won’t be a fire. It’s the same thing. You can give people a bunch of practices for coming into this, but you can’t produce the logos. If it doesn’t take on a life of its own, then you haven’t… you’re not participating in the logos.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You haven’t connected.

John Vervaeke:

That’s right. That’s right. And so, I use the word logos because it has all of those associations in play, but funnily enough, it’s the basis of our word logic. And so, we’ve lost another way of talking about what we’ve talking about because we’ve lost the practices of logos because we have reduced everything to the practices of logic.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So, do you think that we’ve just been so traumatized by this Copernican terror that we just haven’t recovered?

John Vervaeke:

It’s not just that we haven’t been… We’re trauma… I mean, it’s the Copernican terror, the Protestant revolution, the scientific worldview. We have to also remember the tremendous power of that scientific worldview. You have to remember the tremendous… Look at our… The fact that we separated logic out of the sum total of logos has allowed us to make the computational devices that we’re using in order to record this podcast. There’s been tremendous empowerment. But what’s been happening for quite some time is a realization that when I want a life-giving conversation with you, I’m not looking for a logical organization of propositions. I’m looking for it to catch fire in a particular way and organize and take on a life of its own, so that you and I could both get to places we couldn’t get to on our own.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, which… I keep bringing it back to group therapy, but I’m like, yeah, that’s just exactly what it is. And then you can bring it out into other relationships with people outside of this circle.

John Vervaeke:

Exactly. Exactly.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And it takes the life of its own on.

John Vervaeke:

Right.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Because you’re bringing that third into out there.

John Vervaeke:

Yes. Exactly. Exactly. That’s exactly right. And that’s what we mean when we’re trying to get philia to turn onto sophia – wisdom – so that that transfer occurs. And what you’re doing is you’re trying to have ratio religio – well-, properly proportioned connectedness to reality.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And when you say ratio religio, I think of, so, ratio as this deeper sense of reason…

John Vervaeke:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

…and religio as that unity.

John Vervaeke:

So that…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Binding. Binding.

John Vervaeke:

Right. Yeah, so it’s considered to be one of the two possible etymological roots for the word religion, but it means to bind, to connect together.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, to connect together. And then when you were talking about logic and logos, it’s also, I think of it as… so, we’ve reduced it to get these calculations, to have this type of certainty so that we can somewhat feel grounded. And yet it’s just that it’s there. This other side of logos is right next to logic. It’s just been forgotten about or it’s like… So, now it’s knocking at the door right now.

John Vervaeke:

Yes, and getting the right characterization of that door is part of my work. So, you can think of logic as what’s called – and I mean this in the deeper sense, not the more current sense – it’s algorithmic. An algorithm is a problem-solving technique that is guaranteed to give you a solution or prove that a solution is impossible. That’s algorithmic, right? That’s what math is, and logic are there, algorithmic. What you face when you’re trying to solve problems is the fact that there is so much information available. There’s so much memory available. There’s so many possibilities you consider. There’s so many ways of coordinating… that the search space to try and search it all and find the absolute best solution, you can’t do it. You can’t use an algorithm, because if you were to try to search that whole search space, it would take you the rest of the history of the universe. So, an average game of chess has more possible sequences of movements you can make – this is a game of chess – than the total, sum total number of atomic particles in the universe.

Elizabeth Rovere:

What?

John Vervaeke:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I can’t wrap my head around that. I had no idea.

John Vervaeke:

That’s how vast… That’s just a very limited thing. So, even the best computer programs for playing chess don’t search all possibilities. They have heuristic ways of trying to cut it down and zero in on what’s relevant. Now, so logos is not algorithmic, but it’s also not arbitrary. So, your strategy isn’t ‘you just guess’. So, you want to go into a conversation and you try… I’m going to try and make it certain that the conversation is the best conversation I’ve ever had. You can’t do it. You can’t. There’s no algorithm for doing that. But you can’t just arbitrarily say things to people: Porcupine. Albania. Second World War. That doesn’t work either. So, most of logos – and I think therefore properly understood, most of ratio: reason – is found between the arbitrary and the algorithmic. And we have tended to make those an exhaustive dichotomy. It’s either algorithmic or it’s arbitrary. And the point is no, no, no. There’s this big doorway between the two.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that’s what you’re talking about; that is potentially the doorway, and it’s also the middle. It’s the middle. Well, it’s that connection.

John Vervaeke:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And how can we keep splitting as either/or and dichotomizing?

John Vervaeke:

Because, I mean, I’m trying to get a paper published right now with Anna Riedl, because we’ve been trying to argue that even when we pretend to deal with uncertainty, we are exactly engaging in pretense. So, we’ll say things like, “Oh, well, what we do is calculate the probabilities of this and this and this.” Probability, though, is not genuine uncertainty. It’s just a qualified claim. Partially what we’re trying to argue, with a lot of other people that are doing work on embodied rationality, is most of rationality – ratio religio – is about dealing with radical uncertainties.

And you go, well, what does that mean? Let me give you something we’ve already talked about a mystery. How do you enter into proper relationship? I used to do this with my stepsons when they were teenagers. One, he had a big whiteboard in his room, and I would go in when he wasn’t there, and I’d write things on the board to try and shake him up. And I would write things like, ‘Does time take time to happen?’ Because if you give an answer to that, you’ve misunderstood what’s happening. But you can’t also opt out of being a temporal being. You can’t say, “You know what? I’m just going to not be a temporal being.”

Elizabeth Rovere:

I’d like to time out of that for a little while.

John Vervaeke:

Yeah. But you can’t. And this is part of what was going into Heidegger’s classic, Being And Time. He was trying to get us into what he would call the proper comportment – the right relationship with time – not any sort of final certainty about it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Because there is no final certainty about it?

John Vervaeke:

Right, because the idea is when we try to talk about it, we have to try and use something more foundational than time in order to understand time. And then we get caught in the loops of our how our own cognition is an inherently temporal process.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, but yet we are talking about it.

John Vervaeke:

We can, and this is logos. We are talking about it and we are disclosing it. We’re doing Aletheia, but we are not producing absolutely certain propositions. The same thing when I ask you what your ‘self’ is, and what you’ll do is give me some things, this is from James, you’ll give me sets of memories and other things. And this is you looking at what he called all the ‘me’s. This is me. This is me. This is…

But you know what’s never in that picture? The ‘I’ that is actually looking at all of the ‘me’s. And you’ll say, “Well, I’ll bring it into the picture,” and you bring it here and you’ve still left it behind. So, there’s a mystery. Now, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about the self. We should, and we do, precisely because, at least some of the time, we are trying to get into a virtuous relationship with selfhood and personhood. We take it that it is one of our deepest obligations to treat beings that have a sense of self in a particular way. That is, I would argue, the fundamental grounding of morality.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Where does psychedelics fit into this?

John Vervaeke:

Well, in a really interesting way. So, I’m going to talk about two things. I’m going to talk about AI research, and then I’m going to come bring it back to this Circling dynamic.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, yeah. But before you do that though, the Circling dynamic. So, that is something that’s new to me. Where does the Circling dynamic come from?

John Vervaeke:

It comes from a practice called Circling invented by Guy Sengstock. And it’s a way in engaging in dialogical mindfulness and communication for communing. So, instead of saying things to you, I might say, “Being here with you, I noticed that you seem happy.” And then you would respond and you’d say something about being here with me. And then we start to… Right? So, what we’re doing is we’re trying to get reciprocal opening going. And if you remain mindfully present in your body – as opposed to flipping off into purely abstract, distracted thought – this connection starts to form.

Elizabeth Rovere:

But is it based in emotional communication or is it…

John Vervaeke:

It doesn’t have to be based in emotional communication.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It doesn’t have to.

John Vervaeke:

So, I think that we should add a fifth E to… and we should have emotion as part of the four Es, because one of the big arguments and proposals coming out of 4E cognitive science is that all of cognition is inherently emotion, emotional – and all of emotion is inherently cognitive, which rubs against our romantic, in a philosophical sense, grammar. But think about it. Remember how one of the differences between you and a computer is you care about some information rather than others. You’re zeroing in and finding this important or obvious, and that’s irrelevant and you ignore it. There’s an act of caring at the core of that ability of relevance realization. It is not cold calculation, because you are committing your precious and limited resources of attention and time and biological metabolism. That’s why we even say “Pay attention”. There’s always caring bound up in it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, and also just the relationship of being that kind of connection and our interconnection is based on, like you were saying, love or some kind of feeling. Even if it’s not love, it’s still an emotional feeling. It’s something.

John Vervaeke:

It’s, yeah, or at least affective. And so, emotion and cognition are deeply interwoven, and that’s what you experience in Circling. You experience this deep interpenetration of how you are energetically moving – that’s what emotion means, energetically moving towards something – but how this movement is bound up with your very active of sense-making. So, when I’m trying to even see an object, I have to move. This is Gibson’s great point. Well, I can sit still, then your eyes saccade and you shift your attention. So, moving and knowing are inherently bound up together.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Mm-hmm. So, bring it into the psychedelics. What does that have to do with it?

John Vervaeke:

So, psychedelics. So, we have very powerful artificial intelligence called neural networks. And what they are; they’re like us. They’re really, really powerful pattern detectors. They say, “Well, that’s great. Super powerful pattern detectors.” Well, there’s a really deep problem that comes with them. The problem is like this: whenever we’re facing a knowledge move, we have the sample of data that we’re using and that we’re trying to see if it accurately represents the population. This is the central problem of statistics. This would be a bad survey: we gather all the people here, and I say, “How many of you think embodiment’s important?” I bet you everybody puts up their hand, and we get ‘most people think that embodiment’s important’. We go, “No, no. This is a skewed sample. No, no. The sample has all these properties that are probably not the case in the population.”

So, neural networks face that problem, and what they do is they call… it’s called overfitting to the data. They find all these patterns in the sample that don’t generalize to the population. So, they overfit to the data. What you have to do periodically is you have to turn off nodes or throw noise into the system, because it actually liberates them and breaks them out so that they can explore more of the space. They don’t get locked in.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Ah, okay. Yeah.

John Vervaeke:

And you can even do this… This is the work of Stephen and Dixon. They’re trying to… You get people in. They get stuck on an insight problem. And let’s say the computer screen, you fill it with static and you do a little bit of… or jiggle the screen around. You could often trigger the needed insight just by introducing the noise.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wait, so it’s just like hitting the television set to get it unstuck.

John Vervaeke:

Yeah, yeah, kind of. Yeah. Woodward and others… I share the proposal, say, well, what we’re doing with psychedelics is we’re doing exactly that. We’re throwing noise into the system so that we loosen overfitting and connections can be made that normally wouldn’t be made.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Okay. And that’s, I guess, similar in some ways to what the contemplative practices are doing.

John Vervaeke:

So, this struck me really powerfully, because what happens in psychedelics is the parts of the brain that are normally shouting get more quiet, and things that are not normally talking to each other talk to each other. And so, I was doing a Circling practice, and I realized I was getting into the same phenomenological state as in psychedelics, because what was happening is the dominant monological way of speaking was being toned down and I’m having to connect to all these perspectives other than my own and make all these connections that I’m not normally making. And so, it was starting to have the same feeling as the psychedelics.

So, I think a lot of these practices work through these disruptive strategies. What you’re basically doing is taking a highly self-organizing system and you sort of bump it so that it’ll re-self-organize. This is a really important problem, because if insight and the ability to ratio – properly proportion, properly frame things – is the core to wisdom, then you’re in this really interesting situation that these disruptive strategies are actually central to ratio.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I mean, is there a containment of the disruption or is it like, we don’t know how they’re going to disrupt?

John Vervaeke:

No, that’s exactly the right question. You have to get them… so, it’s what’s called self-organizing criticality. You have to disrupt them enough – that’s a system going critical – so a new structure is possible, but not so much that the structure falls apart.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Destroys. Yes, yes, yes.

John Vervaeke:

So, what your brain is doing is it’s trying to find that sweet spot right near there, where it can maintain the continuity of stability but always be open.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. It reminds me of this… I think it’s Winnicott, the Fear Of breakdown?

John Vervaeke:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And it’s like when… I’m a clinical psych, right? I’m a psychologist. I’m a therapist. So, when people are like, “I’m having a breakdown of memory,” it’s like, good.

John Vervaeke:

Good. Yes. Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that’s awesome. You are on the verge of making a change that’s a very profound and powerful one. And it comes back to this idea of when people really hit this sense of deep despair and everything is falling apart and it’s critical and that kind of disruption, then something can emerge. Something shifts.

John Vervaeke:

Right. So, notice the problem they face if they try… and this is LA Paul’s work – she literally wrote the book on transformative experience called Transformative Experience. When you’re in that place, you can’t infer your way. And so, for many people, because they have not developed the trustworthy connectedness, the self-organizing capacities of their cognition, they can’t trust to go through this. And I take it that one of the things a therapist does is to help build that kind of trust for them.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I wanted to spontaneously Circle with you about something, because I want to just say that when I’ve described you to other people, like my husband, I’m like, “Oh, you know, John Vervaeke…” and my experience of you is this person that is so curious and fascinated by learning, and excited, and almost that curious mind – the childlike excitement about something new. And I was like, “He’s going to be great. He’ll want to talk about, like, anything, because he’ll find something fascinating and new about anything, almost.”

John Vervaeke:

Well, I aspire to that. Plato talks about that sense of play and wonder, and of course, Jesus of Nazareth: you have to be little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. And so, I think gaining the intimacy with your cognitive powers – I’m trying to use non-technical words here – such that you are able to go through profound frame breaking so you can make new and more powerful frame making, I think that is a very important virtue that we have lost.

So, people concentrate on their autobiography. They think this is… again, sets of propositions, their story, thinking that this is sufficient. But Socrates, for example, says, “No, no, you don’t want your autobiography. You want your owner’s manual. You want to know what are the actual functions and powers and perils of your cognitive processes, such that you can enter into proper relationship to them and be connected to them in the right way.”

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that’s great. I love that. That’s fantastic.

John Vervaeke:

Thank you.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, thank you. And then the one other thing, I would love it if you would just say… you’ve talked about wonder and the difference between wonder and curiosity.

John Vervaeke:

Yes. Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And you’ve said wonder is to put oneself in the momentum of mystery, and I’m wondering if you would just talk about that a little bit.

John Vervaeke:

So, this goes to an idea from Erich Fromm that he bases it on ideas he got from the Stoics, which is a distinction between two modes. Remember we were talking about participatory knowing, which is a particular agent-arena relationship? So, I’m assuming an identity right now, and I’m assigning you an identity, and they’re bound together. So, there’s this ongoing process of co-identification. So, if I brought my role as ‘father’ into this, we’d go wrong in a fundamental way. It’s also when you try to be kind, or in virtue. Being kind to you is very different from how I’m kind to my partner. It’s very different from how I’m kind to my children. It’s very different from how I’m kind to my students. And if I mix those up, I can get really confused. So, this notion of the appropriate agent-arena relationship, that’s an existential mode.

Fromm points to two – and it overlaps with Buber’s I–Thou versus I–It. But the ‘having’ mode is the mode in which we satisfy needs, and it’s a legitimate mode, by the way. We satisfy needs by having control and consumability over things. I need water, and I need to ‘have’ it in the sense I need to be able to control it and consume it. I need shelter, I need food, et cetera. So, what I’m using there is my problem-solving intelligence to overcome obstacles and achieve my goals. Again, this is a totally legitimate thing.

The ‘being’ mode is not organized around those kinds of needs. It’s organized around needs that are satisfied by development. So, for example, I need to be mature, as a classic example, and that’s not about exercising a particular kind of… solving a particular kind of problem. It’s about, wait, being mature is about really opening up to a developmental process that will do this frame breaking/frame making, and trusting that it will take me to a place that puts me into a more proper relationship to myself and to the world. Also, being in love. You want to be in love.

So, Fromm’s point is that this mode is organized not around problem solving, but it’s organized and it’s not about what he calls animal intelligence. It’s organized around what he calls reason, but he means ratio religio – the proper proportioning of my consciousness, my cognition and my character, so that I enter into right relationship with fundamental mysteries of being. So, notice that it makes sense to say, “I have enough water. I don’t need any more.” It doesn’t make sense to say, “I have enough maturity. I don’t need any more.”

Elizabeth Rovere:

Unless you ask my 12-year-old.

John Vervaeke:

Right, yeah, when people say that. So, for me, curiosity is exploration in the having mode. I need some information. I need to consume it in order to fill some gap in my knowledge. And so, you can tell that it’s in the having mode, because if I were to prolong your curiosity, it becomes deeply unpleasant for you.

So, imagine, here’s a – they’re misnamed, by the way – but here’s a mystery novel, and you keep reading it and you never can find out who did it, who committed the murder. It’s like, “Argh,” right? Wonder is to do the reverse, right? It’s not to try and answer a question from the having mode. It is to try and call oneself into question so that one shifts into the being mode. So, wonder – this is what Socrates said, “Wisdom begins in wonder” – wonder is that opening. So, instead of trying to make information fit, you are instead opening up the possibility.

So, the terms overlap and there’s probably a gray area between them, but deep wonder will become awe as opposed to satisfaction. In fact, one way of understanding the difference between Aristotle and Plato is that Aristotle wants, basically, to turn most philosophical problems into things that are resolved. He wants to turn curiosity into knowledge, and that’s why he’s a great scientist, by the way. I’m not denigrating him. That’s a great scientist. Plato wants to take questioning and turn it into wonder and awe, so that you come into a proper relationship with the depths of reality.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That was John Vervaeke. Thank you so much, John. To learn more about John’s work, check out johnvervaeke.com and his YouTube channel, where his new series After Socrates premiered in January. Please come back next time on Wonderstruck, when my guest will be Mary Reilly Nichols, a yoga teacher for 40 years and the director of the yoga studies program at Nalanda Institute of Contemplative Science in New York City. Mary’s journey in greater consciousness begins with a vision and multisensory experience that you will not want to miss.

For more information about Wonderstruck, our guests, and some really exciting upcoming events, check out wonderstruck.org, and please follow the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and subscribe on YouTube. We truly want to hear from you with your feedback, reviews and ratings. You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Facebook at WonderstruckPod. Wonderstruck is produced by Wonderstruck Productions, along with the teams at Baillie Newman and FreeTime Media. Special thanks to Brian O’Kelley, Eliana Eleftheriou and Travis Reece. Thank you for listening. And remember, be open to the wonder in your own life.