Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with psychiatrist and philosopher John Vervaeke. 08/11/2023
Intro
Elizabeth
Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our common life and the deep values of those who shape it. Every episode, I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or public profile, and I’m trying to listen deeply to them, right at the level of their deepest principles and the life events that have shaped them in order to try and build empathy across our very many deep differences. This is the last episode in our series. And next week I’ll be listening back to all eight episodes – we’ve had such a variety – and reflecting on the themes that are emerging from them. The eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed that Rory Stewart was slated to be part of this series and he sadly had to pull out, but we’re really looking forward to speaking to him next year. I would love as we come to the end of this series, if you would, if you haven’t already, rate the podcast, review it or send an episode to a friend with a question to chew over or something that you found interesting. It seems like a silly thing and I know that podcast hosts are always asking you to do this, and you can kind of tune it out as a sort of white noise, but we currently don’t have any advertising or even a Patreon and if you value the project it really does make a difference and is a powerful way that you can support us and help other people find it. And I’d love you to come chat to me. I really do enjoy hearing what you’re thinking, what the episode triggered for you, what you’re connecting it to, who you found difficult to listen to, who you found surprising. I’m extremely approachable. You can find me on Twitter or on Instagram. Please do send me a message. I would love to be in conversation with you and hear what you are thinking.
In this episode, you will hear a conversation that I had with John Vervaeke. John is a professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science and the Psychology of Buddhism at the University of Toronto. His YouTube channel in which he covers all those subjects, plus a lot of philosophy, a lot of Socrates, a lot of Plato, has hundreds of thousands of subscribers and his series on the meaning crisis has been watched more than seven million times. He also helps run the Vervaeke Foundation, which they describe as helping make the formative way of wisdom accessible to all seek it. We had a really rich and wide ranging conversation. We talked about growing up in a form of fundamentalist Christianity, which he found quite traumatic, his leaving of that, the way that philosophy and Buddhist practices really helped him in a really dark time struggling with depression, what the meaning crisis is and why he thinks it’s so important for us to be talking about, and more importantly seeking to embody wisdom. I will say that this episode starts quite dense. I let us get off into the world of ideas before locating us in who John is, but we do come back to that. So I would suggest, if you get into it and find it a little bit dense, then please bear with us because it opens up. I really hope you enjoy listening.
What is sacred to you? John Vervaeke’s answer
John, I am delighted to speak to you today. And we’re going to go deep fast into a topic that I know you will find less strange than many of my guests, which is the sacred. The genesis of this project was the rise of tribalism and polarisation, which, around 2016, came in a time when I had been reading a guy called Scott Atran, who’s an anthropologist. It was so helpful. And so it was initially this concept of sacred values, of deep, principled commitments, which are not about our rational self–optimising, our rational self–interest, but about something else. And Scott’s – I will butcher his very subtle work – but what the summary I took away is, if you offer someone money to give up their sacred value, they are less likely to because they will feel that I’m offended, you have somehow transgressed something. And, you know, classically in situations of war, as we’re seeing right now, land becomes sacred and functions in that way. It’s not just about utility. It’s about something else. But home, I get exactly. And so I’d like to ask this very tricky question, which I don’t think anyone any of us actually know the answer to but the question is generative. What do you hold sacred? What are your sacred values?
John Vervaeke
So, I’m hesitating because there’s a presupposition in this question, and in Scott’s work, that I would like to challenge in sort of a Socratic fashion. I think the notion that sacredness is a matter of simply valuing is an Enlightenment. And I mean the historical period, I don’t mean the Buddhist notion. It’s an Enlightenment, a way of trying to frame this question, which may, in some serious ways, misrepresent it. And I would object to Atran’s notion of what ‘rational self–interest’ means. I mean, if you compare Platonic rational self–interest to Humean rational self–interest, they are very, very different animals. So we have to be really, really careful around all of this. Sorry, I won’t be the pernickety cautious academic throughout all of this conversation. So, I mean, for me – and I do want to say, and that’s why it took time, I’m worried about confusing what generates experiences of sacredness in me, in contrast to my claims about what the sacred is. And the first one is not easy, but it’s easier to answer. The things that give me sacredness, the things that I would not exchange for an increase in money, power, &c., are precisely the things that the research shows people find, most significantly contributory to a good life in the sense of a meaningful life. And those are relationships. And particularly their relationships to beings – and I’ll be more specific in a minute, because it doesn’t have to be people. Some of the beings are people, for sure, but there’s also sacred practices, in that sense that there’s sacred places, and sacred texts (Plato’s Republic is sacred to me) because they are relationships that reliably afford a reciprocal opening. What I mean by that is, I’m in relationship to this being. It opens me up and connects me deeper, helps make things more coherent, gives me a sense that I’m cutting through illusion into reality that in that’s calling to the deepest parts of me. But as I see more deeply into that reality, it opens up to me and opens me up, and then I go and live my life and I see things in my life in my world. I have insight into my life and my relationships and they’re improved across many domains. And then I returned to the text, and now I see things in it I didn’t see before, and that opens me up. And this reciprocal opening this is this is very much what we experience when we’re falling in love.
So, now that I’ve explained it this way and you won’t just immediately assimilated into our current sort of botched notions of romantic love, I think my experiences of sacredness are those things with which, and to which, and with whom, I fall in love. So that which I fall in love with. And again, I don’t mean “like”, and I don’t mean just simply “value”. This why I’m really hesitant around sacred value. I know there’s things I deeply have preference for, and I wouldn’t take money for having them removed from my life. I really like chocolate and caramel. Like, I really like. If somebody said “I’ll pay you a lot of money so you don’t have chocolate and caramel in your life anymore.” Gee, I don’t think I’d take that deal, right, or it’s gonna have to be a lot of money or something like that, right? It’s got to be really crazy. But I don’t think that engenders a sacredness in me. Whereas my partner Sarah, we decided to make a life–commitment to each other because we realised – and of course, we realise that in tandem – that we consistently, and that doesn’t mean continuously, but we consistently bring out the best in each other. We become better through each other. And we get to know, I get to know a person in their utmost mysterious depths, and be known in my utmost mysterious depths. And so for me, that profound reciprocally opening connectedness is what gives me the experience of sacredness. Then my question is, what is it in that connection, and what is it in us, and what is it in what we’re connected to, that affords falling in love? Now, I would want to put one caveat on that, which has to do with the way meaning has to connect to morality and environmental mastery. I talk about the three M’s, which is: you have to love wisely. So there’s a normative sense to sacredness. It’s that, that to which, and with which, and through which I fall most deeply in love, and this reciprocally opening way, that is also something that draws me to being my best. Helps me afford, motivates me, and inspires me to aspire to wisdom.
Elizabeth
Yeah. Have you come across? James K.A. Smith? He’s a Christian philosopher, who…
John Vervaeke
Oh, wait, I have. Sorry. Weird episodic memory. I have! And we’ve had a brief exchange. Oh, I’ve totally lost.
Elizabeth
He sometimes goes by the name Jamie Smith. And I think you two… There’s a lot of alignment in what you’re saying. Because he has developed this whole kind of anthropology about humans as “desiring beings” which are very Augustinian. And it’s really helped shaped my thinking about what, in my language, what formation is, and what discipleship is. And, you know, what wisdom is. First attending to what we love, and then creating the conditions to… Discipline has negative connotations, but I don’t mean it to be. So, to discipline what we love, to orient our lives, to orient our desires, towards the things that help us flourish towards the good. It is a kind of wonderful way of thinking about the sacred, that that what we fall in love with.
Ultimacy and the relationality of sacredness
It’s also making me think – and forgive me, this is uncharacteristic for me to kind of put this on the table so early in an interview, but as someone who’s a Christian, I would explain that tendency in us as being part of the Imago Dei. That we are made in the image of a Creator who is in Themselves relational, right? That in the in the very being of God is love and relationship. And we are made in the image of that relationship. And so, that is our kind of fullness, that is our becoming. From your philosophy from your cognitive science, how do you integrate that in us? Where does that come from?
John Vervaeke
Okay, now, that’s about the cutting edge of my current work, which is about trying to answer this question. I’m going to use the term God very broadly. God is where we find a relationship between sacredness and ultimacy. And like you said, I think that’s inherently relational. But I’m using that as a stand–in for whatever. My partner is sacred to me, because I have that connection. But I do not think – although there’s mysterious depths to her that I can never fully grasp – I do not think of her as Ultimate Reality. And so, I think we have notions, and they could be Tao, or Brahman, or Śūnyatā (vacuity), of ultimacy. And then, if we have sacred experiences of the ultimacy, that’s sort of the epitome of what I think you’re putting your finger on. But I’m going to make a proposal for which I think there’s an argument. It’s based on a convergence of quite a few people’s work. But perhaps most important to me right now is the work of James Filler in his book “Heidegger, Neoplatonism, and the History of Being: Relation as Ontological Ground.” And his proposal is what the Neoplatonists had argued is that, contrary to an Aristotelian–Cartesian framework, substance, individually independently existing things, are not the ultimate ground of reality; relation is. So it’s not that relations emerge from the things related, but the things related emerge from this field of relationality. You can hear Whitehead here. And you can also surprisingly hear physics, both that the upper end of relativity and the lower end of quantum. So this idea of relationality. And what’s really important about that is, it binds reality to information, which is inherently relational intelligibility that’s inherently relational. And why am I going on about this? Well, think about what you just said. You said: the Christian idea, and the Trinity – and this is Filler’s argument too – the Trinity is, if properly understood, and I think the Eastern Orthodox Church Fathers (I know you might be Catholic or something, I don’t mean to insult you) but people like Dionysus, and Maximus, Erigena, and also Nicholas of Cuza, who is Catholic, really make this very strong proposal that the Trinity is actually a way of trying to exemplify that ultimately is inherently relational. And then, if sacredness is about connectedness, about this dynamic, reciprocally open relationality, we can see why sacredness seeks ultimacy.
Elizabeth
Just explain to me how you’re using the word ultimacy. I don’t think I’ve come across it.
John Vervaeke
So, your life depends on an everyday practical distinction between appearance and reality. Things that are illusory versus the things that are real. And it’s interesting that if you do, like Patrick McKee and Clifton Barber, if you do research into what is a necessary feature of wisdom, it’s the ability to see through illusion and into reality. That’s one of the defining features of the wise person. So, notice something, though, that we can only judge one thing as illusory by comparing it to something that is real. This is a point made by Plato and Merleau–Ponty. So saying that everything’s an illusion actually is like saying everything is tall. It doesn’t make any sense, right? “Real” is a comparative term, it’s an inherently comparative term. And then, what we’re doing is we’re seeking what is that against which all the comparisons are made. And all the work on when people experience what they call “the really real and mystical experience” shows that when people, let’s say, they have a mist, and they encounter the “really real”, they change their lives, the relationships they’re in, because they want to be in closer conformity. So there’s this, “I want to be One with what is most real.” That’s what I’m meaning by ultimacy. And then, what I’m saying is, that’s it’s not – and I’ll try to use a term very neutral – it’s not just an intellectual endeavour. Because we seek relationality in the sacred. The sacredness is also seeking ultimacy, because it’s inherently seeking the deepest kind of connected reciprocally opening relationality. So that in us, the deepest in us, the ground of us, is going to be something inherently relational. And it’s seeking out to be in relationship to what is ultimate. That is a proposal I’m making to you.
Fundamentalist upbringing, a desire for knowledge, and bridging science and spirituality.
Elizabeth
I am going to let that percolate for a minute. And I want to pause and give the listener a sense of who’s talking. They may have joined us and thought “What is happening out there?!” And I want to give them a sense of who you are, and the journey that has led you to be so fascinated with those ideas. So, can you tell me a little bit about your childhood, kind of 10 and under. What were the big ideas in the air that formed you?
John Vervaeke
So I was brought up in not just a nuclear family, but extended family of very strict fundamentalist Christianity. But with a high need for cognition, as a psychologist would say, in which I was deeply interested in the scientific understanding of the world. And at age 10, it would have been my fascination with dinosaurs and with the prehistoric world, as is the case for quite a few young males. Although I really didn’t realise that at first, there was a deep tension in my upbringing, because for all of the ways in which I might be critical of my mother for imposing the fundament of Christianity that in many ways caused some of the most traumatic experiences of my life for me as a young person, I also want to credit her for she never tried to crush my scientific interest. And she realised that I had a burning desire to know. She’s dead now, and I’ve been through therapy to wrestle with things. And I’ve come to realise how she was wrestling with a lot of things in her life that drove her into fundamentalism. I’ll get personal here. I only found out when I was in my 30s that – and I mean this in the literal sense of the word – I’m a bastard. My mom and dad were married to other people and had an affair, and I was the result of it. And my mom was a very young woman. And the family because of its fundamentalist Christianity, sort of black sheep–ed her, if that’s a verb. When people are put in those kinds of situations, they have two possible responses. One is to completely reject that religious framework, or the other is to completely assimilate and say, “You’re absolutely right. I’m a sinner.” And she went the second route. And so you can imagine how her attitude to me must have been very challenged. Here’s the mark of the destructive sin that ripped her life apart. But yet – and sorry, I don’t like to do this, because it sounds like I’m praising myself – but he was he was an extraordinary kid. He’s gonna go on to university. Nobody in the extended family does aside from one other cousin. She called me John, which means a gift from God. And so, there was this deep ambivalence in her and I’ve come to try to understand that. Because it was very much like she wanted to somehow purify me, and I was subject to a very rigid purity code. But she also didn’t want to strangle the giftedness, because the giftedness was in some sense, I think – I’m supposing here – redemptive for her. It was like, “Well, this can’t have been a complete and utter mistake, or God would not have given me this child.” Again, I apologise for talking in this stuff. And so I’ve come to realise – and to some degree, I internalise that – because what happened is, I was traumatised by that religion. Some of the most traumatic experiences in my life. I’ll relate one. No, I’ll relate two. So I was brought up in a form of Christianity that believes in the Rapture. And around 10 years of age, I came home. And this had not happened to me before. I came over from school. It was back in the days when you could walk home from school by yourself and nobody was afraid. And there was nobody home. And I was absolutely convinced that the Rapture had occurred. I was clearly a sinner, had been left behind, and the Antichrist and his minions were coming. I cannot explain to you. I cannot convey to you – and remember, this is a 10 year old – that terror. And that is the only noun that covers it: the terror that I was in. That’s a traumatising experience. And it takes a lot of time and reflection, therapeutic endeavour to get out of that. The other one is, I read in the Bible – and it’s in a couple places: Jesus says at one point in the Gospels, and Paul says it – and there’s the unforgivable sin. And what’s really maddening about those verses, is they don’t say what it is. So you have this blank slate upon which you project all of your anxieties as to what it could be. And so, around the same time, I think a little bit over like 12, I’m like, “Have I done it? I’ve committed the unforgivable sin? What is it?!” And you get into this spiral, and it was horrible, horrible, horrible. And my mom, she could see that I was just terribly distraught. And I give her credit for this too. But she did the only thing she could think to do: she took me to the pastor of my church. And I posed this problem to me, and he gave me the most vapid, unsatisfying, platitudinous answers that even a 12–year–old recognised had no significant response or responsibility to the question I gave him or the state I was in. That also deeply traumatised me by a profound sense of abandonment to guilt at the level that Luther experienced, or something like that. And so because of that, I was riven. I read a bunch of books when I’m 15/16. I read “Lord of Light” by Roger Zelazny that introduces me to Buddhism and Hinduism. I read Hermann Hesse’s, “Siddhartha”. I read Robertson Davies’ “Fifth Business” and introduces me to Jung. And I’m suddenly opened up. I’m opened up to a possibilities that are not disclosed to me in this framework. And I want to read. I’m going to hyphenate this word to really bring it out: it encouraged me to break from that framework, and go very deeply into the scientific part of me. But, you know, we have a mother tongue. We have a mother religion. That religion, for all of its toxic effects, and also because my mom, to give her credit, encouraged me to think and to learn and grow, it left me with a hunger for the transcendent. That left me with a hunger for the transcendent. I can go more on my personal life, but you just want to my childhood. That set in me that only what had to be gradually explicated, articulated, elucidated, this quest, which is how I define my life, of bridging between science and spirituality.
The experience of God: violent atheism, Asian philosophies, and researching mindfulness
Elizabeth
Yeah, I want to ask something, but I’m going to tread very carefully, because the language is very slippery. Alongside finding the courage to break from your fundamentalist structures, had you had a sense of the presence of, or the experience of God or the divine that you lost? Had you never really had one? Did it change? How do you narrate that very difficult thing that you can’t capture in words?
John Vervaeke
Well, that that’s part of it. That’s part of why I’m trying to use this somewhat nebulous, but suggestive phrase: the taste, for the transcendent. Taste connotes something sensual, but also something aesthetic. So, first, God was still present to me, but like, the way your enemy is present to you. I took up a sort of violent atheism. Not physically violent, but I wanted to kill God. And then, I got into philosophy, and I started to understand that that is just as binding to something. That negation is not freedom. And this is also aligned with some therapeutic work. So philosophy and therapy. And I was also starting practices like Tai Chi Chuan and stuff. All of these things were happening together within me. Once the anger was subsiding, and it was more of this, as people use the phrase, “letting go”, I remember walking across a field. I think it was in McMaster University. It was I think in my first year of university maybe second, and just what it felt like for that background, that pervasive sense of the presence of God, to dissolve away. Just dissolve away. And that was one of the first glimmering moments which became more and more prominent and coherent to me. There was a sacredness, that connectedness that reciprocally opened to me, that gave me a meaning in life, that I don’t want to live without him. I don’t think I should live without. And so yes, there was a definitely that. So that’s what I was trying to convey. It left this taste in my mouth. And also the sense of taste makes you explore makes you hunger, makes you long. And, and you know, I did a lot of foolish things. Because that has to slowly be pared away from the ways in which that fundamentalist framework had been ingrained into me. A deep, profound habit. And there was times I wondered, “Am I seeking this just because of a habit?” But what happened is, as I started to try and answer this question for myself and, started to pursue Asian philosophies – Daoism, Buddhism, a bit of Vedanta, but mostly Taoism and Buddhism. Not just in thought, but in deep practice. And I started to bring that into cognitive science. And I was the first person at the University of Toronto to academically, in a scientific setting, talk about mindfulness. And when I started to do this, I noticed my students’ eyes were lighting up, and I started to realise, “Oh, there is something here, that’s not just due to my idiosyncratic habit formation. There’s something more shareable and shared as there’s a shared need.” And these people, most of them didn’t, or maybe all of them did not have my particular background. And so that opened me up to how to discern the difference between “is this an old habit” or “is it a real need.”
Elizabeth
This is a fruitful thing to pursue. Am I right in thinking you dealt with quite serious depression around this time?
John Vervaeke
Yes. So, I was diagnosed. I had what I used to call “the black burning in my chest”. It was a profoundly visceral kind of deep depression. And that was when I hit some very significant moments of loss and grief, that vectored into a persistent state of despair. And I was diagnosed with clinical depression. Now, luckily, I had already developed quite a few of the practices that can ameliorate it. And so again, with the help of therapy, with the help of those practices, and other things, I was able to… I don’t think anybody, any professional person, would diagnose me now as clinically depressed.
Elizabeth
I’m really glad to hear it. That sounds like a really hard thing to deal with.
John Vervaeke
It was very hard, and very taxing. I have come to realise how much of a burden I was on various people in my life, and how much some people really did help me without me properly recognising it at the time.
The meaning crisis
Elizabeth
I want to connect these threads. Because one of the things I think people are very drawn to in your work is that you’re not speaking about kind of philosophy and cognitive science and the pursuit of wisdom in a very dry and distanced way, as if these are things we hold ourselves at arm’s length from you. You have skin in the game. You were drawn to these things from personal need and crisis and are perhaps best well–known for your work on the “meaning crisis.” Could you just give me a sense of how that thesis, that theme emerged out of your experiences and your academic work?
John Vervaeke
Let’s give you the concrete thing. So I was already deeply interested in cognitive science. And I’m at the University of Toronto, and I’m teaching. And cognitive science talks profoundly. The cognitive revolution was based on the idea that humans are not stimulus–response machines, they’re meaning–making entities. And you get first generation cognitive scientists that understood that very semantically, and then second generation more dynamically. And then third generation, the one I consider myself to belong to, which called for ECogSci (embodied cognitive science) and understands meaning in this very, not just propositional sense. I worked on that. One of the godfathers of that, a colleague of mine, we were forming a friendship and then he was transferred to UBC – I taught his son, and things like that – was Evan Thompson. He was one of the founding figures of ECogSci. And they’d asked Evan to teach a course on Buddhism and CogSci, and he couldn’t do it. And they asked him who to recommend who could do it. He said, “Well, John could do it.” So I started to teach that course. And I’d already had some glimmers of light connect these things I laid out, so I started to find all the connections. And especially, “Why are Buddhism and cognitive science coming together so much?” And I started to build this thesis. And as that built, the reputation of this course went up and up. I really think it’s because of the of the material, right? And so I started to build this argument. And then I started to turn more and more of a cognitive scientific eye into it as well. What is it? You want to ask two questions about this: what is this meaning in life? That’s a cognitive scientific question. What is it? Why does it really matter? And then how is it come to be risk? So the second question is a historical question. And the first question is a structural question, a scientific question. And I was pursuing both of those. And then I started to weave them together. And I got this course. And I was teaching another course that they asked me to teach in psychology – Higher Cognitive Processes – and they said, “You can teach a higher course.” So I was interested in intelligence, rationality and wisdom, so I started teaching that course. And my students were bouncing between these courses. And one student who had taken both, he came to me a year after he’d done the Buddhism and CogSci course and he says, “You know, my dad’s professional editor, and I’m a professional videographer and I have a crew. Let’s do a video series!” And that’s “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”, how it came about.
YouTube, professional persona, rejecting influence, and balancing fame and integrity
Elizabeth
And I’d love to hear what was the kind of emotional journey of going from being a successful academic teaching at the University of Toronto to suddenly this other role open opening up? You, like Jordan Peterson and other people at the time, set up YouTube channels that then went completely enormous. I’d love to just hear how you process that. What was good about it? What was hard about it? How do you think about that role?
John Vervaeke
I talk about this almost daily with people, because I reflect on it daily. You should reflect on those things. It’s part of my attempt to cultivate a virtuous and wise life, because what happened is profound. And it continues to be so profoundly mixed. So I am by nature… This is so odd, given the content. I am by nature fairly pathologically shy. And so I did the Aristotelian thing: you cultivate your character to compensate for your personality defects. So I cultivated a professional persona that compensates for that. And I’m in this persona right now. So, as long as I’m in this persona, I’m well, but if you put me in a context where that persona is not appropriate, like a traditional party at somebody’s house, I become sort of indistinguishable from a potted plant.
Elizabeth
I feel like I need to invite you over now, and test that.
John Vervaeke
But anyways, the profound mixture was, because of that shyness, I would literally – I’m not just speaking hyperbolic – I would wake up at 2am/3am feeling tremendously exposed. And so, that was one vector of negative effect. I want to make this very clear, I’m not making a moral condemnation. I mean, I could in other ways, and I want to be very careful, because some of these people that I’m going to gesture to, I have relationships with and they treat me well. They treat me with respect and affection, and I reciprocate. They deserve respect and attention from me. So I’m going to try and say this as with as much lovingkindness as I can: I paid attention to the mistakes a lot of these other people had made, and how, in some ways, they were led into forms of behaviour that I think cost them a degree of integrity, led them into self–destructive, self–deceptive ways of being. I am not claiming to be enlightened or anything ridiculous like that. But I very, very early on made a commitment that I did not want that (whatever we’ll call that) reputation, influence, whatever.
Elizabeth
Guru status.
John Vervaeke
Yeah, I suppose. I wanted to put real machinery – cognitive and social machinery – into place to help prevent that. I have a nonprofit organisation, The Vervaeke Foundation. All the money from all of this goes there. I get a stipend from it, because I’m convening time and I write, but it’s less than 25% of everything that comes in. And that’s to keep the money separate from me. And to make the focus the foundation, not John Vervaeke. And also, everybody that’s in there has to be committed to two things: they have to be committed to doing this as virtuously as possible, and helping me to aspire consistently to be more virtuous; and secondly, what they have to do is to show that it’s not me alone doing this. It’s why I do so many my podcast, even series, with other people and I involve other people, so that the credit gets distributed. They call me out if they think I am moving towards inflation. So all of that. And then the other thing is, I have concluded that what one of the things that upsets these people and causes these deleterious side effects (because I don’t think any of them intended it, I don’t think any of these people are malicious or evil) is that unlike what I see in them, I’m going to keep one foot firmly planted in doing the science. I’m never going to let this be such an attractor that I stopped doing science – and I mean science very broadly. Science includes philosophy. I’m not going to stop doing that work, because that also keeps me grounded in an important way. So those are the two negatives. The exposure one, I just have to deal with it. But the Vervaeke Foundation actually helps with that. And then, the virtue one I’ve tried to indicate what I’ve put into place. Now there’s the positive – and I’m not gonna lie, I like getting the recognition for my work. I don’t particularly like when people take a parasocial relationship with me, and they want to… I don’t know what you put it.
Elizabeth
Take a metaphorical selfie with you.
John Vervaeke
Yeah, I don’t mind. My partner, she’s been really helpful about this, because those moments were really difficult for me. My initial response was to try and shut them down as quickly as possible, and get the person away from me. And then I realised, “Wait, that’s an important moment for that person. You’re all about meaning–making. Some of them might have ulterior motives, but for many of them, they just want that moment of contact.” And so what do I do? But if you go into that, you can feel this part of you that just wants to consume it, like cotton candy or something. And so she said to me, she said, “Well, treat it like music you’re enjoying. Go and share it with the people that are listening. And then when it’s over, the music’s over and you walk away. Don’t try and keep the music going.” And so I’ve been taking that attitude towards it. And so I enjoy that. I enjoy the recognition. I was something of a maverick within the University of Toronto for a long time. They couldn’t figure out “Why does John talk about the things he talks about?” But that’s changed. But this, I can call it the popular domain, has put me into contact with so many academics that allow me to do the science, that’s been a great thing. And also people have influenced my work. And maybe, maybe, steer things towards the good. I mean, I’m deeply, deeply appreciative for all of that as well. I wouldn’t have met you – case in point – if I just stayed in my little academic bubble and we would not have met. We would not be doing this. And all the people listening would not be hearing it. So I’m grateful for all of that. And so I’m trying to balance the fear of exposure, not falling into vice, and properly appreciating in both senses of the word, the positives. So it’s a wrestling, it’s a wrestling. Yeah.
Elizabeth’s concerns: defining the Good, and the over–intellectualisation of philosophy
Elizabeth
That’s really helpful, John. I speak to a lot of people. I talk about my background in the media: I’ve worked at the BBC, and I talk a lot about public conversations and the way they shape our common life. And I’m very often talking to journalists or politicians, and sometimes trying to get them to think ethically about their vocation, and the way it shapes other people, for the first time. Not all of them for the first time, but some of them first time because so often, when you’re in one of those high powered jobs, you’re just like, “How do I do a good job? How do I climb the ladder?” There’s very little ethics training which is taken seriously. Very little. What is the legacy that I’m leaving in the world? And the laying down which you’ve gone to, which is incredibly rare. Which is, in my language: how is this forming my soul? Or how is this forming my character? What is the formation of the vocation that I’ve chosen? And so… Full confession time. I increasingly talk to people like you who both shape public conversations through their academic work, but perhaps more, I guess, numerically shape their conversation through their you YouTube channel. And it is so new, that trying to work out… You know, the medium is the message! Trying to work out what are the ways in which those platforms can shape people towards wisdom, and what can’t they, and having some… Well, I’ll put both of them to you at the same time, which is terrible practice, but you can cope with it. The two concerns that I have as someone who is naturally into talking about ideas, into talking about philosophy, theology, transcendence: what is the good? Is that they feel very individualised spaces, often very over–intellectualised spaces and don’t take seriously embodiment, and emotion, and practice, even though I know you do personally? And the third one is, where are the women? Why are there so few women in these conversations? And I don’t mean that in a hostile way. Isn’t that interesting? Why is that?
John Vervaeke
Well, let’s do the first one. So here’s one area where I am very, very grateful for what I consider to be a very powerful confluence. So I do a lot of work on kinds of knowing other than propositional knowing. And maybe at some point we can talk about that procedural, perspectival, participatory, and that cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, extended. So the theory is actually pointing away from an over–intellectualised, over–individualised understanding of meaning, cognition, intelligence, rationale. The evidence is growing, the theoretical argument, the evidence is growing. We reason better dialogically than monologically – in both senses of the word, by the way. In a monologue, and only relying on logic. All of that I like. So, that’s the theory. And what the Foundation allows me to do is do a lot of work on helping people to do two things: take up an ecology of practices, and receive support and guidance for that, and meet and connect with other people who are also interested in an ecology of practices. And not just meet, like the way you do around coffee: undertake practices of distributed cognition, dialogical practices, shared contemplative practices, shared moving practices… And I’m just gonna say something, but my work, I think, will testify to this. I do this with tremendous respect to the legacy of religions. Try to see what the religions were doing to help people in not just an intellectual fashion, but – now I want to use this in a really rich sense – but in an existential, spiritual fashion. Cultivate wisdom and meaning. And not just individually, not just autodidactically, which I think is very problematic, but in communion and in community. And so that’s what the Vervaeke Foundation is doing. We have we have a platform “Awakened to Meaning” where we can plug you into drop–in things, courses, short–term courses, long–term courses… It’s there, and it’s growing. So this is both the theory and the practice. I’m not just doing theory. What would be the analogy… I’m doing something like engineering. Virtual engineering, the engineering of how to cultivate virtue and doing it largely in the virtual domain. And like you say, there’s all an experimenting with these media, these virtual media. And so, I’m going to rather forcefully claim, but I think I take those two concerns you brought up very seriously…
Elizabeth
I should say I see you as the exception in an ecosystem. It’s more that the conversations in general, and you banging the drum for those things, I think is in tremendously healthy.
Where are the women? Biology, psychology, relationality, and the role of women in philosophy
John Vervaeke
Well, thank you. Thank you. I hope I didn’t sound defensive. I didn’t think you were making an accusation. Now, we keep asking that question. Now. We definitely have women playing important roles, like leading courses, teaching courses, being on the board. There are two women on the board of the Vervaeke Foundation. I think we have more women showing up to our events as a proportion than a lot of these other communities. It’s not 50/50, and so the question is still stands. If you’re gonna be rationally responsible about this, you want to say, “To what degree is it what we’re doing? To what degree is that what the medium is doing? To what degree the culture is doing?” And you know, I don’t have nice, crisp, clean answers to that. We’re kind of fumbling our way. But this is also one of the things I said from the beginning. I said it in this very nuanced way. I’m not saying like quotas, but it’s like, “What can we do?” And whenever women reach out to me and say, like, “I want to talk to you. I have a channel.” I will give that a priority if I think they’re coming in good faith, and it’s going to be a rich conversation. But I take the question seriously. I don’t have crisp, clean answers. We are trying to address it. We’re trying to create invitation and a welcoming environment. We’re giving leadership both at the teaching level and the governance level, to women trying to listen. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t find my own answer satisfactory. I’m not happy with it. It’s not satisfying, either scientifically or ethically. But I think it’s an important question.
Elizabeth
Well, I’ve sat with it ever since I’ve talked to Jonathan Pageau about it. One of the one of the things we played with together is particularly in his work. He talks about embodied forms of knowledge, and re–enchantment, and surrendering to mystery. And one of my kind of hypotheses was, is it just that women never forgot these things? Like, is it that the nature of – I’m probably going to disagree with myself at the end of the sentence – but, just like the nature of a woman’s biology means that it’s slightly harder to end up too much in your head, to buy into that kind of Homo Economicus myth that we are just rational, functioning things.
John Vervaeke
I think there’s evidence for that. I mean, first of all, overwhelmingly, women are the primary caregivers. And that means they have direct experiential access. And I’m not saying all women step into the ideal of this. Many women fail. But they have more access to a agapeic love than men do. Now, the problem for that is that’s actually declining, right? All the socio–economic socio–political changes that are coming as more and more women are opting not to give birth. Please understand, I’m not condemning. So the availability, the strong sense of “avail”, to agape is greater for women. Women are generally – and this is what the psychological research shows – they’re generally more oriented towards relationships than products. And men are more hemispherically specialised, more left hemisphere. When you think about Ian McGilchrist, etc. Women tend to use language differently. And this, of course, causes all kinds of difficulties when you’re in conflict with a person self–declared of the opposite gender and sex. I know all this research, and I’ve done a lot of mindfulness training, and I can still fall into this. My partner will want to talk to me, and I will think there’s a problem to be solved. And I would keep trying to get to a solution to the problem. And I’m frustrating her. Like, “Why am I frustrating you? Are we trying to solve a problem? I’m trying to…” She doesn’t want a problem to be solved. She just wants presence to the network of relationships. And so I do think there is something like a natural proclivity for women towards relationality, and agapeic love, which I think is really central to a lot of what we’re talking about here. So I do think there’s that. But that is not to say that some of the most profoundest seekers and thinkers are women. I did an online course called Beyond Nihilism, and I’m gonna do a follow up called Women of Wonder. I just noticed that so many of the philosophers that are having the biggest impact on me are women. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence, either, because I think philosophy is finally turning away from scepticism, and solipsism, and all that Cartesian stuff, and turning back to (!) the Love of Wisdom. And so, and I think women are playing a pivotal role in that. And some like Karen Wong and the Meaning Code: these are women who are doing exemplary work. So everything I just said, I want to also put that in the context that some of the deepest seekers and thinkers I meet are women.
Elizabeth
It’s one of those things isn’t it? It’s a generative question for me, whenever I see a group that is not explicitly defined around a certain characteristic, but its centre of gravity is falling around that characteristic to just go: okay, what’s going on there? I don’t necessarily think it’s a problem when I find spaces that are dominated by women, I don’t go “Oh, no, that’s necessarily a terrible thing.” I just think when we’re talking about fundamentally “What is Wisdom? What is a good life?” That is a question for us all.
Against autodidactic technique extraction, and the case for sapiential and spiritual communities
I’m aware that we’re short on time so I just want to land on your relationship with religion now. I guess a lot of people who listen to this podcast come for kind of all faiths and none. I would guess that one of the things In common is what you beautifully described a taste for the transcendence, a taste for depth, a taste for meaning, I have found. So I’m a Christian. Because I take so seriously this sense of formation, and you spoke beautifully about it about communion, about ritual that embodies form of meaning, I moved into a very small, intentional community because I felt that it’s only through being – and again, it’s a phrase you use – the kind of scaffolding, that kind of the social machinery in order to form my desires in the direction I want them to go in that we talked about earlier. For those people who are not religious – and honestly, the majority of my friends are not, and I wish I could communicate to them the love of God. But for so many that it’s just not salient, it doesn’t connect with them. Where are the best places they can go to find that kind of communal wisdom, that dispersed cognition, the things that you are continually pointing to?
John Vervaeke
I have always intentionally wanted my work to be – and I quote the Upanishads – “the razor’s edge.” If people come to my work and find a way to “rehome” – and I’m going to use that as a strong verb, rehome – in one of the legacy religions, great! I am not anti–religious.
Elizabeth
It’s a lovely phrase, “rehome.”
John Vervaeke
Yeah. And I’m going to say something a little bit controversial, I suppose. I think there’s good evidence that most of the meaning, and wisdom cultivation, is not coming through the propositions but through the procedures, the perspectives, and the participation and identity formations. And therefore, the things that are often held in the Abrahamic West as being central to religion – the creedal aspects – I don’t… Some of them I take very seriously, if I think there’s independent argument. Because of Feller’s book, which I think is a masterpiece, I think there’s something important about the Trinity and its way of trying to deeply enshrine that ultimacy is relational. The ground of being is relational. I think that deserves proper respect and recognition. So all that being said, rehoming people. But I’m also trying to reach the Nones, those people who say they have no established religion. And contrary to what some of the Left claim, most of those people are not simple secular atheist or agnostics. The overwhelming majority of them describe themselves with this unhelpful phrase: “spiritual but not religious”. And it’s unhelpful, because it’s very vague, and it’s often individualistic, and autodidactic. They think that by leaving the propositional Creed’s behind, they have solved the problem. They’ve solved maybe one aspect of the problem, but what they fail to realise is the individualism, the monological approach: all those sorts of things. The idea that you can remove a practice from a framework and turn it into a technique. All of these things are also deeply problematic. And so, trying to give the Nones what I call something like “the religion that’s not a religion”. Can we understand all of this non–propositional functionality that allows people to deeply connect, deeply aspire to transcendence to having a sacred experience of what is most real, that transforms them and gives them a North Star, a compass towards the cultivation of virtue and rich relationships. Because that’s when you’re dying, that’s all you care about: how rich were your relationships? Everything else falls away as not relevant. So that is definitely something I want to do. And I’m not doing this because I’m trying to be self–promotional. I’m doing this because I think a proper part of what I call “the meaning crisis” is precisely that the Nones do… Wisdom and sacredness, the way I’ve described that, are not optional for human beings. But they find the legacy religions non–viable for them. And because of a lot of the critiques, they find the political arena, the pseudo–religious ideologies, the totalitarian utopian ideologies which drench the world in blo – they’re traumatised. They don’t want to go down that road. And they think the solution is like I say, individual autodidactic technique extraction. And that’s a bit of a caricature. I’m using that as a caricature. And so the meaning crisis is actually, they confront the very question you pose to me. And part of the problem is, my work is to help to do one of two things: rehome you, if that’s a possibility. And again, not manipulatively. Make everything available to you. And it still might not be viable for you, and I totally accept that fact that might not be viable. Or give you what we’re trying to do with the Vervaeke Foundation and working with other emerging communities where people are doing this. There are sapiential communities, there are spiritual communities where it’s not vague. There is a well–designed, disciplined ecology of practices, sitting in conversation with good science, good philosophy, good history. And trying to get all of those. So I talked about “stealing the culture”. Can we get all of those cultures to network together the way the home churches of Early Christianity networked together and stole the culture from the Roman Empire? So that’s my answer to your question. One of the things that the Vervaeke Foundation tries to do is partner with these other communities, vet them, incubate them, if they need help, point people to them. We’re not claiming that our place is the panacea place, or we have the panacea practice. So I think that question is the core question that many people, probably a lot of the people that you’re talking about, are wrestling with. And they have come, I think, to the wrong conclusion, given certain misinterpretations implicitly given to them by their culture, that this show has to be done individually, autodidactically, and it’s about getting certain techniques. And I think what I want to say to them is, there is an alternative to that. And it’s neither the totalitarian utopias, the pseudo–religious, political ideologies, nor does that have to be one of the legacy religions. There are real and responsible and viable alternatives, and we are trying to both help afford them, and help promote the ones that are already in existence.
Elizabeth
Well, we will be cheerleading that important piece of work. And sadly, I need to bring us to a close. So John Vervaeke, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
John Vervaeke
Thank you, Elizabeth.
Reflection and Outro
Elizabeth
Well. Again and again, this project takes me on this journey of thinking that I know who I’m going to be speaking to and having all kinds of presumptions and preconceived ideas about them. And then the difference between researching someone, even though you’ve spent a lot of time listening to them or reading their books or inside their mind, how different it is to just talk in person with someone directly. And I went into this, I was saying to Dan and the team before we got in, I went into it a bit puzzled because there’s people in my life who really have valued John’s work. I have a YouTube video available of me talking to a friend called Rich Bartlett, who grew up in a similar kind of fundamentalist childhood and has found John’s work really, really transformative. And there’s a lot of enthusiasm for his work, but I found it hard to find a way into it. He’s an academic. And as you hear at the beginning of the podcast, speaks in this way that’s really quite dense with concepts and quotes. And, you know, from my kind of journalistic background, what seemed like unnecessarily multisyllabic jargon, essentially. So I was really struggling to find a way into, I could see that it was, you know, themes I’m really interested in. There should be loads of overlap in the things that we care about and think about. But it was all just bouncing off me and I was wondering how this conversation would go. But as these things often happen, I encountered someone who really helped me understand why their work has been so meaningful for people, not least because John really shared vulnerably about his childhood and his struggles and how this is not theory for him. This is how we live a meaningful life. How we love people. It’s such a beautiful way of talking about the sacred. You know, the things that I am able to fall in love with in that richest way of thinking about it. Yes, I’m going to quote Buber, I’m sorry, I’m always quoting Buber. But yeah, his language really reminded me of that sense of an I, thou moment. A sense of encounter. I think he talks about mutual opening to each other, which I had struggled to get my head around as a concept, listening to him elsewhere and really made complete sense as soon as that was how he began to be talking about his sense of the sacred. Yeah, so much more. I could say there.
I think what also really came through is it’s not jargon for the sake of jargon. It’s that very admirable thing, I think, in a lot of philosophers, which is a commitment to accuracy and a commitment to care in language. That means he speaks often in this quite dense way. But what I could really see underneath it was sincerity. And I just love sincerity. I love people who prepare to be earnest in public. It came through in our episode with James Marriott a few weeks ago that I think he’s a very earnest person who has a layer of apologising for himself and a layer of irony because that’s what journalists have to do. And I wanted to invite him into his kind of beautiful earnestness. And honestly, I had such respect for the way he spoke about the way he thinks of his vocation and that he’s not just alert to and aware of the dangers of becoming a YouTube guru, and we see it with lots of people who are shaping our common conversation, our common life in this way. It’s actually a really difficult thing for your soul to suddenly have lots of people going, “Yes, you have the answers. Yes, you are my source of wisdom. You are who I want to listen to. You’re making everything make sense.” That is a very dangerous place to be soul–wise. And John has taken that so seriously with his character and what he’s doing with the vocation, and what he’s doing with the foundation. And just thinking deeply about his vocation in a way that few people that I’ve asked a similar question to have been able to respond with that level of thought.
Yeah, it really opened up for me when we got onto his childhood as I knew it would. You know, I was really interested in that early stuff about the sacred. But as soon as you ask someone about how they grew up, and that’s my top tip for you, if you are struggling to connect with someone or find a way into who they are, ask them about their childhood. And if that is too intense – I have a very high social awkwardness tolerance, so it’s fine – but if you have lower social awkwardness tolerance and you think asking someone about their childhood might sound intrusive, then ask them about their favourite childhood confectionary. It just immediately reduces the tension level, and someone can’t help but look a little bit like the child they were when they’re describing, you know, whatever it is, dime bars or bubble gum. And then the full human emerges and whatever it was that was putting you off or intimidating you about them, which is probably more about you, it’s very often more about me and my insecurities than it is about the person that I’m trying to connect with. But any way of humanising the person you’re talking to and childhood is just a shortcut. And it really happened in this interview. I was like, there you are. Okay. I began to fall in love with him in the way that I do with all guests.
There was such a sadness obviously about those early years. And as someone who is a Christian, I think any of us who have something we want to pass on, any of us who are parents and have something we want to pass on, we have to be so responsible. We have to be so careful because the power dynamic is all wrong. It’s not wrong. It’s right, but it’s heavy. And knowing how to talk about our sense of the sacred, our sense of what a meaningful life looks like, what wisdom is, without crushing our children or without the suitable level of spaciousness around it, that takes wisdom. That’s the kind of wisdom I want to be developing. Yeah, so much more we could have spoken about. But I think that end point of knowledge is good, cognitive science is good, philosophy is good, these kind of channels, these places, these universities, these books, these podcasts, where we can all be sucking in so much more knowledge than generations before us. You know, those of us who are hungry for ideas can fill our cup of ideas on the walk to work, on the loo, while we’re cooking, we can just be constantly imbuing ideas about what wisdom is and what a good life is. What does it mean to actually live it? Very often that has to be in community. It has to be with others. It has to be embodied as well as intellectual. And John’s just such a great voice for bringing those things into the common conversation. Many thoughts that I’m sure will come to me later, please do tell me what it made you think about. Do get in touch. But in the meantime, thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Sacred.
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