Wow, this is a big one! I'm excited! I'll have to listen to it a few times before I do much commentary on it. This all has been very very helpful. Thank you!
Paul Vanderklay, just wanted to say hi. We may have a few things we could talk about (I'm the circling Guy John has mentioned a few times). Here is my discussion with John: The Circling Institute presents: "Getting your world podcast" #1 John Vervaeke
Both Paul and John, can you comment on the Hebrew meaning that is traditionally translated as holy? The word kadosh in Hebrew means to consecrate (more detailed, to separate to separate the sacred from the profane, or the RR from the background). It means something very different from “to heal or make whole.”
Relevance realization and tools against self deception has really helped my OCD. I am listening to this, while cooking salmon. And before I started, I picked up that raw peace of salmon and really felt it with no fear. It’s like the chains of obsessive compulsive disorder are slowly starting to disappear. Thank you so much John Vervaeke 🙏
I watched your latest video 2 times now and even talked my wife into watching it instead of Netflix. One of the things I appreciate is the way you brought technical language in distinguishing the primordial pre-reflective ground that Heidegger opened up. But then you clearly showed how this phenomenological mystery opens and folds back on itself in revelation enriching our reflective capacities that then folds back and enrich the primordial ground in trans reflective fittedness. This auto poetic relation through participatory knowing was really clear and powerfully shown. This was a really powerful articulation in new language of what Heidegger called ecstatic time. To me your furthering what Heidegger radically opened in a way I have not seen before. Deep Bow..
“My theory of “vagueness” doesn’t itself have to be vague. In fact, my theory of “vagueness” has to be clear!” 00:40:20 Oh my! I think this should henceforth be labelled the Vervaeke Paradox. ✨😹💫
I don't know really why, after your classes I always feel revigorated. Maybe it's because your lessons feels like "Sati", remember how to be alive and how we are living, to truly look into the world and feels that "it" is looking back at us, in a feel of symbiotic oneness. Thank you John, for adding a real solid brick of understanding in my wall of how to understand and appreciate life itself. Keep up the good work.
I am emailing this to my wife and children who have been shaking there heads at me wondering what the heck I have been up to since June 9, 2015. This was the day I picked up my daughter from her school, and the first thing she told me was that they watched a documentary about the oceans. They learned that the oceans would be dead in forty years! She was in grade 8 at the time. I told her that was unacceptable! We would do something to stop that from happening. Since then I have been in a spiral, circumambulating toward the “ultimate root cause”. In other words, I hVe been on a quest, and relevance realization is my compass 🧭.✨😺💫
You know what's also enriching in this? It is to actually go down and read other people's comments it's amazing to see the responses to you, it's like an added effect making this process more beautiful as it unfolds and moves and takes up it's form in the way most optimal set in love and life . Saw your After Socrates trailer, It looks great , congrats John 👏 ❤️🌿
It just so happened that at 21 minutes into this video, my room began to become flooded with the gloriously rose-orange glow of a late summer desert sunset. ❤
Thanks John. I watched the recent paul vanderclay chat you had where you seemed to be a bit apologetic that the RR stuff was a bit heavy/technical. But dont worry man, this is the stuff many of us have been waiting for, keep going with it please. Will you be able to talk about it at the neurological level?
Anyone who is interested in the neurological level should also find Jeff Hawkins’ recent discussions very interesting: ua-cam.com/video/uOA392B82qs/v-deo.html
As someone who has experienced a direct, sustained encounter with horror and worked towards a feeling of belonging in the world through spirituality this resonates very much with me.
With due respect to John's point that a theory doesn't necessarily have the attributes of the thing it's explaining, I definitely feel that the unfolding of this series exemplifies the trajectory of transframing that he describes here. Each episode makes sense and has value in its own right, and is also a waypoint on the greater journey of understanding that John's taking us on. Each time we are introduced to framings that become part of subsequent framings. Masterfully done.
Don't worry, Paul! Nobody can put these rationalistic concepts into actual operation in their lives. With a little luck, someone might get lucky and react in the right way, but usually there's no time. If "you have to read this in a deeply Heidiggerian sense," then you'll never put it into practice in your life. What comes to mind is the old joke about consultants: "A consultant is someone who knows 150 ways to make love, but doesn't know any girls." Remember, he's "not holding out for a nostalgic return to religion," because he hasn't understood that religion is a right now system that works. As you rightly observed, if you put all of the rationalist philosophy/psychology professors on a scale along with all of their books, they would be a feather weight compared to the world's religions. There IS a qualitative reason for that! They are trying to but are not talking about the bailiwick of religion. They can only point at your world. Of course, I do know that religious leaders have followed the rationalists down the rationalist rabbit hole for centuries, as a means of trying to hold off the implications of the scientific method, but in the end theologians need to pull themselves out of that rabbit hole, dust yourselves off, and leave the rationalists to their own devices, because they don't have what humanity needs. You do! Of course, Dr. Peterson gave you all a boost, by overlaying rationality on Biblical texts, but until he's ready to come over to the other side, your side, he won't quite reach the goal.
beautiful and comprehensive explanation of religion...it explains so well the teachings of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, whose interpretation of Buddhism was coloured by his own experience of exile from Vietnam , and how his practice of mindful breathing and walking could brings us home to the ‘very here and now’. To me, this practice, which he developed out of his experience of domicide, is the ultimate system of meta-meaning! it protects the agent-arena relationship against any kind of physical (or even meta-physical) displacement
This is just incredible how much stuff these lectures integrate so smoothly together. They have so far covered and tied together so much relevant stuff from the intersection of comparative religion, philosophy and psychology, with a remarkable clarity and pedagogic skill. Also huge respect for ability to include altered states, mysticism, all experiential and "far out" stuff that is easily ignored, overlooked or even ridiculed in many standard academic courses. And a very wide variety of different thinkers and intellectual traditions also: not many people are able understand and interpret such a wide reportoire of source material from buddhism to ancient mystery traditions to modern cognitive science and existential philosophy (and everything in between). Really impressive scope. Very valuable work! Love it!
After all these (for me) very complex episodes about RR and cognitive science, this one tied everything together beautifully. It was the first one where I could really follow all you were saying and it cleared up a lot. I particularly enjoyed the citations from The Joy Of Secularism, some of the most religious words ever written down lol. On a side note I think your work is very underrated. Outside of this series you don't get the recognition you deserve and I think I know why. The main difference between this series and your other videos (outside of the structure) is the layout. These thumbnails and titles are beautiful and very attractive. Whoever made them for you knows what they're doing. If you apply the same design to your other video's you would see a surge in viewership, I'm sure of it. Excited for more!
It seems to me that the comparison of relevance realization to God is an apt one given the change of the content of what God is being as significant as it was from the old testament to the new. This is a religion that is no religion. Seperating the wheat from the chaff there is no need for dogma. Thank you for all the work you put in to scientifically explain spirituality and it's ability to cultivate meaning. I came across Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by reference from After Sokrates and consider it a true gem. In the conversations with Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau you demonstrated deep thought yet the profoundness of your whole work is astonishing. It appears to me to be a logical, albeit with a more secular emphasis, continuation of C. G. Jung's Red Book. It is a pleasure to watch!
Another great episode! This reminded me of an experience from this last weekend. My partner and I create and perform rituals together and we performed this beautiful ritual celebrating the New Moon. We take our play seriously😉. Now, we've been doing this for awhile now so it wasn't anything new for us. But at the end she turned to me and said, "I feel like I just went to church, but not like how I feel when I go to church now, how I felt as a child." (We don't attend church regularly, so these days when we go it is just to please someone else.) I don't think she could possibly have said anything more meaningful to me. What she was describing was the sense of contact with the sacred and that is the exact purpose of all the practices, rituals, poetry, and stories that I create. That contact with the sacred is so powerful and, sadly, so rare. I hope that my work can bring more of that into the world like I believe your work does. Thank you again for the wonderful gift of this series. 🙏
his talk at 57:37 about the Holy... He is just so fascinating I forget to laugh on how hilarious it is also! not only John is a thriving genius and awe inspiring character, he is also very proficient in the art of derision! Furthermore Episode 33 is the first one I saw and it opened up a whole realm of hope during one of the most gruelling times in my life during the lockdown. Whenever I am at a loss or in endless doubts, any episode will have me rebooted... I doff my hat to you John!
The distinction between the words “sacred” and “divine” actually triggered quite a significant thought for me. My first reaction was that I actually prefer the word “divine” to describe the Tao over the word “sacred”. Why? You can have a lifeless object that is sacred - for example, the bones of a saint who died five hundred years ago that you carry around with you in a little box could be a sacred object. “Divine”, by contrast, implies an aliveness to that which it modifies. Notice that we would tend to say “a sacred object”, but “a divine being”. Even when we’re talking about an environment of experiential knowing as potent as a temple, we’re still going to call the temple “a sacred place” and the entity that dwells within the temple “a divine being”. Now, because I consider the quality of “aliveness” the most salient feature of the Tao, it feels to me like “divine” better fits the Tao as a descriptor than “sacred”. The Tao is divine in its essential aliveness, and it can give rise to things that are sacred, such as a particular body of teaching, or a particular building that affords spiritual experience (we could even say that there is sacredness to life itself because it proceeds out of the divinity of the Tao). It then hit me that there is a major aspect of all spiritual traditions (to my knowledge) that is seriously left unexplained by this naturalistic account of relevance realization: every spiritual tradition contains accounts of entities that are both autopoetic AND non-embodied! Vervaeke has done a great job of explaining why his entire theoretical framework depends on the embodied brain as the foundation of the experience of spirituality and meaning. And thus that entire framework gives us no way to account for something that is somehow autopoetic without having a body. Now, we could just foo-foo those disembodied beings away by saying, “They’re just a goofy hallucination, an artifact of expanded consciousness” - but is it really prudent to foo-foo away something that has shown itself to be such a consistent human universal? Vervaeke himself said, “In cognitive science, you pay attention to universals, because they likely tell you something about the underlying structure!” And something not only universal, but typically experienced as the very core of the spiritual experience? If your theory of spirituality cannot account for a universal experience that is commonly felt to be the very core of spirituality - i.e. the encounter with the non-embodied autopoetic being - maybe that is a gap that needs to be looked at? If our entire experience of relevance and meaning is completely predicated on embodiment, it should be impossible for us to separate the sense of “meaning” from the sense of “being in a body” - how then would we even be able to conceive of an entity that is not only disembodied and autopoetic but also exemplifies what we as embodied humans experience as “meaningfulness”?
Yep, definitely a Tipping-Point level of Salience in videos 30-33. I wanna be cautious of hyperbolizing, but for me the magnitude of this work is akin to the Theory of Evolution.
That tipping point you speak of is the relevance of the deep continuity of life and mind being realized! The phenomenology and functionality of consciousness fuse in a dynamically coupled, stereoscopic cascade of insights. "The real self-realization of reality."
My understanding of all the keywords mentioned today: In some sense, RR is the permeating “ether” of life, that inspires awe and wonder in us, allowing the agent to be in contact with itself, the world, and the relationship among these entities. Such a relationship is impossible to encapsulate in a theoretical frame or language, it’s elusive, it’s a mystery, similar to that mystery provided by the direct exposure to a sacred experience, in which a person participates with all its being in and with the Divine, a numinous experience.
Your piece about culture shock at the end was great. It adds a great context for understanding resort tourists and those that want to immerse themselves in the culture. It goes right back to your concept of participatory knowing. I've gotten an incredible amount out of your series. Keep it up and thank you!!!
OMG! I love the distinction between Curiosity (focused attention) and Wonder (diffuse attention). The way that John talks about it here, curiosity is the pump that fills our senses with details to the point of criticality, and when the balance tips, and the pendulum swings, and the hourglass topples 180 degrees so that the sands run the other way, the Relevance of another layer of dialectical synthesis is Realized. I have recently watched a video about Braess’ Paradox, in which this kind of tipping point is realized in a network by breaking the camel’s back of that load bearing assumption upon which rests the fundamental way that we make sense of the world. Curiosity is the compulsion to keep adding the straws until criticality is reached. (The Braess’ Paradox video: ua-cam.com/video/cALezV_Fwi0/v-deo.html )
I am definitely playing fast and loose with a couple of metaphors there, I admit. But there is a kind of sense that this has been making that suddenly points to the disagreement (tension) between John and Jordan Peterson in the meaning of life discussion from several years back when Jordan fears that the continuing to include more expansive frames could lead to a kind of nihilistic paralysis, and John seems to be noting that this is a part of the maturation process that requires that kind of critical point be reached. Perhaps the nuance between their positions is that we can’t rush to this criticality, but we also can’t put it off forever?
David Swedlow can’t put it off too long, as there are 97 percent of climate scientists saying “we don’t have time”. The meaning crisis solution doesn’t really care about whether we have time to change ourselves. Our purpose is complete whether we live for another 195,000 years or 195,000 hours.✨😺💫
Myles Flaig, true, we’ve got extra alarms klanging in our ears, which makes it seem even more urgent. But truly I think that is co-incidental and integral to the waking up. Kind of like a fruit getting ready to fall from the tree and happy that it got ripe just in time (whew, that was a close call, what if it lost its grip when it was still green). I know that is a big leap, but I don’t think there is much if anything in this universe that is truly accidental, just that it seems that way.
Near the end you discuss the "homing" through sacredness against domicide. And this is what happened to me profoundly mid 2019. Before I was very fearful, and afterwards I had a release from it. I noticed also that I could comfort people around me, by simply staying calm. And one component of my experience is best explained with the following sentence: everywhere I go, there I am at home. There is a fundamental sense of "at homeness". It came from a gnostic approach of combining mindfulness of breathing and metta (logically, not at the same time). It could be an Insight/enlightenment experience.
Mic drop....Gnosticism reverberates everywhere, it is trying awaken us to the primordiality & mystery of religio. The trajectory of its transframing is ultimately understood as transgressive, in trying to overturn the "grammar" of a world-view!
This was a powerful episode. I have struggled my whole life with trying to frame experiences as meaningful. When I can, life radiates, when I can’t, the horror is overwhelming. They’re two sides of a same being mode and so easily slipped between.
This is awesome! There has been a process to embody and understand this topics for years and i really resonate your way of coming to it. It is a way wich is clear and can be argumented out. Thank u thousand times and more! ( Also massive thankfullness to the wizards on the way whos name have been dropped during the serie and to the ones who nobody remember). Long live brighten humanity!
The pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. This concept is mindblowing and very exhilarating. I also feel your personal exhilaration about Relevance Realization, John. It feels like what the theory of evolution is for biology, and what a "theory of everything" would be for physics. A theory of (almost?) everything for intelligence, cognition, wisdom, spirituality, and meaning! Even human culture as one of its emergent properties? I don't know, maybe I am blowing it out of its proportions. The last lectures were difficult (I should watch them later for a second time), but my excitement is through the roof. Even though I am ignorant of most within cognitive science, I recognize that this work is highly relevant and important. Keep up the good work John, and I will wait for the other hundred lectures! ;-)
The transgressive side of sacredness that "opens us in wonder and awe, and even takes us to the horizon of horror" reminds me of James Joyce's "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man." Yours is a beautiful expansion of the transjective nature (if I got it right) of the RR of meaningful art. That is, art has the capacity to evoke the sacred and steer us away from BS.
Hopefully Google isn't censoring me here, but to be grasping with struggle at a philosophy of feeling at home, I wonder if home-ness is somehow central to all human desire, and traveling comes from a loss of something home-ness is supposed to entail.
@FifesAndClarions In the sense that both GI and JV build upon Kant by identifying reason with practice and by locating the rational in the actual. It seems to me that JV is lending empirical credibility to this project with the recent findings in cog sci.
NOTES! The Spirituality of RR: Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness “Belief as an effect of RR.” Religio “You need an additional argument to go from phenomenological mystery to the claim of theoretical inexplicability. They do not follow because perspectival and propositional knowing are identical. That is an equivocation” “When I’m thinking about something, I’m keeping it in a frame, if I don’t I face combinatorial explosion.” We want to expand from a framing altogether, but when we do, we just add a new framing to think through. (forming a box within a box within yet another box). This is how we view the world, through frameworks, this is at the core of CBT and rational emotion management! “How you face the world determines the face you see in the world” We view the world in a compartmentalized fashion, so we want to expand on that as much as possible via RR, expanding our salience landscape through gratitude and etc. We want to examine this theoretical homonculus within, “I can never see the ‘I’, I can only see by means of the I.” This brings to mind Plotinus, who spoke of the “one”, the self, as being like light, ungraspable, unattainable, but allows us to see. Light must also bounce off of surfaces to be useful, and can be directed, and a good light will do a good job of bouncing light information off of objects. We can direct the light to look outwith and within, engage in exterroception and interroception, but never to the extent of thought itself. “You cannot confuse properties of your theory with properties of what your theory is about.” “We have to understand the differences between the limitations of the different kinds of knowing. And the ways in which I can and cannot bridge between these kinds of knowing.” This makes me think of thinking solely through the lens of religion, or science. “What’s missing from religio that’s found in religion is to confront the sacred.” Shunyata in buddhism is sacred, but not a worshipped entity. The Dao is not divine, but is still considered sacred. The Sacred is a metaphysical proposal. It is supernatural. Sacredness is a psycho-existential proposal, experiencing sacredness. Shlermacher examined this. A deep culture shock, or a homesickness is domicide. Geertz argues that “part of sacredness is to home the world… We are homed in the world and the world is homed around us.” “If you don’t get absorbed [initiated] into the culture, you’re experiencing domicide, and none of the other meaning systems will work for you.” Our agent-arena relationship is thrown outta whack when we feel far from home. A very important function of sacredness: We play in a meta-meaning arena. We have psychotechnologies that allow us to do this serious play with sacredness so we are constantly being homed against horror.” Religion affords us congregation, participatory knowing, but no personal growth. “Research shows that people that belong to such spiritual pathways are more resilient in dealing with the horrors of life.” But you don’t really need research to tell you that being able to say “Well, God’s will, he works in mysterious ways” about a tragic accident in the family can have its mental-gymnastical advantages. If you’re traveling, it helps you eliminate feelings of domicide by finding congregations/similar religious symbolism and groups to flock to. The Gnostics examined the values of religio SUMMARY: Viewing aspects of spirituality and sacredness through the lens of how they apply RR, this Vervaeke has coined “Religio”. Essentially the useful bits of religion and terms like sacredness, holiness, and awe.
''One of functions of sacredness is this meta meaning process of homing us against horror, where horror would be overwhealmed by lonelyness, beung overwhealmed by homesickness, cultural shock and a tremendous sense of alienation, absurdity and anxiety, ok? .... Now thats important.'' Haha so casual that, ''now thats important'' !
Yeah, by midway I likewise was already thinking “Wow!”. By the end of this one, I’m completely blown away. And to see John’s comment to Paul Vanderklay that more along these lines is coming. It justifies coining a new expression of wonder: “Numinous Realized Relevance!”
Several times John has talked about how culture requires participatory learning/knowing - in this episode he talks about the difference between culture shock and really understanding a culture via participation. Elsewhere he talks about how discovering in anthropology works by participation to some extent. Does anyone know of any good books that explain this in more detail? John perhaps?
41:30 Aha! "Transjective trajectory flow state celebrating [my] participation in religio" is one way I would translate my experience of what the Buddha called "2nd Jhana." Also resembles my experience of the Brahmaviharas ("god abidings") of Karuna (compassion) and Mudita (empathetic joy). Granted, I haven't watched your Buddhism and Cog Sci series yet, so you may have already articulated this, JV. Just hope this bread crumb helps someone.
"Smoke rose from his nostrils; consuming fire came from his mouth, burning coals blazed out of it. ... He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him- the dark rain clouds of the sky." "the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently." Numinous glory, Awe, and horror. Those that look upon my face shall surely die.
The conception of God in whiteheads process and reality seems strongly connected to RR, not sure how familiar you are with it...something ive been studying for the last 9 months or so, as conclusions from the work of Robert Rosen, Varela/Thompson, Deacon, Kaufman, and Hoffmeyer have led me to accept a process relational metaphysical position.
Does anyone know if there are clean PDF or JPEG versions of what is on his chalkboard? I can never make out what’s going on with my phone. And I haven’t had a chance to try to re-watch these on a laptop.
I understand the new meaning you gave to the word "thing". Having understanding that, then, what are the good things and the bad things? And, can we track them in a statistical analysis? That's a very dark place to explore logically 😱
I can never follow the notes on the board either because I can’t listen and watch at the same time, or when I look I’ve missed why what is on the board is there. Is there a place where there is a PDF or JPEG image of the notes? Perhaps with a very brief description?
I want to ask a question about this trans jective level which is underneath the objective and the subjective. And also all of this stuff that is pre egoic and pre cognitive. I'm thinking about this perhaps evolutionarily. So it seems that the distinction between subject and object is found in our bodies in the having of two hands. So one hand grasps something so that the other hand can work on it. And this also shows up in our grammar, the subject object distinction with a subject performing the action upon the object. So is it possible that evolutionarily we begin to get subject-object distinction when we have the kind of animal life and the kind of appendages that permit that grasping action? So it would be the more primitive body plan life that would originate this pre egoic and pre-conceptual engagement with the world, with the original element of caring connected to survival.
A good detective doesn't only use logic, he also considers, dreams, hunches and intuition to solve a case. Likewise, using only reason to understand the world would be like examining a crime scene with the lights dimmed, one of your eyes closed and at half mast. Reason and the subjective distance themselves from one another only in order to see the other more clearly. But without a parallax view, we end up allowing reason to do violence to the subjective and visa-versa. In the end we can only be as objective as we can within our subjectivity.
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
This idea of wonder and awe reminds me of Jesus telling his disciples, “Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” If you spend any amount of time around children, you quickly see their natural ability to enter a state of awe and wonder.
keith swift reminds me of a video I saw yesterday as an FB post of a little girl with her mom seeing a train 🚊 for the first time arriving at the station. Pure awe and joy tinged with a bit of fear. Priceless!😺
Could the trajectory of transframing also suggest that RR is accomodating for a larger search space? i.e., the illumination of larger possible combinations to solve a problem?
00:59:00 “The numinous opens us up to experience the transgressiveness of the Sacred.” I am thinking of how this relates to a recent reading by Skip Conover of the Carl Jung Depth Psychology Reading Group about “Gethsemane and Sacred Chaos by Françoise O’Kane.” In the Reading there is a concept of Sacred Logos and Profane Logos. There is a concept of the Sacred Chaos and the Profane Chaos. So it makes me think “horror” is the manifestation of either Profane Logos or Profane Chaos. I will send this over to Skip, as he will find this talk very interesting. ✨😺💫
The philosophy in that book was hard for me to follow, perhaps because it was a bit too informal. So I wonder if transjectivity would lend itself to a new reading.
@@cameronhashemi569 I think Persia’s quality is relevance but he seems in places to also equate it with truth so I am not happy making a straight equivalency.
I am sorry if this sounds elementary( or I missed earlier explanations) yet who/what decides something is relevant? Or how is relevance decided? Is it a survival imperative? A move toward pleasure and away from pain? For something to be relevant there is framing yes but does it also need a "goal"? Or is framing the goal and the goal is framing?
Would "time" be also considered as cost in the equation that RR is doing when calculating if some action is "worth the effort" ? Everything we take in consideration is kind of biological or physical, but is there something to the idea that we have a hard time dealing with "time"?Or how do we deal with "time" at that level? And especially with the fact that time is limited and one day my time will be over.
I think contemplating whether “time” invested is “worth it” is purely a function of whether the RR succeeds in transmuting this moment into glory. If the critical moment fails, than all that time building up this scaffolding is gone and we must start over. But on the other hand, if it is successful, then the collapse results in a new reification of glory that is unequivocally worth it. If I anthropomorphize the universe, that is the only reason time exists, to fritter it away on this one foundational activity.
enkor349 John mentions time (temporal) as part of our “ cognitive, metabolic and temporal resources “ early on in the video. A favourite song of mine by Trooper includes the lyric “We are here for a good time, not a long time.” John is all about establishing what a “good time” is. I think the song is titled RAISE A LITTLE HELL.✨😹💫
I'm getting from Kant that space is the condition for intuiting appearances of objects and time is the condition for understanding them. That would make your guess right.
Is there any research on Relevance Realization in newborns? I don‘t know, maybe this is a stupid thought but isn‘t it true that infants are (obviously) conscious - hence they are doing Relevance Realization - long before they can make a distinction between the inner and the outer, between subjectivity and objectivity? Wouldn’t that support the notion that consciousness, RR, transjectivity presupposes subjectivity/objectivity? And is not also true, that before a human being can even grasp any kind of propositional knowing it has already developed some sort of participatory, perspectival and procedural knowing? Very simply put: You know how to live, be alive, be here and now before you know anything else. Does that make sense?
Please note that the vast majority of stimuli cause neither pain nor pleasure and that something can be relevant one minute and irrelevant the next whereas pain and pleasure do not work that way. Pain and pleasure and much more fixed and limited in scope than relevance and irrelevance. Also, a lot of RR goes on unconsciously as in categorization and memory whereas talking about unconscious pain and pleasure makes no sense. Of course one can change the meaning of pleasure so that it is simply the same as finding something relevant but then the problem has just been renamed rather than solved. Why should I find the colour of my wall pleasure at one moment and not pleasurable the next?
@@johnvervaeke well, I mean qualia space is as infinite as many holons (I'm not a Wilburist, but he has some very descriptive and useful terminology) we can segment reality and real space into, but you'll all have that once you have the ability to feel pain, the rest of qualia space is open season to get enlisted by evolution or even unconscious processes, the feeling of relevance or the rightness of an answer even is a qualia in qualia space, just the same as pleasure (in a derivative way, by that I mean there was pain first to serve as the body's extended way to achieve homeostasis in unexpected circumstances, and then once you had that, you had the option for everything else) I realize that this might just be another way of saying the same thing as you, but I think it might be a more grounded and straightforward way of looking at it
@@johnvervaeke also I remember you emphasized talking about it is not the same as the thing and from my part by describing RR as "just another qualia" is basically just talking about it in a perhaps too general and therefore a pointless way, but looking at this in the reverse this is exactly the same problem for me wit RR, that is it sounds like it could be used to describe all qualia with it. I remember what you said about Hegel, that is for me RR is similar to his endgame in practice, as you have this pretty description of yet another qualia, and we can sit down next to it, I don't see how this will develop to anything else than what we already have. But you know what, there are 15 lessons left, so perhaps I should reserve judgement after I finished, lol. It's just you were so into describing RR that I couldn't resist the urge to try to cool you down with a bucket of water, like all good internet trolls ought to do ;)
@@johnvervaeke Ok John. I finished your series on the meaning crisis and now I see the integral part of RR in the agent arena relationship. Also, I have some interesting things to say. I don't know what would you prefer, if I write a book, or paper(s), while properly reference you and give you due credit, or perhaps you could use my stuff and credit me as co-author of your paper. I've been researching and thinking on solutions to the meaning crisis during the span of the past 25 years, (with big gaps in the middle), but I never published anything. My focus has been on an approach to circumvent fundamental dichotomy (you would say Cartesian) that I see as pivotal in order to get an intellectual tool against the hard wired instincts in our brain to see everything as us/them or to get an optimal grip on how to enact wisdom. Your ideas about the 4 p/e-s, mesh perfectly with my approach and in fact they are extending each other to describe the agent arena relationship in a very convincing manner. I'm a Hungarian living in Hungary, (my youtube name is not my real name), by trade I only have a bachelors in computer science for which I studied in England, so academically I don't see a lot of options for me to get published, but maybe I just don't know how. Please advise.
I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄 just a small question maybe its just my view but is “home” a reference to your inhabited body being home, and not your physical house with a pantry and bedrooms, and than what domicide is, is the “self destructive nature” of ones self? Ones home, our very body we host? Or is there a philosophy or maybe a book to how im thinking here?
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth." Yet, here we are, talking about the Way. Maybe we've gone full Hofstadter and we all became strange loops folding numerous times over ourselves, and quantitative changes leading to qualitative ones, almost impossible to unravel clearly.
So, there is an underlying statement here that the individual’s interest in survival is fundamental to the capacity for meaning-making. If that is true, what are the ethical implications of a “belief system” that advocates negation of ones own survival?
Can’t help but think of dual masculine and feminine symbolism that you see in myth, religion, Jung with terms like having (masculine) and being (feminine).
If anyone needs a transcript we've made them for this & all episodes here: www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-33-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-the-spirituality-of-rr-wonder-awe-mystery-sacredness/
This is absolutely Amazing!!! John’s team rocks so hard. I’m giggley about these transcripts…. Such a great way to review or preview, & deep dive these episodes and concepts!!! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! 🙏🏼
Insofar as all animals are doing relevance realization (necessarily, in order to navigate) but don't have wonder, awe, or religio... what's going on there? How does this theory account for that?
I would like to have seen more time devoted to psychedelics. This episode you treated the issue basically as already discussed but the questions psychedlics pose have not been discussed enough. Yes, they do change what's relevant to you, but by what criteria? Which perspectice do we take when being on psylocibin for example. People afterwards quit smoking etc., what does that mean? Why does the higher good become more relevant and how is that tied to the different, less ego-tied perspectices? Especially when ego is a meaning making construct at least as i understood that's somehow your position. Or does anybody know a video where john discusses this in depth in relazion to RR?
I started watching Robert Paul Wolff’s YT lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He insisted we read the text so I’m at page 100. I’m trying to find where, in the myriad of terms, the faculty for belief might be found. For starters, might it be found in a category to understanding sensory input like the apostle Paul intimates at Romans 1:20? I don’t think objects from the physical world can become any more than objects of thought and God must come to us another way. The type of thought God will come under must be synthetic a priori, a pure (abstract) thought. The curious thing about all this is that even though I’m trying to use Kant to pinpoint belief in God in the workings of the mind, it seems Kant was adamant that all our thinking was subjective anyway. That lends itself well to god-belief in the way William Blake understood it but not in mainstream thinking.
I loved this series in the beginning. But now it's becoming incomprehensible to me. Part of it is that there are so many words that I don't fully understand in almost every sentence. A dictionary for the series would help as in some cases I simply don't remember what the terms he introduced means. But that's definitely not the only reason. Another thing is that I have trouble remembering arguments from previous lectures and I probably didn't understand some of the things fully, and all of that accumulates since he builds on previous lectures. Consequently, despite a lot of effort, I now understand almost nothing he says. I guess I'll give up here. Another person also told me that he gave up somewhere around the ep. 30.
Hello Saulius I appreciate your patience. There is a book version of the series coming out that has extensive notes figures and a comprehensive glossary. I hope this will help.
“i can’t use conceptual categories to talk about this, in the sense of exemplifying it. I can use words to talk about it in the sense of pointing to it. But I can’t produce it in subjective and objective categories precisely because the whole argument points towards its transjective nature.” Doesn’t this apply every time we talk about anything other than words? When we talk about emotions, about memories, about procedures... we never exemplify the thing we talk about, we only point to it (in a sense, we try to arouse similar “experiential bits” in the receiver’s consciousness). No?
Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness=Beauty without the irony or sentimentality. Beauty as entrainment, not entertainment. Beauty as a push and pull, a means of pushing through. ua-cam.com/video/Pd_Kti6jvy8/v-deo.html
Philosophers talking about the arts are calling for a return to the romantic without the naivete' that only the individual's emotions, and uneducated opinions are of ultimate value. The third option is the empty expanse of the"postmodern." One group has called this move to less naievete Metamodernism. Though the authors of Metamodernism seem to misread Kant, their idea of oscillating between the subjective and the objective to maintain the tension in order to temporarily bridge the gap is a useful concept for an artist.
25:48 "I'm not claiming that RR is god, that's ridiculous", Hahahahaha, that's funny, I remember Paul Vanderclay saying that RR was John Vervaeke's god, I supposed in a god spirited way.
Wow, this is a big one! I'm excited! I'll have to listen to it a few times before I do much commentary on it. This all has been very very helpful. Thank you!
This scares me. I am excited.
Glad you found it helpful. Much more to come along these lines.
Paul Vanderklay, just wanted to say hi. We may have a few things we could talk about (I'm the circling Guy John has mentioned a few times). Here is my discussion with John: The Circling Institute presents: "Getting your world podcast" #1 John Vervaeke
ua-cam.com/video/0R2jmtBwQgw/v-deo.html
Both Paul and John, can you comment on the Hebrew meaning that is traditionally translated as holy? The word kadosh in Hebrew means to consecrate (more detailed, to separate to separate the sacred from the profane, or the RR from the background). It means something very different from “to heal or make whole.”
This feels like getting your mind blown by being educated on how your mind gets blown...Thanks John.
Freaki isn't?
Relevance realization and tools against self deception has really helped my OCD. I am listening to this, while cooking salmon. And before I started, I picked up that raw peace of salmon and really felt it with no fear. It’s like the chains of obsessive compulsive disorder are slowly starting to disappear. Thank you so much John Vervaeke 🙏
I watched your latest video 2 times now and even talked my wife into watching it instead of Netflix. One of the things I appreciate is the way you brought technical language in distinguishing the primordial pre-reflective ground that Heidegger opened up. But then you clearly showed how this phenomenological mystery opens and folds back on itself in revelation enriching our reflective capacities that then folds back and enrich the primordial ground in trans reflective fittedness. This auto poetic relation through participatory knowing was really clear and powerfully shown. This was a really powerful articulation in new language of what Heidegger called ecstatic time. To me your furthering what Heidegger radically opened in a way I have not seen before. Deep Bow..
Thank you Guy for your insightful and reflective comment. Much appreciated.
“My theory of “vagueness” doesn’t itself have to be vague. In fact, my theory of “vagueness” has to be clear!” 00:40:20 Oh my! I think this should henceforth be labelled the Vervaeke Paradox. ✨😹💫
A vague thing that lacks clarity must clearly be vague.
Lol!
I don't know really why, after your classes I always feel revigorated. Maybe it's because your lessons feels like "Sati", remember how to be alive and how we are living, to truly look into the world and feels that "it" is looking back at us, in a feel of symbiotic oneness. Thank you John, for adding a real solid brick of understanding in my wall of how to understand and appreciate life itself. Keep up the good work.
I’d listen to an extra 100 hours of this!
Such a generous act, putting all of these lectures on line.
I am emailing this to my wife and children who have been shaking there heads at me wondering what the heck I have been up to since June 9, 2015. This was the day I picked up my daughter from her school, and the first thing she told me was that they watched a documentary about the oceans. They learned that the oceans would be dead in forty years! She was in grade 8 at the time.
I told her that was unacceptable! We would do something to stop that from happening. Since then I have been in a spiral, circumambulating toward the “ultimate root cause”. In other words, I hVe been on a quest, and relevance realization is my compass 🧭.✨😺💫
I vote for 150. I’ll put up the bail money.
You know what's also enriching in this? It is to actually go down and read other people's comments it's amazing to see the responses to you, it's like an added effect making this process more beautiful as it unfolds and moves and takes up it's form in the way most optimal set in love and life . Saw your After Socrates trailer, It looks great , congrats John 👏 ❤️🌿
I can't wait to get to this episode. Got sidetracked way back on 28 with Hegel but I enjoy reading ahead on the comments.
It just so happened that at 21 minutes into this video, my room began to become flooded with the gloriously rose-orange glow of a late summer desert sunset. ❤
This episode culminated beautifully within the series. Kairos.
Thanks John. I watched the recent paul vanderclay chat you had where you seemed to be a bit apologetic that the RR stuff was a bit heavy/technical. But dont worry man, this is the stuff many of us have been waiting for, keep going with it please. Will you be able to talk about it at the neurological level?
Anyone who is interested in the neurological level should also find Jeff Hawkins’ recent discussions very interesting: ua-cam.com/video/uOA392B82qs/v-deo.html
@@dls78731 Brilliant, thanks for the link...
@@dls78731 Yes! Hawkins is doing some great work. Do you know if John has commented on him/talked to him at any point?
"If I tried to run this 150 episodes my crew would kill me, they're be tragedy, I'd end up in jail." LOL 46:12
Worth it though!
As someone who has experienced a direct, sustained encounter with horror and worked towards a feeling of belonging in the world through spirituality this resonates very much with me.
With due respect to John's point that a theory doesn't necessarily have the attributes of the thing it's explaining, I definitely feel that the unfolding of this series exemplifies the trajectory of transframing that he describes here. Each episode makes sense and has value in its own right, and is also a waypoint on the greater journey of understanding that John's taking us on. Each time we are introduced to framings that become part of subsequent framings. Masterfully done.
Ach! Otto! Holy! Glory! cliffhanger!!!! Next week...
Don't worry, Paul! Nobody can put these rationalistic concepts into actual operation in their lives. With a little luck, someone might get lucky and react in the right way, but usually there's no time. If "you have to read this in a deeply Heidiggerian sense," then you'll never put it into practice in your life. What comes to mind is the old joke about consultants: "A consultant is someone who knows 150 ways to make love, but doesn't know any girls." Remember, he's "not holding out for a nostalgic return to religion," because he hasn't understood that religion is a right now system that works. As you rightly observed, if you put all of the rationalist philosophy/psychology professors on a scale along with all of their books, they would be a feather weight compared to the world's religions. There IS a qualitative reason for that! They are trying to but are not talking about the bailiwick of religion. They can only point at your world.
Of course, I do know that religious leaders have followed the rationalists down the rationalist rabbit hole for centuries, as a means of trying to hold off the implications of the scientific method, but in the end theologians need to pull themselves out of that rabbit hole, dust yourselves off, and leave the rationalists to their own devices, because they don't have what humanity needs. You do! Of course, Dr. Peterson gave you all a boost, by overlaying rationality on Biblical texts, but until he's ready to come over to the other side, your side, he won't quite reach the goal.
As a level 10 guru in Boganism, (mysticism for Bogans) I must say this bloke knows his stuff
John is nuts and I love everything about it! Thanks again man!
Wow. This hits deep - so much deeper! - after all the work we've been doing. ❤
beautiful and comprehensive explanation of religion...it explains so well the teachings of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, whose interpretation of Buddhism was coloured by his own experience of exile from Vietnam , and how his practice of mindful breathing and walking could brings us home to the ‘very here and now’. To me, this practice, which he developed out of his experience of domicide, is the ultimate system of meta-meaning! it protects the agent-arena relationship against any kind of physical (or even meta-physical) displacement
I’m in awe after watching this episode. Thank you.
This is just incredible how much stuff these lectures integrate so smoothly together. They have so far covered and tied together so much relevant stuff from the intersection of comparative religion, philosophy and psychology, with a remarkable clarity and pedagogic skill. Also huge respect for ability to include altered states, mysticism, all experiential and "far out" stuff that is easily ignored, overlooked or even ridiculed in many standard academic courses. And a very wide variety of different thinkers and intellectual traditions also: not many people are able understand and interpret such a wide reportoire of source material from buddhism to ancient mystery traditions to modern cognitive science and existential philosophy (and everything in between). Really impressive scope. Very valuable work! Love it!
Thanks John.
Thanks Lee.
After all these (for me) very complex episodes about RR and cognitive science, this one tied everything together beautifully. It was the first one where I could really follow all you were saying and it cleared up a lot. I particularly enjoyed the citations from The Joy Of Secularism, some of the most religious words ever written down lol.
On a side note I think your work is very underrated. Outside of this series you don't get the recognition you deserve and I think I know why. The main difference between this series and your other videos (outside of the structure) is the layout. These thumbnails and titles are beautiful and very attractive. Whoever made them for you knows what they're doing. If you apply the same design to your other video's you would see a surge in viewership, I'm sure of it.
Excited for more!
It seems to me that the comparison of relevance realization to God is an apt one given the change of the content of what God is being as significant as it was from the old testament to the new. This is a religion that is no religion. Seperating the wheat from the chaff there is no need for dogma. Thank you for all the work you put in to scientifically explain spirituality and it's ability to cultivate meaning.
I came across Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by reference from After Sokrates and consider it a true gem. In the conversations with Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau you demonstrated deep thought yet the profoundness of your whole work is astonishing.
It appears to me to be a logical, albeit with a more secular emphasis, continuation of C. G. Jung's Red Book. It is a pleasure to watch!
This presentation is ONE BIG MIC 🎤 DROP!!! ✨🙀💫
Another great episode! This reminded me of an experience from this last weekend. My partner and I create and perform rituals together and we performed this beautiful ritual celebrating the New Moon. We take our play seriously😉. Now, we've been doing this for awhile now so it wasn't anything new for us. But at the end she turned to me and said, "I feel like I just went to church, but not like how I feel when I go to church now, how I felt as a child." (We don't attend church regularly, so these days when we go it is just to please someone else.)
I don't think she could possibly have said anything more meaningful to me. What she was describing was the sense of contact with the sacred and that is the exact purpose of all the practices, rituals, poetry, and stories that I create. That contact with the sacred is so powerful and, sadly, so rare. I hope that my work can bring more of that into the world like I believe your work does. Thank you again for the wonderful gift of this series. 🙏
This one made me nervous, like really worried in the most meaningful way. Amazing having "amazinges" explained both at the same time. Terrifying.
his talk at 57:37 about the Holy... He is just so fascinating I forget to laugh on how hilarious it is also! not only John is a thriving genius and awe inspiring character, he is also very proficient in the art of derision! Furthermore Episode 33 is the first one I saw and it opened up a whole realm of hope during one of the most gruelling times in my life during the lockdown. Whenever I am at a loss or in endless doubts, any episode will have me rebooted... I doff my hat to you John!
Still connecting with these one at a time! This one is beautiful. Thanks!
The distinction between the words “sacred” and “divine” actually triggered quite a significant thought for me. My first reaction was that I actually prefer the word “divine” to describe the Tao over the word “sacred”. Why? You can have a lifeless object that is sacred - for example, the bones of a saint who died five hundred years ago that you carry around with you in a little box could be a sacred object. “Divine”, by contrast, implies an aliveness to that which it modifies. Notice that we would tend to say “a sacred object”, but “a divine being”. Even when we’re talking about an environment of experiential knowing as potent as a temple, we’re still going to call the temple “a sacred place” and the entity that dwells within the temple “a divine being”. Now, because I consider the quality of “aliveness” the most salient feature of the Tao, it feels to me like “divine” better fits the Tao as a descriptor than “sacred”. The Tao is divine in its essential aliveness, and it can give rise to things that are sacred, such as a particular body of teaching, or a particular building that affords spiritual experience (we could even say that there is sacredness to life itself because it proceeds out of the divinity of the Tao). It then hit me that there is a major aspect of all spiritual traditions (to my knowledge) that is seriously left unexplained by this naturalistic account of relevance realization: every spiritual tradition contains accounts of entities that are both autopoetic AND non-embodied! Vervaeke has done a great job of explaining why his entire theoretical framework depends on the embodied brain as the foundation of the experience of spirituality and meaning. And thus that entire framework gives us no way to account for something that is somehow autopoetic without having a body. Now, we could just foo-foo those disembodied beings away by saying, “They’re just a goofy hallucination, an artifact of expanded consciousness” - but is it really prudent to foo-foo away something that has shown itself to be such a consistent human universal? Vervaeke himself said, “In cognitive science, you pay attention to universals, because they likely tell you something about the underlying structure!” And something not only universal, but typically experienced as the very core of the spiritual experience? If your theory of spirituality cannot account for a universal experience that is commonly felt to be the very core of spirituality - i.e. the encounter with the non-embodied autopoetic being - maybe that is a gap that needs to be looked at? If our entire experience of relevance and meaning is completely predicated on embodiment, it should be impossible for us to separate the sense of “meaning” from the sense of “being in a body” - how then would we even be able to conceive of an entity that is not only disembodied and autopoetic but also exemplifies what we as embodied humans experience as “meaningfulness”?
Yep, definitely a Tipping-Point level of Salience in videos 30-33. I wanna be cautious of hyperbolizing, but for me the magnitude of this work is akin to the Theory of Evolution.
That tipping point you speak of is the relevance of the deep continuity of life and mind being realized! The phenomenology and functionality of consciousness fuse in a dynamically coupled, stereoscopic cascade of insights. "The real self-realization of reality."
My understanding of all the keywords mentioned today: In some sense, RR is the permeating “ether” of life, that inspires awe and wonder in us, allowing the agent to be in contact with itself, the world, and the relationship among these entities. Such a relationship is impossible to encapsulate in a theoretical frame or language, it’s elusive, it’s a mystery, similar to that mystery provided by the direct exposure to a sacred experience, in which a person participates with all its being in and with the Divine, a numinous experience.
Your piece about culture shock at the end was great. It adds a great context for understanding resort tourists and those that want to immerse themselves in the culture. It goes right back to your concept of participatory knowing. I've gotten an incredible amount out of your series. Keep it up and thank you!!!
This feels like the mid-season finale!
Indeed
OMG! I love the distinction between Curiosity (focused attention) and Wonder (diffuse attention). The way that John talks about it here, curiosity is the pump that fills our senses with details to the point of criticality, and when the balance tips, and the pendulum swings, and the hourglass topples 180 degrees so that the sands run the other way, the Relevance of another layer of dialectical synthesis is Realized.
I have recently watched a video about Braess’ Paradox, in which this kind of tipping point is realized in a network by breaking the camel’s back of that load bearing assumption upon which rests the fundamental way that we make sense of the world. Curiosity is the compulsion to keep adding the straws until criticality is reached. (The Braess’ Paradox video: ua-cam.com/video/cALezV_Fwi0/v-deo.html )
I am definitely playing fast and loose with a couple of metaphors there, I admit. But there is a kind of sense that this has been making that suddenly points to the disagreement (tension) between John and Jordan Peterson in the meaning of life discussion from several years back when Jordan fears that the continuing to include more expansive frames could lead to a kind of nihilistic paralysis, and John seems to be noting that this is a part of the maturation process that requires that kind of critical point be reached. Perhaps the nuance between their positions is that we can’t rush to this criticality, but we also can’t put it off forever?
David Swedlow can’t put it off too long, as there are 97 percent of climate scientists saying “we don’t have time”. The meaning crisis solution doesn’t really care about whether we have time to change ourselves. Our purpose is complete whether we live for another 195,000 years or 195,000 hours.✨😺💫
Myles Flaig, true, we’ve got extra alarms klanging in our ears, which makes it seem even more urgent. But truly I think that is co-incidental and integral to the waking up. Kind of like a fruit getting ready to fall from the tree and happy that it got ripe just in time (whew, that was a close call, what if it lost its grip when it was still green). I know that is a big leap, but I don’t think there is much if anything in this universe that is truly accidental, just that it seems that way.
Thanks John! I really appreciate your intellectual honesty and earnestness.
JV-JBP-PVK-JP three hour discussion on sacredness pleaaaaase. Awesome lecture.
Thank you
Near the end you discuss the "homing" through sacredness against domicide.
And this is what happened to me profoundly mid 2019. Before I was very fearful, and afterwards I had a release from it. I noticed also that I could comfort people around me, by simply staying calm.
And one component of my experience is best explained with the following sentence: everywhere I go, there I am at home. There is a fundamental sense of "at homeness".
It came from a gnostic approach of combining mindfulness of breathing and metta (logically, not at the same time). It could be an Insight/enlightenment experience.
Mic drop....Gnosticism reverberates everywhere, it is trying awaken us to the primordiality & mystery of religio. The trajectory of its transframing is ultimately understood as transgressive, in trying to overturn the "grammar" of a world-view!
This was a powerful episode. I have struggled my whole life with trying to frame experiences as meaningful. When I can, life radiates, when I can’t, the horror is overwhelming. They’re two sides of a same being mode and so easily slipped between.
This is awesome! There has been a process to embody and understand this topics for years and i really resonate your way of coming to it. It is a way wich is clear and can be argumented out. Thank u thousand times and more! ( Also massive thankfullness to the wizards on the way whos name have been dropped during the serie and to the ones who nobody remember). Long live brighten humanity!
The pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. This concept is mindblowing and very exhilarating. I also feel your personal exhilaration about Relevance Realization, John.
It feels like what the theory of evolution is for biology, and what a "theory of everything" would be for physics.
A theory of (almost?) everything for intelligence, cognition, wisdom, spirituality, and meaning! Even human culture as one of its emergent properties? I don't know, maybe I am blowing it out of its proportions.
The last lectures were difficult (I should watch them later for a second time), but my excitement is through the roof. Even though I am ignorant of most within cognitive science, I recognize that this work is highly relevant and important.
Keep up the good work John, and I will wait for the other hundred lectures! ;-)
The sacred "Holding us against horror". I hear the double meaning sense of this statement as it holds both ways
Much like the word "reveal".
Oh Shit! I wrote this before I heard your closing statement!
Jason Silva is going to loooove this one!
The transgressive side of sacredness that "opens us in wonder and awe, and even takes us to the horizon of horror" reminds me of James Joyce's "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man." Yours is a beautiful expansion of the transjective nature (if I got it right) of the RR of meaningful art. That is, art has the capacity to evoke the sacred and steer us away from BS.
I think I felt my brain do a backflip in my head.
Thanks much
Hopefully Google isn't censoring me here, but to be grasping with struggle at a philosophy of feeling at home, I wonder if home-ness is somehow central to all human desire, and traveling comes from a loss of something home-ness is supposed to entail.
Another helpful lecture. This is like German Idealism augmented with the conceptual tools of 21st c. cognitive science.
@FifesAndClarions In the sense that both GI and JV build upon Kant by identifying reason with practice and by locating the rational in the actual. It seems to me that JV is lending empirical credibility to this project with the recent findings in cog sci.
This one I had to watch 3 times
NOTES!
The Spirituality of RR: Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness
“Belief as an effect of RR.”
Religio
“You need an additional argument to go from phenomenological mystery to the claim of theoretical inexplicability. They do not follow because perspectival and propositional knowing are identical. That is an equivocation”
“When I’m thinking about something, I’m keeping it in a frame, if I don’t I face combinatorial explosion.” We want to expand from a framing altogether, but when we do, we just add a new framing to think through. (forming a box within a box within yet another box). This is how we view the world, through frameworks, this is at the core of CBT and rational emotion management! “How you face the world determines the face you see in the world” We view the world in a compartmentalized fashion, so we want to expand on that as much as possible via RR, expanding our salience landscape through gratitude and etc.
We want to examine this theoretical homonculus within, “I can never see the ‘I’, I can only see by means of the I.” This brings to mind Plotinus, who spoke of the “one”, the self, as being like light, ungraspable, unattainable, but allows us to see. Light must also bounce off of surfaces to be useful, and can be directed, and a good light will do a good job of bouncing light information off of objects. We can direct the light to look outwith and within, engage in exterroception and interroception, but never to the extent of thought itself.
“You cannot confuse properties of your theory with properties of what your theory is about.”
“We have to understand the differences between the limitations of the different kinds of knowing. And the ways in which I can and cannot bridge between these kinds of knowing.” This makes me think of thinking solely through the lens of religion, or science.
“What’s missing from religio that’s found in religion is to confront the sacred.”
Shunyata in buddhism is sacred, but not a worshipped entity. The Dao is not divine, but is still considered sacred.
The Sacred is a metaphysical proposal. It is supernatural.
Sacredness is a psycho-existential proposal, experiencing sacredness. Shlermacher examined this.
A deep culture shock, or a homesickness is domicide. Geertz argues that “part of sacredness is to home the world… We are homed in the world and the world is homed around us.”
“If you don’t get absorbed [initiated] into the culture, you’re experiencing domicide, and none of the other meaning systems will work for you.” Our agent-arena relationship is thrown outta whack when we feel far from home.
A very important function of sacredness: We play in a meta-meaning arena. We have psychotechnologies that allow us to do this serious play with sacredness so we are constantly being homed against horror.” Religion affords us congregation, participatory knowing, but no personal growth. “Research shows that people that belong to such spiritual pathways are more resilient in dealing with the horrors of life.” But you don’t really need research to tell you that being able to say “Well, God’s will, he works in mysterious ways” about a tragic accident in the family can have its mental-gymnastical advantages. If you’re traveling, it helps you eliminate feelings of domicide by finding congregations/similar religious symbolism and groups to flock to.
The Gnostics examined the values of religio
SUMMARY:
Viewing aspects of spirituality and sacredness through the lens of how they apply RR, this Vervaeke has coined “Religio”. Essentially the useful bits of religion and terms like sacredness, holiness, and awe.
Thanl you, Professor
''One of functions of sacredness is this meta meaning process of homing us against horror, where horror would be overwhealmed by lonelyness, beung overwhealmed by homesickness, cultural shock and a tremendous sense of alienation, absurdity and anxiety, ok? .... Now thats important.''
Haha so casual that, ''now thats important'' !
This one is epic....and I'm just 23:00 in
Thanks Guy!
Yeah, by midway I likewise was already thinking “Wow!”. By the end of this one, I’m completely blown away. And to see John’s comment to Paul Vanderklay that more along these lines is coming. It justifies coining a new expression of wonder: “Numinous Realized Relevance!”
Ignore my comment. But Im no longer awakening from the meaning crisis. Im drowning in a sea of confusion...😧
Several times John has talked about how culture requires participatory learning/knowing - in this episode he talks about the difference between culture shock and really understanding a culture via participation. Elsewhere he talks about how discovering in anthropology works by participation to some extent.
Does anyone know of any good books that explain this in more detail? John perhaps?
Whoa, that was powerful. It gave me a moment of enlightment.
By the way, I think it is like the clear mind experiene of Zen. How do you see it?
41:30 Aha! "Transjective trajectory flow state celebrating [my] participation in religio" is one way I would translate my experience of what the Buddha called "2nd Jhana." Also resembles my experience of the Brahmaviharas ("god abidings") of Karuna (compassion) and Mudita (empathetic joy). Granted, I haven't watched your Buddhism and Cog Sci series yet, so you may have already articulated this, JV. Just hope this bread crumb helps someone.
"Smoke rose from his nostrils;
consuming fire came from his mouth,
burning coals blazed out of it. ...
He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him-
the dark rain clouds of the sky."
"the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently."
Numinous glory, Awe, and horror.
Those that look upon my face shall surely die.
And Simon did die.
The conception of God in whiteheads process and reality seems strongly connected to RR, not sure how familiar you are with it...something ive been studying for the last 9 months or so, as conclusions from the work of Robert Rosen, Varela/Thompson, Deacon, Kaufman, and Hoffmeyer have led me to accept a process relational metaphysical position.
Does anyone know if there are clean PDF or JPEG versions of what is on his chalkboard? I can never make out what’s going on with my phone. And I haven’t had a chance to try to re-watch these on a laptop.
I understand the new meaning you gave to the word "thing". Having understanding that, then, what are the good things and the bad things? And, can we track them in a statistical analysis? That's a very dark place to explore logically 😱
I can never follow the notes on the board either because I can’t listen and watch at the same time, or when I look I’ve missed why what is on the board is there. Is there a place where there is a PDF or JPEG image of the notes? Perhaps with a very brief description?
I want to ask a question about this trans jective level which is underneath the objective and the subjective. And also all of this stuff that is pre egoic and pre cognitive. I'm thinking about this perhaps evolutionarily. So it seems that the distinction between subject and object is found in our bodies in the having of two hands. So one hand grasps something so that the other hand can work on it. And this also shows up in our grammar, the subject object distinction with a subject performing the action upon the object. So is it possible that evolutionarily we begin to get subject-object distinction when we have the kind of animal life and the kind of appendages that permit that grasping action? So it would be the more primitive body plan life that would originate this pre egoic and pre-conceptual engagement with the world, with the original element of caring connected to survival.
A good detective doesn't only use logic, he also considers, dreams, hunches and intuition to solve a case. Likewise, using only reason to understand the world would be like examining a crime scene with the lights dimmed, one of your eyes closed and at half mast. Reason and the subjective distance themselves from one another only in order to see the other more clearly. But without a parallax view, we end up allowing reason to do violence to the subjective and visa-versa. In the end we can only be as objective as we can within our subjectivity.
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
Anderson Todd is also a professor at the University of Toronto like John, and he also uploads his lectures on UA-cam, I really like them.
This idea of wonder and awe reminds me of Jesus telling his disciples, “Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” If you spend any amount of time around children, you quickly see their natural ability to enter a state of awe and wonder.
keith swift reminds me of a video I saw yesterday as an FB post of a little girl with her mom seeing a train 🚊 for the first time arriving at the station. Pure awe and joy tinged with a bit of fear. Priceless!😺
Myles Flaig Perfect example!
HOLY ✨also as in WHOLENESS and HEALING✨
Could the trajectory of transframing also suggest that RR is accomodating for a larger search space? i.e., the illumination of larger possible combinations to solve a problem?
00:59:00 “The numinous opens us up to experience the transgressiveness of the Sacred.” I am thinking of how this relates to a recent reading by Skip Conover of the Carl Jung Depth Psychology Reading Group about “Gethsemane and Sacred Chaos by Françoise O’Kane.” In the Reading there is a concept of Sacred Logos and Profane Logos. There is a concept of the Sacred Chaos and the Profane Chaos. So it makes me think “horror” is the manifestation of either Profane Logos or Profane Chaos. I will send this over to Skip, as he will find this talk very interesting. ✨😺💫
How is the claim for the primacy of transjectivity similar and different to Pirsig's claim in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
The philosophy in that book was hard for me to follow, perhaps because it was a bit too informal. So I wonder if transjectivity would lend itself to a new reading.
@@cameronhashemi569 I think Persia’s quality is relevance but he seems in places to also equate it with truth so I am not happy making a straight equivalency.
I am sorry if this sounds elementary( or I missed earlier explanations) yet who/what decides something is relevant? Or how is relevance decided? Is it a survival imperative? A move toward pleasure and away from pain? For something to be relevant there is framing yes but does it also need a "goal"? Or is framing the goal and the goal is framing?
Would "time" be also considered as cost in the equation that RR is doing when calculating if some action is "worth the effort" ? Everything we take in consideration is kind of biological or physical, but is there something to the idea that we have a hard time dealing with "time"?Or how do we deal with "time" at that level? And especially with the fact that time is limited and one day my time will be over.
I think contemplating whether “time” invested is “worth it” is purely a function of whether the RR succeeds in transmuting this moment into glory. If the critical moment fails, than all that time building up this scaffolding is gone and we must start over. But on the other hand, if it is successful, then the collapse results in a new reification of glory that is unequivocally worth it. If I anthropomorphize the universe, that is the only reason time exists, to fritter it away on this one foundational activity.
Seems to me that Vervaeke is very much bringing distinction to and thus revealing what Heidegger called ecstatic temporality.
enkor349 John mentions time (temporal) as part of our “ cognitive, metabolic and temporal resources “ early on in the video. A favourite song of mine by Trooper includes the lyric “We are here for a good time, not a long time.” John is all about establishing what a “good time” is. I think the song is titled RAISE A LITTLE HELL.✨😹💫
I'm getting from Kant that space is the condition for intuiting appearances of objects and time is the condition for understanding them. That would make your guess right.
@@brendantannam499 that’s a fantastic answer
Is there any research on Relevance Realization in newborns?
I don‘t know, maybe this is a stupid thought but isn‘t it true that infants are (obviously) conscious - hence they are doing Relevance Realization - long before they can make a distinction between the inner and the outer, between subjectivity and objectivity?
Wouldn’t that support the notion that consciousness, RR, transjectivity presupposes subjectivity/objectivity?
And is not also true, that before a human being can even grasp any kind of propositional knowing it has already developed some sort of participatory, perspectival and procedural knowing?
Very simply put:
You know how to live, be alive, be here and now before you know anything else.
Does that make sense?
What song is being played at the beginning of each episode?
50:50 Meta meaning Function (Geertz)
53:00 Sacredness - Homing Us against Horror
Are you writing a book on Relevance Realization or is it something you'd like to do in the future, perhaps?
He is so enamored by RR but it's just pain (and derivatively pleasure) by another name.
Please note that the vast majority of stimuli cause neither pain nor pleasure and that something can be relevant one minute and irrelevant the next whereas pain and pleasure do not work that way. Pain and pleasure and much more fixed and limited in scope than relevance and irrelevance. Also, a lot of RR goes on unconsciously as in categorization and memory whereas talking about unconscious pain and pleasure makes no sense. Of course one can change the meaning of pleasure so that it is simply the same as finding something relevant but then the problem has just been renamed rather than solved. Why should I find the colour of my wall pleasure at one moment and not pleasurable the next?
@@johnvervaeke well, I mean qualia space is as infinite as many holons (I'm not a Wilburist, but he has some very descriptive and useful terminology) we can segment reality and real space into, but you'll all have that once you have the ability to feel pain, the rest of qualia space is open season to get enlisted by evolution or even unconscious processes, the feeling of relevance or the rightness of an answer even is a qualia in qualia space, just the same as pleasure (in a derivative way, by that I mean there was pain first to serve as the body's extended way to achieve homeostasis in unexpected circumstances, and then once you had that, you had the option for everything else)
I realize that this might just be another way of saying the same thing as you, but I think it might be a more grounded and straightforward way of looking at it
@@johnvervaeke also I remember you emphasized talking about it is not the same as the thing and from my part by describing RR as "just another qualia" is basically just talking about it in a perhaps too general and therefore a pointless way, but looking at this in the reverse this is exactly the same problem for me wit RR, that is it sounds like it could be used to describe all qualia with it. I remember what you said about Hegel, that is for me RR is similar to his endgame in practice, as you have this pretty description of yet another qualia, and we can sit down next to it, I don't see how this will develop to anything else than what we already have. But you know what, there are 15 lessons left, so perhaps I should reserve judgement after I finished, lol. It's just you were so into describing RR that I couldn't resist the urge to try to cool you down with a bucket of water, like all good internet trolls ought to do ;)
@@ricardosantos6721 I appreciate the water!
@@johnvervaeke Ok John. I finished your series on the meaning crisis and now I see the integral part of RR in the agent arena relationship. Also, I have some interesting things to say. I don't know what would you prefer, if I write a book, or paper(s), while properly reference you and give you due credit, or perhaps you could use my stuff and credit me as co-author of your paper. I've been researching and thinking on solutions to the meaning crisis during the span of the past 25 years, (with big gaps in the middle), but I never published anything. My focus has been on an approach to circumvent fundamental dichotomy (you would say Cartesian) that I see as pivotal in order to get an intellectual tool against the hard wired instincts in our brain to see everything as us/them or to get an optimal grip on how to enact wisdom. Your ideas about the 4 p/e-s, mesh perfectly with my approach and in fact they are extending each other to describe the agent arena relationship in a very convincing manner. I'm a Hungarian living in Hungary, (my youtube name is not my real name), by trade I only have a bachelors in computer science for which I studied in England, so academically I don't see a lot of options for me to get published, but maybe I just don't know how. Please advise.
I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄 just a small question maybe its just my view but is “home” a reference to your inhabited body being home, and not your physical house with a pantry and bedrooms, and than what domicide is, is the “self destructive nature” of ones self? Ones home, our very body we host? Or is there a philosophy or maybe a book to how im thinking here?
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth." Yet, here we are, talking about the Way. Maybe we've gone full Hofstadter and we all became strange loops folding numerous times over ourselves, and quantitative changes leading to qualitative ones, almost impossible to unravel clearly.
So, there is an underlying statement here that the individual’s interest in survival is fundamental to the capacity for meaning-making. If that is true, what are the ethical implications of a “belief system” that advocates negation of ones own survival?
Can’t help but think of dual masculine and feminine symbolism that you see in myth, religion, Jung with terms like having (masculine) and being (feminine).
If anyone needs a transcript we've made them for this & all episodes here: www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-33-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-the-spirituality-of-rr-wonder-awe-mystery-sacredness/
This is absolutely Amazing!!!
John’s team rocks so hard. I’m giggley about these transcripts…. Such a great way to review or preview, & deep dive these episodes and concepts!!!
Thank you,
Thank you,
Thank you!
🙏🏼
Insofar as all animals are doing relevance realization (necessarily, in order to navigate) but don't have wonder, awe, or religio... what's going on there? How does this theory account for that?
Who else votes in favour of the 150 episode version?
I would like to have seen more time devoted to psychedelics. This episode you treated the issue basically as already discussed but the questions psychedlics pose have not been discussed enough. Yes, they do change what's relevant to you, but by what criteria? Which perspectice do we take when being on psylocibin for example. People afterwards quit smoking etc., what does that mean? Why does the higher good become more relevant and how is that tied to the different, less ego-tied perspectices? Especially when ego is a meaning making construct at least as i understood that's somehow your position. Or does anybody know a video where john discusses this in depth in relazion to RR?
I reckon "Completely Other" is another important facet of Holy (Hagios)
I started watching Robert Paul Wolff’s YT lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He insisted we read the text so I’m at page 100. I’m trying to find where, in the myriad of terms, the faculty for belief might be found. For starters, might it be found in a category to understanding sensory input like the apostle Paul intimates at Romans 1:20? I don’t think objects from the physical world can become any more than objects of thought and God must come to us another way. The type of thought God will come under must be synthetic a priori, a pure (abstract) thought. The curious thing about all this is that even though I’m trying to use Kant to pinpoint belief in God in the workings of the mind, it seems Kant was adamant that all our thinking was subjective anyway. That lends itself well to god-belief in the way William Blake understood it but not in mainstream thinking.
god-belief = god-delusion
Or you could buy a fridge magnet with the Serenity prayer on it.
You really don't need much more, do you? "Complexification" can be deadly.
What about NDE? There have been a number of cases where people have been pronounced dead medically but were able to describe the experience.
I loved this series in the beginning. But now it's becoming incomprehensible to me. Part of it is that there are so many words that I don't fully understand in almost every sentence. A dictionary for the series would help as in some cases I simply don't remember what the terms he introduced means. But that's definitely not the only reason. Another thing is that I have trouble remembering arguments from previous lectures and I probably didn't understand some of the things fully, and all of that accumulates since he builds on previous lectures. Consequently, despite a lot of effort, I now understand almost nothing he says. I guess I'll give up here. Another person also told me that he gave up somewhere around the ep. 30.
Hello Saulius I appreciate your patience. There is a book version of the series coming out that has extensive notes figures and a comprehensive glossary. I hope this will help.
@@johnvervaeke ah, thanks, I'm looking forward to checking that out :)
Sacredness as a “noble lie” (irony intended) for an immanentist metaphysics?
“i can’t use conceptual categories to talk about this, in the sense of exemplifying it. I can use words to talk about it in the sense of pointing to it. But I can’t produce it in subjective and objective categories precisely because the whole argument points towards its transjective nature.”
Doesn’t this apply every time we talk about anything other than words? When we talk about emotions, about memories, about procedures... we never exemplify the thing we talk about, we only point to it (in a sense, we try to arouse similar “experiential bits” in the receiver’s consciousness). No?
Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness=Beauty without the irony or sentimentality. Beauty as entrainment, not entertainment. Beauty as a push and pull, a means of pushing through.
ua-cam.com/video/Pd_Kti6jvy8/v-deo.html
Philosophers talking about the arts are calling for a return to the romantic without the naivete' that only the individual's emotions, and uneducated opinions are of ultimate value. The third option is the empty expanse of the"postmodern." One group has called this move to less naievete Metamodernism. Though the authors of Metamodernism seem to misread Kant, their idea of oscillating between the subjective and the objective to maintain the tension in order to temporarily bridge the gap is a useful concept for an artist.
"Feed-back-down arrows" 😆
25:48 "I'm not claiming that RR is god, that's ridiculous", Hahahahaha, that's funny, I remember Paul Vanderclay saying that RR was John Vervaeke's god, I supposed in a god spirited way.