John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro: The Philosophical Silk Road - Part 1
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- Опубліковано 2 жов 2024
- I caught up with John and Chris and explored John's change of perspective from 'the religion that is not a religion' to the philosophical Silk Road. How do we create a meaningful passage between the religions and those who have fallen out of religion? A heartfelt dia-logos and the start of a longer conversation on the subject.
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Bio
John Vervaeke
For 28 years, cognitive scientist Dr. John Vervaeke has given his life to pioneering the scientific study of wisdom and transformation. His discoveries blend ancient and modern ways of knowing-bringing together philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, information processing, linguistics, and studies of religion.
His Awakening From the Meaning Crisis series has earned him global notoriety and his academic work has gained the respect of the scholarly and scientific community. His lectures and discussions have been viewed by millions.
This cognitive explanation of meaning-making has attracted leaders in many disciplines to the work. His teachings have served as a clarion call, around which practices are being honed and communities are being built that are having a proven ability to bring transformation and meaning to many
Christopher Mastropietro
Is Executive Director of the Vervaeke foundation. He is a writer, instructor, and former public policy advisor. An experienced manager and team lead, he worked for a decade in the Ontario Public Service and Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner.
He is a co-author of several publications related to philosophy, dialogue, and the Meaning Crisis, including Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis (Open Book Publishers, 2017) and the forthcoming Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (Story Grid, 2024).
I really appreciate you saying this. I completely understand your initial reaction. I am grateful you gave me another chance. Thanks.
You're very welcome, sir. Tks for responding! :)
Maybe you've heard this before; maybe even often you hear it or something like it, but I have to say it regardless because I'm afraid and anxioius about it all the time.
I think for the vast majority of people, what the idea of "sacred" means is that which is all three: true, good, and beautiful. They seem to compel people to try REALLY HARD to put the sacred thing beyond question, critique, or any analysis that might reduce the status or prestige or power of the sacredness of the thing. Analysis and debate can happen but not in a way that would reduce the sacredness of thing and introduce the profane (profanity) even in the slightest.
People can feel this way about stuff and try those things or ideas to the status of the sacred just because they do for any number of reasons personal to them, AND/OR they can do it because they've been impressed upon by scripture or sutra or whatever. Either way, the end result is the birthing of "the sacred cow." Offending against the sacred cow usually results in persecution up to the point of murder by a mob or even war (as the history of Europe and the Islamic world show clearly.) If the sacred cow is actually "killed," the paradigm and Overton Window shift and a lot of people are very unhappy about that. If an entire herd of sacred cows are killed, you get a Meaning Crisis which seems to me, is how civilizations end and new ones are born.
A lot of the Liminal Web is staring the figurative psycho-social end of the world right in the face, which I admire and love, but a lot of it is responding by wanting to fall back on axial age (or in the case of Bard, Bronze Age) philosophy and psychotechnology. It's NOT just for me that all of this is a mixed bag. Some of it, (the stuff that has to do mostly with what we would now call "psychology") is exactly what champions of it, like yourself claim it is: timeless and insightful; comforting, clear, and possessed of the potential to quite literally save hundreds of millions from despair, suicide, and barbarism. Hell yeah, baby; sign me up. Then there's a bunch more of it that will serve as weapons in the hands, not just of the Athenian jury and judges or whoever that murdered Socrates or the Pharisees and Roman Bureaucrats who did for Jesus, but, y'know, just regular every day people. People who are more than happy to burn witches or utterly cancel and destroy people like Oscar Wilde or to put a scarlet letter on Hester Pryne.
You are one of the great champions of "oh shit, oh shit; go back go back! We need to go BACK to the axial age stuff!" I wish you wouldn't have gone this route but (laughs gently) that ship sailed soooo long ago the water next to the peer hasn't had an olfactory hint of your ship's diesel fuel for years. You've spent many a long year becoming the academic and public intellectual that you are. As the saying goes: "Haters gonna hate;" I know that "Vervaekes gonna Vervaek"
I will repeat, it's not just for me that all of this axial age stuff is a mixed bag. It's the sacred thing, the yearning for the grand narrative that's the frightening part, and by frightening I'm not messing around at all. People want to defecate all over Lyotard's summarizing satement on Post-Modernism and insist that we're facing nihilism and a mental health crisis and civilizational degeneracy and all the other stuff that they say and blame on Post-Modernism ("they tore everything down and never built anything in its place!" etc.) but there's a big part of all of that that has to do with the weak and the few-in-number and the hated hoping beyond hope that a civilization with no grand narratives is a civlizaiton with room for an admittedly chaotic plethora of narratives and versions of "true, good, and beautiful" to flourish, or a least, y'know, not get be strung up or turned into social lepers or forced into ghettos.
The ship sailed long ago. That's gonna have to be okay. :) I know you're going to keep talking about the sacred. I know you're one of many who will. Please, sir, I beg; try your VERY best to keep them from, uhhh, what is that you and Christopher said, "instrumentalizing?" it. Try and keep them from turning whatever pops up as sacred from being instrumentalized and becoming a "sacred cow." The "Religion That's Not A Religion" seemed to me, like the opening line from the Tao De Ching that Schmachtenberger likes so much: "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao." Encoded within the name "The Religion That's Not a Religion," is an aggressive insistence and admonishment or warning: "YOU WILL NOT INSTRUMENTALIZE THIS; YOU WILL NOT WEAPONIZE THIS!" No rules lawyers or reductionists allowed.
You've backed off of that and have gone more overtly axial. It is what it is. Just, please try, sir, please. Please try to keep the dangerous idea of the sacred from becoming something awful and violent.
I'm 24 mins in and feeling better about what's happening every minute. The "betterness" is slow but steady. I'm almost willing to say this is the best thing to happen to me in a month or more.
When Jordan Hall got on Rutt's show and told the Liminal Web about his conversion I unfollowed immediately. Then, the first I thought after that was, "I bet John Vervaeke is going to respond to this in some way that I do NOT like!" So went and looked at I started seeing this business about how the Philosophical Silk Road is superseding all the work done on The Religion That's Not A Religion and I was angry and bitter and the voice in my head said, "God damnit, fucking John is wussing out and laying skid marks because his friend has gone over to Christianity! John's capitulating!"
So I unfollowed.
I'm going to refollow. What's being said in this interview is putting me much more at ease! It looks to me, at this point that I was over-reacting a lot and was wrong. I haven't been so happy to be wrong in a loooong time.
Jonh answer you outside of your comment btw
I’m glad to hear someone else felt the same as me re Jordan H on Jim Rutt’s show…
Ultimately perhaps all religions are not a religion at some mature point when disciples simply let go and "become".
Well said.
One, two, three... Where's number four, Timaeus?
Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Gyana Yoga, and...
Raja Yoga (the way of meditation) is the 4th path laid out to Arjuna by Sri Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita 😊
Oh Tetractus! The song which the Sirens sing!
Mindfulness
Imagination
eNbodiment
Dialogos
This has been one of the profoundest discussions I have ever been able to take part of, even tangentially. It speaks to the power you are freely and consensually exchanging with one another in true context of the dialogos that I could even conceive of myself as a part of this.
But I did. And I do. And I’m forever grateful.
I am thinking of religion as having two types of plug-in's for an individual. But sadly, what many people dont have is an understanding their political views and its similarity to a religious stance. I always have one plugin with Catholic and the other must be with the Stoics, otherwise they dont actually shape who I am, instead they are large system ways to identify myself with other large sets of people in systems and vice versa. Like tiny scattered dots on a screen in the community and other such places to grow innovation at grassroots.
Religion may be culturally oriented or adapted to a particular culture. Christianity was built on a foundation of Paganism which was a religion based on nature with an abstract Spirit God. Christianity brought God into the human form but unfortunately lost God in nature which in a Dark Age was rightly viewed as problematic. We should now try to see God as all there is, nothing can be excluded, neither the sacred or profane, as for a manifested world we need to have duality, good and bad, otherwise there would be just the One. Duality helps us choose the good and in choosing we advance and reach liberation from the problems of duality and unite with our real Selves which is One.
The original chism can be traced back to the Dasharajna war,the churning of the ocean story n mahishasura story.
Re John as the earliest gospel: The biblical scholars are not saying that the gospel as we now have it is the earliest gospel; it is later than the synoptics. Rather, the claim is that parts of John are very early. Can't remember off-hand what those parts are. The Wikipedia article on John is pretty good.
43 minutes, John brings together the history of meaning in a sentence and calls it the way, this has been a treat so far, those that know, know 58:45, thank you John, Chris, and Andrew for sharing your time and work, this was wonderful, looking forward to the next chapter, peace
SYNC up y’all
Absolutely amazing. This is the piece that I've been intuiting has been missing from much of the discourse around resolving the meaning crisis.
Great dialogue.
I would like to hear a conversation between John Vervaeke and Marc Gafni. I'd like to hear more about the Philosophical Silk Road and First Principle & First Values.
The fourth yoga is commonly referred to in Hindu traditions as Raja Yoga (path of meditation). Vivekananda popularized the term Raja Yoga in honor of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra and its path to mystical experience.
Great book by Phil Cousineau The Art Of Pilgrimage.
Also Plato's resting place may have been found. Will that be a stop along your own pilgrimage along the philosophical silk road?
Also Swami savapriananda is great on the four ways of yoga . Include him on the Silk Road along with bede Griffiths , etc
Re propositional claims in Christianity. Andrew, I really think you are misunderstanding religious language. Strict propositional language, as we use in science, philosophy, mathematics and logic is not ordinary language; it is a language stripped of its metaphorical, poetic, symbolic and relational aspects. When you say to someone close to you, "I believe in you," you are using language in a way that is similar to religious language. When you say that you "believe in" someone, you're not making a simple, propositional claim like, for instance, "the cat is on the mat." You are saying something about your knowledge of, experience of, the other; you are also saying something about your relationship with that other; you are also indicating that you are willing to commit to or trust that person - and maybe a lot more. The creeds to not use simple, propositional, language. The Apostles' Creed begins, "I believe IN God...", not that "I believe THAT there is a God," and the difference is massive.
In the Jewish Era God was out there. His existence in man was problematic as it was with Christ and other prophets who were killed for their view of God as not just out there in some other realm but also in man was blasphemy. See also my comment below. There are the 24 Principles of nature and humans should comply, the 24 Spirits St. John saw in Revelation before the Throne. Not just Christians but all humans should align with these Principles otherwise we are in trouble. The Eastern tradition also bases its Religion and Philosophy on aligning human consciousness with these 24 Principles.
this was just the discourse and interlocutors needed to drill down on this Christian meta-modern question.
Thank you Andrew, Christopher and John exploring the philosophical Silk Road
Christianity came at the bottom of the Dark Age. It was necessary for the Church to turn to Ancient Greek philosophers, who were Pagans in relation to nature but also believed in god. The Dark Age wiped out most knowledge.
Re "salvation" in the original Greek is "soteria". It means to be saved, made whole, restored, healed, delivered, preserved. I think that, for our times, the meaning of "healing" is most helpful, and yet it is rarely invoked, which I find frustrating. There are certain forms of fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity which gain a lot of attention and that reduce the content of certain central aspects of the faith to simple slogans that imply that you have to subscribe to truth claims, asserted as simple propositions, or you will be condemned to hell for eternity. That is simply ridiculous, and it is a caricature of true Christianity. Faith requires that we bring our entire being into relationship with the divine, and that stance, that commitment cannot be reduced to simplistic slogans.
Buddhism was a reaction to what appeared to be multiple gods, actually this was different ways of seeing and expressing in forms the one God. Buddhism concentrated on improving the mind without devotion to an external personal source personal or impersonal. The Buddha cleared the mind of unreality which leaves Reality both personal and impersonal which many would still see as God.
30:46 How can we become in the likeness of the infinite and mysterious? What does that mean to make the infinite and mysterious real or present more than that it is just mysterious? Actually I think Christopher around 1:07 answers my question that some people have that vulnerability to fall in love with the mysterious and have a real connection and presence to it.
When John says, "ONE OF THE THINGS THAT GETS IN THE WAY BETWEEN CHRISTIANS AND JESUS IS CHRISTIANITY", I think I stood up in my living room and started clapping.
Like John I have a background in Christianity and after reading Kierkegaard's "Training in Christianity" this same intuition came to me, and just as John said Christians need to RETHINK the verse that says that Jesus is The Way, similarly Christians and non-Christians should really think about Jesus' first words in Mark calling those who will listen to "REPENT" which in the Greek is Metanoia, meaning "CHANGE YOUR MIND".
Very much enjoyed this discussion and very much looking forward to Part 2 and more of the Philosophical Silk Road.
Clark Dorothy Brown Sarah Thompson Amy
The word “heart” is mentioned 203 times in the Bible❤
John, I am so happy to hear you stand up strongly against “cultural Christianity “ & Christian nationalism “ !! You sounded like my UCC pastor. There are a lot of us Christians out here who agree with you and we seek to embody the Way that Jesus lived and taught. You are in a position to speak up for us & that is a sign to me that Spirit is working in you and in the world. Blessings on your journey and for your fellow travelers.
Yes, yes, yes, thank you guys!
13:00
@ around 1:10: Re the role of philosophy in resolving unclear thinking, mistakes, fallacies, etc., see Wittgenstein - he's all about that (although many other things as well). Re the dialogue between philosophy and religion - that is called theology; "faith seeking understanding" (I think that's Anselm? not sure right now).
@ 28:57 ff: A better word than "representation" is "reappropriation." In reappropriating our tradition we make it ours again, but in a new way, for a new time and place, and a new understanding of self and world. For example, Paul Ricoeur does a wonderful job of reappropriating the bible with what he calls "second naivite," (but can't remember where he does that right now). Or we can see it as moving into a new relationship with tradition, community, etc. Eg, the child grows up, goes away to university and a career in a different place, then returns to their hometown, renewing relationships as an adult, not a child.
This is great John and Chris . Just been to a Thomas Merton celebration someone on the Silk Rd I think and who dies on it . Can we have him in the mix?
as a mystical Catholic Christian but whose run a Thich Nahn Hanh sanga I found his bk zen and the birds of Appetite helpful
In a world at war when friend and family are taking up arms against each other, we hold our breath and shut out the divine. Thank you for words that let us sigh a deep breath and remind us that what is most important is to stay in touch with the sacred.
To finally accept what you know, you believe, you understand. What a great breakthrough! Thank you.
Thank you very much for this conversation. As RC christian this is representative of my experience.
Where is part 2 ?
Coming!
Sat Chit Ananda
I am, I know that I am, I love that I am