#891 - John Vervaeke - The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life

Speaker 1 Given that we are biological creatures, why do we need meaning? Why do humans need to do all this extra work in order to be satisfied with life?

Speaker 2 Well, I have to tell you that I've been

Speaker 2 going through a

Speaker 2 since the publication of the book, I've been going through a serious reflection on this question again and going deeper into it.

Speaker 2 There's many levels of answering that question. At one level,

Speaker 2 meaning has to do with sense-making.

Speaker 2 It has to do with how we properly pay attention to the right kind of information that can allow us to reliably solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains.

Speaker 2 And that's one aspect of meaning, that sort of agentic aspect.

Speaker 2 Consonant with that is we need to be connected to other people because most of our problem solving is done in connection with other people. So there's an initial sense-making dimension.

Speaker 2 This is often talked about as sort of coherence in the meaning and life literature. Does your world sort of, is your sense-making making sense to you? Is how I sometimes put it.

Speaker 2 Like the sense-making is what you're doing sort of automatically. And when you reflect on it, you go, yeah, that makes sense.
My world isn't absurd, or things like that.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 we need to feel connected to other people because most of our

Speaker 2 problem solving is done via other people. That's our great superpower individually, biologically, as you framed it.
We're pretty pathetic animals. You know, a really angry dog can take us out.

Speaker 2 And so our superpower is we can coordinate together and

Speaker 2 train some of those dogs and sharpen some of those sticks and then kill anything on the planet. And so we need to be connected to other people.
And that brings with it its own special problem.

Speaker 2 My friend Greg Enriquez made sort of prevalent.

Speaker 2 We developed the superpower of connecting and coordinating called language. And language is something really, really powerful in helping us coordinate, but it also does something really novel.

Speaker 2 It makes

Speaker 2 the content of our minds

Speaker 2 accessible. We're sort of exposed.
to each other in a way in which no other organism is exposed to

Speaker 2 its fellow creatures. And so we have to also develop this way of balancing between coordinating with other people, but not being overexposed.

Speaker 2 So we have to develop relationships of trust and forgiveness and belonging. And we have to balance between being individuals and having an individual identity and a group identity.

Speaker 2 So that's all central to meaning.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 beyond that,

Speaker 2 we fall prey in both of those domains to massive self-deception. I don't pay attention to the right things.
I misframe you. I'm biased in my attitude towards you.

Speaker 2 And so we have to do a lot to correct that. We have to try and ameliorate that.
And what that means is we also have to be connected to standards by which we can correct ourselves.

Speaker 2 Standards about what is most real, what is best,

Speaker 2 what is most beautiful.

Speaker 2 And that's a deeper kind of connectedness. That's kind of a connectedness to what we consider ultimacy.

Speaker 2 So I've tried to show you how all of these things are all important dimensions in why we have to pursue meaning in life.

Speaker 2 I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the standard psychological construct called meaning in life to measure and talk about

Speaker 2 all those dimensions

Speaker 2 in a coordinated fashion.

Speaker 1 Can you talk to me about the sort of established body of work when it comes to meaning and how you diverge from that or what you would suggest as an improvement?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so

Speaker 2 the standard metrics are around sort of four dimensions, really three.

Speaker 2 One is coherence, which I mentioned, which is does your sense-making make sense to you?

Speaker 2 Another one is purpose. That's not well posed

Speaker 2 because if you think standardly of how people think of purpose, purpose is you're working towards some ultimate goal.

Speaker 2 That's a very dangerous way of framing meaning because if you never reached a goal, your life was meaningless.

Speaker 2 And if you reach it going forward, forward you're pretty meaningless and I discovered that way back in high school and that sort of really bothered me and

Speaker 2 so I think they're what they're talking about more is orientation and then orientation is a

Speaker 2 more important way people have to feel not disoriented but oriented in the world

Speaker 2 and then

Speaker 2 The next one they talk about is significance, that you have things in your life that aren't transitory, ephemeral, shallow.

Speaker 2 But that seems to be just sort of one side of this deeper thing, which is called mattering. You need to feel connected to something.

Speaker 2 People typically use the metaphor bigger than yourself.

Speaker 2 I want to be connected to something larger than myself, right?

Speaker 2 They don't mean that literally because that would be ridiculous.

Speaker 2 You know, attaching you to a locomotive engine doesn't give you a profound sense of meaning in life. So what's going on there is, I would argue something like this.

Speaker 2 there's a deep connection between the sense of bigger and more real. And let me try and give you an everyday example of this.

Speaker 2 When you're in a dream world, you're in this little world, and it seems so real to you. And then you wake up.
Notice we have all these waking-up metaphors and enlightenment metaphors.

Speaker 2 You wake up, and from that larger world, you can see how the earlier world, the smaller world, is limited and biasing you and warping and thwarting you

Speaker 2 in you trying to

Speaker 2 get a flourishing life. And I think that's what people are really struggling with when they're talking about mattering, about being connected to something larger than themselves.

Speaker 2 And it's this sense of realness, which I don't think is properly captured just by the psychological notion of mattering.

Speaker 2 And here's the fundamental thing.

Speaker 2 I mentioned that

Speaker 2 meaning

Speaker 2 has to do with being connected to something that's more real

Speaker 2 than yourself in some important ways because it helps make you feel more real to yourself

Speaker 2 now that's a problematic notion to think of as just purely I'm just describing something like a psych like a standard psychological phenomenon this is actually if you'll allow me a one technical term this is a normative term

Speaker 2 meaning is a meaningful life is not a description when i say your life is meaningful i'm not just describing it. I'm praising it.
I'm saying there's something fundamentally good to it.

Speaker 2 It's meeting some standards of evaluation. But those standards of evaluation are completely absent from the standard psychological model.
That would be the crux. That's one of my two main criticisms.

Speaker 2 And so in a very deep sense,

Speaker 2 the standard meaning and life

Speaker 2 psychological model is completely divorced from the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. And if you look across all the religion and philosophical traditions, that's not the case.
They're deeply wound,

Speaker 2 you know, wound together, bound together, right? The cultivation of meaning and the cultivation of virtue and the cultivation of wisdom are profoundly intertwined.

Speaker 2 Stoicism and facts that they're exactly identical,

Speaker 2 which tells you how strong some positions have been on this. And the psychological model is missing all that.
The second one is

Speaker 2 the psychological model, and this is ironic because it's talking a lot about connectedness, but it doesn't talk about the connectedness.

Speaker 2 What I mean by that is it only talks about the individual agents' attitudes. It doesn't talk about how the world is showing up for them.
So let me give you an example of how this can go wrong.

Speaker 2 You can ask somebody, you know,

Speaker 2 and you ask them the standard sort of questions on meaning of life.

Speaker 2 And they have friends and they have family and they have work projects so their life is pretty meaningful above average but you ask them

Speaker 2 do you think your world's very coherent do you think the world makes a lot of sense you have a lot of trust in the world

Speaker 2 is the world presenting itself with a lot of beauty and depth to you and you'll get no you'll get people saying exactly the opposite and and see

Speaker 2 And then if you ask people, is your meaning in life actually bringing you a lot of peace? Is it really integrating you well as a person? Is it reciprocally opening you to reality? Is it no?

Speaker 2 Because people are experiencing a lot of burnout, a lot of bullshit, and a lot of betrayal. They're losing trust and faithfulness in their institutions and in fellow people, right?

Speaker 2 And so there's a famine of people being able to get into the flow state and able to have that basic trust and forgiveness with others, fellowship, and a sense of faithfulness is massively diminishing.

Speaker 2 I just saw a report that

Speaker 2 Americans' trust in the Supreme Court is at an all-time historical low. It has never been so low.

Speaker 2 And of course,

Speaker 2 that is

Speaker 2 only prescient, I think, of what's happening all throughout the Western world.

Speaker 2 And so the meaning in life construct is leaving out all of this. It's really bedeviling people in a very, very

Speaker 2 powerful way.

Speaker 2 And so I think the meaning in life construct gets a little bit about how our agency works and contributes to meaning in life, but it's leaving out a lot.

Speaker 2 Let me put it one last sentence and then I'll stop.

Speaker 2 The issue isn't just about finding information relevant. It's about can you enter into resonance? This is what Rosa calls.

Speaker 2 right this relationship that is so centrally lacking in most of our lives this is does your meaning in life allow you to reciprocally open does it take you into the depths of the psyche and align them Does it take you into the depths of reality so you feel you're meeting standards that allow you to correct yourself according to what is true and good and beautiful?

Speaker 2 Is it doing any of that? That's resonance. And then resonance also needs to be transmuted into reverence.

Speaker 2 Are you ultimately oriented to what you consider ultimately most real?

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 that's the judge behind everything else that we're evaluating. So sorry, that was a long question.

Speaker 1 Not at all, not at all.

Speaker 1 The realness point, I think, is very interesting.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's a contemporary problem because of how much people are mediated by their screens.

Speaker 1 Maybe this is worsened by the fact that we're atomized and isolated into our little droid boxes and we spend a lot of our time on our own.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's because of a lack of connection to nature and awe and dread or whatever it might be.

Speaker 1 But I would guess that a lot of people have this sense that their life is surreal and not surreal in the I can't believe how amazing it is. I'm so blessed, everything's going right, but in a,

Speaker 1 I don't necessarily feel fully connected and grounded to the experiences that I have day to day. My mind and my feet don't rest in the same location all that much.
You could maybe call it presence.

Speaker 1 But it's sort of

Speaker 1 It's more than just presence. Presence is necessary, but not sufficient.

Speaker 1 It's the connection to it. It's being able to feel like I can reach out and grab it.
Like things are happening and the things that are happening

Speaker 1 are important. And I have some sort of agency and they affect me.
And

Speaker 1 they're actually going on, as opposed to kind of like everything being a sitcom and it all just sort of playing out in front of our eyes. So I want to really dig into sort of

Speaker 1 things becoming really real and sort of where that comes from.

Speaker 2 I think that's important.

Speaker 2 I think that is the thing that's

Speaker 2 quintessentially missing from the psychological construct.

Speaker 2 That's the sort of ultimate norm within the normative dimension.

Speaker 2 Because you can undermine any of this if like any of these relationships that are giving people meaning in life can be immediately undermined if there's a sense of betrayal or that there was an illusion or they were being deceived.

Speaker 1 Explain, can you think of an example of that?

Speaker 2 So there's a standard one I use.

Speaker 2 so and i've done this multiple multiple times and it's never failed to work so it's not quite a scientific study but it it's pretty good so i asked my students how many of you are in really deeply satisfying romantic relationships romantic relationships are the culture's current surrogate or at least one of its surrogate

Speaker 2 idolatrous surrogates for God and culture and virtue.

Speaker 2 You're supposed to find the one and they're supposed to do everything and you're supposed to transcend yourself and find familiar familiar fulfillment in it.

Speaker 2 Which, of course, leads to the weird thing that people value romantic relationships sort of most of all right now, except maybe with their kids.

Speaker 2 Yet romantic relationships are the source of most suffering and a lot of mental health disorders.

Speaker 2 And so that tells you

Speaker 2 we're treating something, we're putting too much pressure on something. Okay, so let's take that.
We've got this thing. This is like...
Cultures tells you this is where it is at.

Speaker 2 This is where you find it. I asked them, okay, how many of you are in such a really satisfying romantic? And they put up their hands.

Speaker 2 They say, okay, now I'm only addressing the people who are in relationships. So the rest of you, sorry, you're not in this now.

Speaker 2 But for those of you who put up your hands, how many of you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you, if that meant the absolute dissolution of the relationship?

Speaker 2 And almost all of them, like somewhere between 95 and 100% reliably put up their hands.

Speaker 2 And I say, well, why?

Speaker 2 Like you like, you could continue to go on and enjoy the relationship and get all the pleasures out of it and all the companionship and all the sexual gratification. Like what? Like why?

Speaker 2 And here's my students, and they're at the university, so they're hard-bitten with cynicism and postmodern nihilism and everything and all this sort of stuff.

Speaker 2 And they without a beat say to me, well, because it wouldn't be real.

Speaker 2 It wouldn't be real.

Speaker 2 And then that removes all of the other ways in which it is contributing to meaning in life for them. That's the example of what I mean.

Speaker 1 So good.

Speaker 1 So good. And intuitively, everybody knows that there is this

Speaker 1 sort of sense of honesty, the honesta that you need to, that you expect. And, you know, who was the experience machine?

Speaker 2 Who did the experience machine? Nozick, Robert Nozick. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's not too dissimilar, I guess, to the experience machine, but it's a much more salient example that everybody knows.

Speaker 1 Yeah, would you,

Speaker 1 how would your experience change?

Speaker 1 You know, the Truman show might be

Speaker 1 another example of that, where you know, you're going around living a good life and everything seems fine, but what if everybody else was an actor? It's like, well, I wouldn't want that.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 1 To you, the sort of felt sense, nothing would have changed. It's the exact same.
Yeah, yeah, no, but there's something about sort of intention. There's something deeper.
There's something beyond

Speaker 1 not just the sort of utilitarian, what do I get out of this situation? It's

Speaker 1 what is the intention behind that? What's the meaning?

Speaker 2 Exactly. And notice his name, which is really central, true man.
It's about truth. And it's not about just conceptual truth.
It's about like being true to, right?

Speaker 2 True to his humanity, true to reality. And of course, he's willing to break through the wall, right? Remember, he's sailing on the little sea to break through the wall.

Speaker 2 And, you And the same thing was offered in the Matrix when Morpheus says, all I'm offering you is the truth, right?

Speaker 2 And the villain, of course, Cipher, which means a symbol without any depth, right? He wants to go back to the Matrix.

Speaker 2 And we know that's why he's a villainous person, because he's betraying the commitment to reality and to his own humanity.

Speaker 2 Just...

Speaker 1 Lingering on what you said before about the difference, a lot of people, I think, will use purpose and meaning almost interchangeably, even though when you think about it, it's not quite, but the two kind of come as a package pair.

Speaker 1 They're a twin pack of values that a lot of people talk about.

Speaker 1 When you were mentioning about how, if you use the word purpose, if you don't achieve it, your life is worthless. And once you do achieve it, if you do achieve it, what do you do next? It seems to me

Speaker 1 the difference between purpose and orientation is the same as between destination and journey. Yes.
That one is moving you in a direction, and it's kind of an endless game. It's an infinite game.

Speaker 1 Whereas the other, by design, the purpose is this thing. Unless you do some jiggery pokery with your purpose and create some sort of like instrumental purpose.

Speaker 1 My purpose is to show up every day in a manner that's like, yeah, give it whatever. Don't litigate me.
Don't litigate me out of what most people mean by purpose.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it feels like that.

Speaker 1 Attachment, attachment to outcome.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think when you, when you, as soon as you talk, I think that's exactly right, journey rather than destination.

Speaker 2 I think and playing the infinite game rather than the finite game, Cars' notion, I think that's exactly what I'm trying to convey.

Speaker 2 What also comes up when you when you get back to the notion of orientation,

Speaker 2 you you you start to connect

Speaker 2 what can be isolated by the term purpose. You start to connect back to, well, what like what ultimately orients you is what is what's true, what is good, what is beautiful.

Speaker 2 Whereas purpose can be very ego-centric. It can be what I most want to have.

Speaker 2 Whereas orientation is reality-centric. What do I most need to be in order to be in touch with reality, to be deeply in touch with myself, with other people, with the world?

Speaker 2 And see, a lot of people

Speaker 2 have kind of...

Speaker 2 And you see this in sort of the rampant rise of cynicism and nihilism and popular media, because of massive senses of burnout and betrayal and bullshit,

Speaker 2 people have sort of given up on the world in some ways.

Speaker 2 And the problem with that is that's not optional. Our model of who and what we are is inevitably bound up with our model of who and what the world is.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so the degree to which we find the world an incredibly

Speaker 2 scary place is the degree to which we create sort of an insulin, an insular model of ourselves. We withdraw and we withdraw and we withdraw and we withdraw.
The problem with that is

Speaker 2 that's the behavior ultimately of an organism in pain and in distress. And the fact that we don't recognize it as that isn't the central of central importance.
We're withdrawing

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 that's the move of pain and distress. That's the fundamental move of depression.
So even if you don't feel depressed, you're already behaving in a depressive manner.

Speaker 1 What do you make of the recent uptick in depression and anxiety? How this sort of relates to the work you've been looking at?

Speaker 2 So Chris and I, Christopher Master Pietro, and I, we talk about three kinds of responses to the meaning crisis. One is just a reactive

Speaker 2 sense of like despair.

Speaker 2 You see this in depression, anxiety,

Speaker 2 increasing rates of suicidality in places that are marked by affluence, which is a very strange paradox, given our current cultural way of thinking about things.

Speaker 2 Loneliness,

Speaker 2 addiction, all of these things are people basically falling into some kind of drift towards despair in powerful ways.

Speaker 2 The number of Those friends you have is going down reliably decade by decade, even though the number of social connections you have up is going up exponentially.

Speaker 2 Things like this.

Speaker 2 We're obviously doing it the wrong way. We're doing more and more that's giving us less and less.

Speaker 2 So that's one group.

Speaker 2 Then there's a replacement strategy where people try to replace the kinds of things that used to give this normatively charged sense of orientation and meaning in life and give us ways of cultivating wisdom and virtue therein, meanly religion and philosophy.

Speaker 2 People are trying to replace that with, you know, with

Speaker 2 things like, you know, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which they which they investigate, they identify with. They go to

Speaker 2 often dress up as these people or put markers of them in their home. And they protect this universe with a religious fervor.
So there has been rage.

Speaker 2 self-righteous rage at how Hollywood has destroyed these universes. I agree with the aesthetic criticism, by the way.

Speaker 2 I think Hollywood has just destroyed a lot of these things, but people aren't paying enough attention to why does this matter so much to you?

Speaker 2 Why do you spend hours online relaging about this?

Speaker 2 And that's a replacement strategy. And of course, people are also doing this, can do this in the political arena.

Speaker 2 They can do it with pseudo-religious ideologies. They can do it with this weird amalgamation of conspiracy theory and spirituality called conspiratuality on both the left and the right.

Speaker 2 Neither pole has any monopoly on foolishness.

Speaker 2 So there's a lot of that.

Speaker 2 And then there's a replacement strategy, which is where you see hopeful responses to the meaning crisis. You can see the rise of an ancient Roman philosophy, Stoicism, becoming super important.

Speaker 2 You can see

Speaker 2 the psychedelic renaissance, the mindfulness revolution, the rise of biological practices in communities around the world.

Speaker 2 All of these are showing that

Speaker 2 there's also a healthy response.

Speaker 2 What was interesting is how COVID was such a cleaving point, right? Because it showed that how many people have lack what's called existential resilience.

Speaker 2 Soon as the normal routine that keeps them busy, right, busy unto death, as soon as that gets disrupted, they are confronted with, some people were confronted with in patience of meaninglessness and they dove into spirituality and all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 2 Other people

Speaker 2 turned to a replacement strategy and they started, you know, attending online mindfulness courses,

Speaker 2 starting to read some philosophy.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it's a very complicated response to meaning growth.

Speaker 1 I'm interested in the role of the individual on their own. And

Speaker 1 even beyond the sort of connectedness, interconnectedness thing, the fact that

Speaker 1 seeking meaning as a purely selfish pursuit. And I heard a quote the other day, which I loved, which was, after a while, you just get sick of yourself.
And it really made me think

Speaker 1 about that step change change that a lot of people go through from just living for me, just thinking about me, to trying to serve a

Speaker 1 pay it forward, perhaps, and pass it on. And that perhaps comes along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older.
But yeah, I'm interested in the self versus

Speaker 1 selfless element here.

Speaker 2 Excellent.

Speaker 2 And this goes towards another criticism I have of the standard meaning and life construct. It's completely egocentric in its orientation.

Speaker 2 It should be asking questions like, how much are you making meaning for other people?

Speaker 2 How much coherence and beauty are you bringing into the world?

Speaker 2 And it doesn't ask those questions. And that's exactly right.
And you see, the self-centered orientation is extremely problematic.

Speaker 2 Obviously, there's ethical problems, and we get, you know, we get the increasing...

Speaker 2 growth of spiritual bypassing as an as a growing psychological problem. So people pursue spirituality as a way of avoiding their important economic and ethical responsibilities and obligations.

Speaker 2 And I think, and you know, and spiritual bypassing is an offshoot of this large, this growing group of people, spiritual but not religious.

Speaker 2 So if you look into the academic literature on spiritual but not religious, like people who do the anthropology and sociology of religion, what they'll tell you is spiritual means the spirituality means the religion of me.

Speaker 2 That's what it means it's you're doing all the standard religious behavior but you're doing it uh toward for you and towards you and by you and evaluated by you and that's extremely problematic because

Speaker 2 um autodidactically we're really bad

Speaker 2 so have you noticed for example you're very good and this shows up metabolically in terms of even of cognitive effort you're very good at pointing out the biases in your friends and other people you're really good at it You are, by the way.

Speaker 2 You are really good at it. The objective evidence shows you're really good at it.
And you do find it relatively easy. And what that evidence also shows is you're really crap.

Speaker 2 And I'm really crap at doing it for myself. I'm really bad at finding my own biases, my own self-deception.
Now, that doesn't.

Speaker 2 Let's be clear, what I'm not saying, that doesn't remove the responsibility for addressing those from me. Of course not, but I'm not saying that.

Speaker 2 We are still always individually responsible for our vices. So I want that clearly stated.

Speaker 2 But what it shows is, and this is something that we've known since Socrates, and we emphasize until recently in current scientific practice: you are my best source of self-correction, and I am your best source.

Speaker 2 This was supposed to be the engine of democracy, but we've lost that

Speaker 2 too. And so, the degree to which we become withdrawn and self-centered is the degree to which

Speaker 2 we are going to

Speaker 2 fall prey to self-deceptive behavior and the degree to which we might not

Speaker 2 pay proper attention to the deep interconnections between our spirituality and our responsibilities.

Speaker 1 How can people work out if they're being self-deceptive? By design, we're good at deceiving ourselves.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 but we're also really good at determining it in other people. That's the counterbalance.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you have to practice a lot with other people.

Speaker 2 And then you have to imitate what it's like with other people, with yourself, until you get good at doing it by yourself.

Speaker 2 And then there's a lot of things you can do that do that. So something that might not seem obvious that actually relies on that.

Speaker 2 Mindfulness. Mindfulness practices like meditation are a good way at becoming aware of how you are biased in how you're paying attention.
But how did you get that ability?

Speaker 2 Well, you got that ability by doing the following, right? When you're a kid, you imitate how adults, because you trust them, they're credible to you.

Speaker 2 You imitate how adults are taking a perspective on how you are taking perspectives in the world and allowing them to correct you.

Speaker 2 And you imitate that and imitate that and imitate that until you can take a perspective on your own perspective that is corrective. That's metacognition, to use the technical term.

Speaker 2 And that's what you're exercising in mindfulness. But that's, that's a broad lesson to be learned.
You practice dialogically with others until you can do it internally and reflectively.

Speaker 2 It's the whole point of

Speaker 2 Socratic philosophy. You hung around with somebody like Socrates and you did all of this Socratic, you know, question and answer and exploration with him.

Speaker 2 And then eventually you got to the ability where you could do it by yourself.

Speaker 2 Antisthenes, who is considered the forefounder of Stoicism, when asked what he had learned from Socrates, he said, Well, I learned how to dialogue with myself.

Speaker 2 He didn't mean talk to himself, because we do that automatically all day long. He meant that he had so practiced it and imitated it so that he had internalized it.

Speaker 2 So he had an inner Socrates that was quite competent at pointing out to him his own bullshit and self-destructiveness.

Speaker 1 What we sort of touched on it earlier on, but I'm interested in how contemporary of a problem a lack of meaning is.

Speaker 1 And you also said about how as people become more affluent or as nations become more affluent,

Speaker 1 problems of meaning seem to increase.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 1 what use is there in us all trying to attain a chase after affluence if all that comes along is a heavy side order of meaninglessness.

Speaker 2 That's a good question.

Speaker 2 Rosa talks about the fact that we're in kind of what he calls dynamic stability.

Speaker 2 I talk about it as a frenetic frozenness. We have to put more and more effort in, not to make things better, but to make sure we don't fall behind or miss out.

Speaker 2 Of course, and this is what's predictive of the massive amounts of burnout. And Han talks about how

Speaker 2 we've become, we're not so much oppressed and exploited by other people as we are exploiting ourselves and oppressed by ourselves.

Speaker 1 It's the Red Queen fallacy, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so I think, again, if you asked people and you use the standard metrics, they'll tell you, well, I know I have connections.

Speaker 2 I care a lot about my kids and I care a lot about my friends and work's important to me, you know, and blah. And so you'll get that.
But if you ask them, like, and we know. burnout is arising.

Speaker 2 The number of close friends you have is going down. People's sense of trust in others and in institutions is massively declining.
So again, that's why I keep pressing on this.

Speaker 2 You have to ask this question really, really carefully.

Speaker 2 And I think around those issues of burnout and being busy unto death

Speaker 2 and, you know, sense of ever-increasing bullshit and betrayal, I think that,

Speaker 2 or if you want to put it on the other way, a famine, a famine of wisdom, scarcity. We don't know where to go.

Speaker 2 We find it very difficult to get into healthy flow situations. We have addictive and maladaptive forms of flow generation, like video games.

Speaker 2 We lack fellowship. Fellowship isn't friendship.

Speaker 2 We've lost the whole category of getting together with people that we basically trust because we all participate in something that we all are committed to together, like what used to happen in the church or the mosque or the temple or the synagogue, et cetera.

Speaker 2 We've lost all of those things.

Speaker 2 And again, we've lost faithfulness.

Speaker 2 We've become increasingly short-term. And so it gets harder and harder for us

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 be faithful, which means sticking in with things, staying connected to things because of their realness, even though it's at times very unsatisfactory to do so.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, this shows up in

Speaker 2 the fact that people are finding it harder and harder to maintain long-term relationships.

Speaker 1 You mentioned there about kids, and I'm going to guess that most people would say a source of great meaning or one of the greatest sources of meaning in my life has been kids.

Speaker 1 Have you guys considered the base rate reduction in the age of people becoming parents and the number of people becoming parents? That

Speaker 1 I've got it in my head. A friend messages me semi-consistently when I do Q ⁇ A's on the show.
And he's very interested, but he's a dad of two,

Speaker 1 an old school sort of Irish guy. And

Speaker 1 he says,

Speaker 1 So many of your audience just need to have kids.

Speaker 1 Like they're asking questions, and as am I about fulfilling my higher purpose, about you know, enacting my logos forward, about how, why, why can't I give myself a break?

Speaker 1 Why is it that I never really seem to be connected to the achievements that I have in life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 And I think, you know, what the sort of subtext of his

Speaker 1 point is: lots of those problems are fixed or pale into insignificance once you have children.

Speaker 1 I guess two questions then. First off, meaning crisis and associated with declining levels of

Speaker 1 people becoming parents. And then the second one, is there something

Speaker 1 wrong or shallow or compensatory about leaning on your children to provide you with meaning in life?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 First of all, excellent question, Chris. Eberstadt and

Speaker 2 how the West Really Lost God talks about the fact that the countries that are the most

Speaker 2 secular in their orientation are all are is predicted by how much people are living atomically, individually alone.

Speaker 2 And whereas more religious communities

Speaker 2 tend to be related to people who live in more extended family kinds of situations.

Speaker 2 This goes towards a lot of research that puts, I think, puts the nail in the coffin of the idea that people are religious because they're stupid and intuitive and not rational.

Speaker 2 So some of the best research done by Gervais and others, who, by the way, are atheists, shows that's not why people are atheist or religious.

Speaker 2 That's not what predicts if people are atheist or religious. In fact, you get weird anomalies.
There's kind of a very weak correlation between how analytic people are and how irreligious they are.

Speaker 2 But you get important anomalies, like in the United Kingdom, analytic thought is more predictive of being religious than non-religious.

Speaker 2 And so the whole Enlightenment mythology, still espoused by people like Dawkins and others,

Speaker 2 just doesn't, that's not what matters. What matters is how many, remember the kid we were talking about earlier and how you get metacognition? You have to trust, right? You have to trust.

Speaker 2 You have to entrust yourself to credible others, people that you trust, because you can't believe this, but you have to trust that they can see things you can't see.

Speaker 2 And what seems like senseless behavior to you actually has a deeper, you know, meaning to it, a deeper function, right?

Speaker 2 And that requires, you know, typically, you know, we've relied on families to give us those kinds of entrusted relationships, but we've narrowed the family down to the nuclear family, the nomadic nuclear family.

Speaker 2 And that has seriously eradicated a lot of ways in which we could get meaning in life. I think your friend is right in the sense that children are

Speaker 2 very powerful indicators, especially of how meaning in life is not about wealth. Because you have a child and your wealth goes down, man.

Speaker 2 The other one is it's not about subjective well-being, especially at the beginning. Having a child crushes all the measures of subjective well-being.
You're not sleeping. You're not eating.

Speaker 2 You're wet all the time. You're under high stress because the baby's crying.
The person who you thought loved you the most in the world hates you right now, your partner.

Speaker 2 And yet, so that shows you the two things our culture tells us are necessary and sufficient for meaning in life, are neither necessary nor sufficient for meaning in life.

Speaker 2 So I think having children is important. Children orient you non-egocentrically.
You have to go from how is everything relevant to me to how am I relevant to somebody other than myself.

Speaker 2 And I think that's a big, that's, those are important moves for meaning in life.

Speaker 2 Although,

Speaker 2 as I've been arguing, not captured by the current psychological measures.

Speaker 2 Now, I would say he's wrong and you're right about we can turn our children into idols too. And we've done that.

Speaker 2 Jonathan, you know, hate has made a good career out of pointing out how an idolatrous relationship to our children, in which we made them the be-all and end-all of existence and helicopter parenting and, you know, and trying to wrap

Speaker 2 protective layers around them so they never suffer hurt or pain, has actually

Speaker 2 destroyed them in some very important ways. And he's got a ton of research to show this.
I know most people don't like hearing that,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 it seems to be the case. And so

Speaker 2 we have to be careful about that. I think having children is a powerful way of reorienting you.
I think our meaning in life,

Speaker 2 the way I've been talking about it, evolved out of our capacity to be parents.

Speaker 2 But it's not enough to be a parent because if you're just a parent and here's my point that I've already made, you're still withdrawing into your own little circle.

Speaker 2 And you can be having children

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 not really

Speaker 2 caring about the world. Now, what's interesting, of course,

Speaker 2 is children make you care about the world, or at least they should make you care about the world.

Speaker 2 And then that's my final point, which is being able to care about things in the right way and really focus on what's the really real.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's wisdom.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 your friend sounds like a good person. So for whatever set of reasons, they probably

Speaker 2 were wise parents, or at least wise enough.

Speaker 2 That's not necessarily the case. So you could get sort of intense feelings of meaningfulness, but you could be an incredibly foolish parent.
And I think that's very problematic.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I had Dawkins on the show maybe

Speaker 1 four months ago, something like that. And we had a live event.
We had a discussion in Austin, Texas, where I hosted him. And he was lovely.
But I got stuck.

Speaker 1 We both got stuck twice in two nights in a row, first live on stage in front of his audience, and then again the next day when we did the podcast. And I mentioned how

Speaker 1 derogating the story behind religion, whatever it is that people choose to follow, because you can't prove it, or it can't be proven in the manner that you want it to be able to be proven, doesn't reduce its effectiveness.

Speaker 1 It doesn't make it any less useful, even if the level of truthfulness, the bar that you want it to reach, is something that it can't do.

Speaker 1 And I've been obsessed over the last couple of years with things that are literally true, but figuratively false, and figuratively true, but literally false. And

Speaker 1 yeah, I kind of feel,

Speaker 1 I get a sense in the zeitgeist that people are sort of turning away from the very hard, cold, sterile,

Speaker 1 well, it doesn't matter. It has to be literally true

Speaker 1 at all costs.

Speaker 1 That doesn't seem to quite be the case. And I wonder whether that is born out of a, we kind of had a crack at this.
We tried to simultaneously equation our way through

Speaker 1 coming up with answers to big questions. And maybe I just need something that works, even if I can't describe to you why it works

Speaker 2 okay well that's a tall order but uh i i i i i do want i do feel i i have a responsibility to respond um

Speaker 2 you have to be careful about um

Speaker 2 uh this notion of truth um it's very one-dimensional uh that's being used by dawkins um it's about uh evidence that convinces you that a proposition should be believed.

Speaker 2 I think that's important.

Speaker 2 I'm I'm a scientist, and that's what theories are built out of, scientific theories, in the scientific sense of theory, not in the everyday sense, which is completely opposite to how scientists view the word theory.

Speaker 2 So I think that's important, and Dawkins is a scientist, so of course he values that. But of course, that's not the,

Speaker 2 those are not the primary ways we feel in contact with reality.

Speaker 2 So evidence isn't the same thing as relevance.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 your skills are,

Speaker 2 they have to be true to things. Like your aim has to be true.
It's a different sense of truth.

Speaker 2 You have to be able to make things present to yourself and you have to be able to like interact with the world in a way that reliably

Speaker 2 gives you some degree of

Speaker 2 agency in the world. That's really important to you.

Speaker 2 In fact, I would put it to you that if you had to choose between your skills and your beliefs, you'd give up up your beliefs rather than your skills.

Speaker 2 And they're a big part of how you sense what's real. This is know-how, and this goes into your procedural memory.
But you talked about it a bit earlier, and this is important.

Speaker 2 We also have like

Speaker 2 what I call perspectival knowing.

Speaker 2 what it's like to be you here now in this situation in this state of mind and that is a different sense this is knowing by noticing it's knowing by being present um it's how you're sizing things up what's your take on things how you're framing things all that sort of stuff now notice uh

Speaker 2 so my partner she she was gone recently because she was at a yoga retreat getting her certification to be a yoga instructor we're going to run retreats when we're both retired and so um

Speaker 2 Now, I still had all my beliefs about Sara. I still believed that they were all true, right?

Speaker 2 I still have all my skills for interacting with her in place and everything.

Speaker 2 But she wasn't present to me.

Speaker 2 And she, that's, oh, and we, there's a sense of that lack of presence really matters to us. And there's a sense, and you can just feel it right now.
There's a sense of this is real

Speaker 2 because it's present. It's present.
There's this power of presence that matters to us. That's not captured by propositions.

Speaker 2 I could state all of the propositions all day long about Sara that didn't make her present to me.

Speaker 1 I wonder whether that's why long-distance relationships are often difficult.

Speaker 2 Exactly. That's exactly right.
And then beneath it is this

Speaker 2 what I've called participatory knowing. This is knowing by sort of in placement, being in place, like you have a, like you have, you belong.
It's not just a space. It's a place.
You belong.

Speaker 2 You fit the space and the space fits you. So it's a place for you.
Right. And

Speaker 2 this is often very unconscious, but you lack it, for example, when you're homesick

Speaker 2 or you lack a certain version of it when you're lonely.

Speaker 2 And this really contributes to your sense of real.

Speaker 2 Have you ever gone that thing where you've traveled to another country and it's all exciting and interesting, but you don't really feel like you're properly in place?

Speaker 2 You're getting a bit of culture shock. And then it starts to feel less real to you.
It starts to feel surreal to you.

Speaker 2 And see, so what Dawkins is is forgetting, he's forgetting all of those other aspects of realness that matter if what we want is to be in contact with reality. And secondly,

Speaker 2 right,

Speaker 2 it's not that he's forgetting all of those. He's forgetting that our access to those non-propositional kinds of knowing is largely done through what's called the imaginal.
Okay.

Speaker 2 So for example, I'm present to you. I hope.
Okay. Do you, can you literally see into my mind?

Speaker 2 No, you're imagining it. Now it's not imagining the way you're imagining a sailboat where imagination is taking you away or distracting you from reality.

Speaker 2 You're looking through your imagination because you're trying to have insight. Look into my mind.
Now, let's make it even more freaky.

Speaker 2 That space inside your head where you're aware of yourself, is is that a literal space?

Speaker 2 Nope. Is it just a fable? Is it just false? No, because you get real self-knowledge.
In fact, that's central to you being a rational being. So that's imaginal.
It's fictive. Or,

Speaker 2 Richard Dawkins, open a science book. Oh, look, here's on page three.

Speaker 2 Here's the

Speaker 2 solar system model of the atom.

Speaker 2 That's almost completely false. Yet we teach it to kids.
Why do we give them this image?

Speaker 2 Because the image trains their perspective taking, gives them skills so that they can get to the place where they can then get the deeper propositional knowledge.

Speaker 2 The imaginal is irremovable from the way in which we need to train the non-propositional in order for us to get those proper connectedness to reality that allows us to find the causal patterns that establish the propositional, the scientific kinds of claims.

Speaker 1 What about people that think meaning is a thinking problem? A lot of us spend a lot of time in our heads. We're learning.

Speaker 1 This is somewhere between philosophy, psychology, sociology, all of these things.

Speaker 1 I think the only place I have to experience these things is in the head, a little bit in the body, and that gets fed up through my head as well.

Speaker 1 Can we fix this by just thinking our way out of the problem?

Speaker 2 No. I mean, especially especially if we think of thinking as just running a lot of propositions together and making sure they're coherent and computing with them, that's not going to work.

Speaker 2 As I said, most of this, most of what we're talking about here when we're talking about this kind of connectedness, this sense of belonging, this sense of emplacement is happening, right?

Speaker 2 It's happening

Speaker 2 in

Speaker 2 a completely embodied fashion. It's happening non-propositionally.
Like your skills. You have the skill of swimming.
Can you get access to that skill without swimming or doing something imaginal?

Speaker 2 No, you can't, right? What about what your state of consciousness is like? You have a kind of memory for that episodic memory. Like, did you take a shower this morning?

Speaker 2 And you sort of remember and you sort of relive it for a moment, right? That's different from your knowledge of our cats, mammals. You don't relive that, right? You have to

Speaker 2 like, there's whole aspects of you that you can't get access to unless you're doing it imaginary. And that means embodied.
Like, this is all dependent on the fact that you're embodied.

Speaker 2 The view that

Speaker 2 this is just sort of a matter of not having the right propositions.

Speaker 2 Look, look, here's how it's fun. Let me give you a concrete example.
This is from Thomas Nagel.

Speaker 2 All of the arguments for reality being absurd aren't actually good arguments.

Speaker 2 This came out in, you know,

Speaker 2 I think the movie is really good, by the way, everything everywhere all at once.

Speaker 2 But all the arguments in there are, well, everything all at where, you know, everything everywhere all at once that makes your life meaningless. Well, how?

Speaker 2 Well, because there's so much. It makes this insignificant.
But if it makes each part insignificant, how can the whole have significance? That doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 Do you understand? If

Speaker 2 all these little individual parts are made insignificant by this huge collection of all the parts, how does the huge have a better standard by which it renders all the parts so meaningless? Like,

Speaker 2 well, I'm so small. If I blew you up to a galaxy, would that make your life more meaningful? Well, you know, what I'm doing now doesn't matter, won't matter a million years from now.

Speaker 2 So that means what's happening a million years from now shouldn't matter to you now. Like, none of these arguments actually work.
They're really bad arguments. They self-destruct.

Speaker 2 That's not what drives absurdity. What drives absurdity is, right,

Speaker 2 when there's a clash between your perspectives, when you have this, Thomas Nagel tells this wonderful story, and he wrote this way back when, when we used to, the dark barbaric days where we had answering machines that were actual machines that were actually in your home and things like that, because we couldn't carry our telephones around with us.

Speaker 2 And he tells this thing about, you know, Tom, who realizes he loves Susan, and

Speaker 2 he calls Susan up, and he hears the receiver get picked up. He says, Susan, don't talk.
I have to tell you I love you. I love you.
I love you. And then he hears, Susan is not here right now.

Speaker 2 And notice you laugh. And laughter, like humor is that there's a contrast between the two perspectives.
There's the personal perspective of his life and the impersonal perspective of the machine.

Speaker 2 And there's a clash there. Humor is when you're on the cusp of authority.
And I got to meet John Cleese, by the way.

Speaker 2 When you're on the cusp of absurdity, and Monty Python was brilliant at that right they could take you to the edge of absurdity and then what you do is you have a weird insight that relieves the absurdity but if I if you can't relieve

Speaker 2 the clash between perspectives with an insight because that's what insight does it relieves a clash between perspectives

Speaker 2 then

Speaker 2 you will experience absurdity. Now I ask you, Chris, can you think your way into an insight?

Speaker 1 Huh, I don't know.

Speaker 2 Well, have you ever needed an insight? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And realized it just wasn't coming?

Speaker 1 Yes, many times.

Speaker 2 Insight doesn't work that way. Insight doesn't work propositionally.
You can't infer your way into an insight. In fact, it looks like

Speaker 2 the parts that are responsible for insight and the parts that are responsible for inference are kind of like in opponent processing with each other. Let me tell you why why I say that.

Speaker 2 When we're doing bad inference, it's because we're jumping to a conclusion.

Speaker 2 That's insight. Insight is when you jump to something.
When you like it, you call it insight. When you don't like it, you call it jumping to a conclusion.

Speaker 2 They're like that. Insight has to do with changing your perspective, altering your perception and attention, but also participating in a process that is self-organizing.
You don't make an insight.

Speaker 2 You don't just receive an insight. You participate in a self-organizing process.

Speaker 2 So this is why you can't think your way through

Speaker 2 these things. Thinking matters.
Don't misunderstand me. Propositions matter.
I'm not saying they don't.

Speaker 2 But it's not just a matter of running good arguments because that's not where the primary problem lies.

Speaker 1 I remember you saying that some truths are only knowable through transformation.

Speaker 2 Oh, totally.

Speaker 1 And I was having a great conversation last night, and we came up with this term of unteachable lessons.

Speaker 1 And an unteachable lesson, one of the best unteachable lessons, I think, is money and success won't make you happy.

Speaker 1 And, you know, it is a unique category of lesson where

Speaker 1 nobody gives the people trying to teach it sympathy.

Speaker 1 They're derogated in a manner that

Speaker 1 no teacher would typically accept. And I'm yet to,

Speaker 1 I know of nobody who has arrived at that realization logically. They've arrived at it experientially.

Speaker 1 I was trying to think about some other

Speaker 1 ones that are not too dissimilar. I think

Speaker 1 don't be swayed to falling in love with somebody. who looks very pretty but has no morals or anything sort of deeper to do with you you know it's very much

Speaker 1 the the the thing that i kind of came to realize at least with the unt some of the unteachable lessons i'm sure there's a million um but the ones that i'd found were ones that sort of limbically were very seductive in one form or another they were about status they were about acclaim they were about resources they were about sex they were about power and um

Speaker 1 that was so salient that what you end up with is this

Speaker 1 you're at war there is one higher version of yourself that goes ah i remember the the last time that got into a relationship with a girl that was pretty and kind of didn't really have much to say.

Speaker 1 And we didn't really have much to do or whatever. And, you know, that didn't end too well.
But,

Speaker 1 you know, she's just so hot. I can't not think about it.
And then, you know, the same with

Speaker 1 everybody else says that sort of money and success didn't change any of the internal voids that they had. But that was them.
I, I will be able to thread the needle in a different way.

Speaker 1 And I just, I thought it was so funny that Unteachable Lessons came to me last night, knowing that I was going to speak to you today and the some truths that are only knowable through transformation.

Speaker 1 I thought that was a nice

Speaker 1 parallel.

Speaker 2 That's powerful. I like that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, L.A. Paul's work on transformative experience that,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 because we don't know

Speaker 2 who we're going to be

Speaker 2 and what's it going to be like to be that other person until after we've gone through the transformation. So we can have all the propositions we want.
We can even have some relevant skills, but the

Speaker 2 perspectival knowing, knowing what it's going to be like, the participatory knowing, who are we going to actually be, we won't know that until we undergo the transformation.

Speaker 2 And so we draw very poor conclusions

Speaker 2 because we've been sort of educated for quite some time since Descartes

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 truths are just accessible to calculation. We should just be able to calculate all possible truths.

Speaker 2 And that was to overturn an older religious idea that, no, no, many truths are, as you're indicating very powerfully, many important truths are only disclosed to us after we commit to undergoing a fundamental transformation.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think that's deeply right.

Speaker 2 Now, the issue around this is, well, if you're ignorant, what do you do? And then here's where the imaginal comes back in, right?

Speaker 2 So let's use one of L.A. Paul's powerful examples, having a child.
You don't know what it's like to be a parent until you're a parent. And we were kind of talking about that a few minutes ago.

Speaker 2 You can read all kinds of books, but

Speaker 2 they really don't help that much, right? And you can even practice some skills sort of in your head or on your friends or something.

Speaker 2 But what do people do then?

Speaker 2 Well, what I've noticed is a lot of people do, and some people are even noticing that other people do this, is they get a dog.

Speaker 2 They get a dog and they pretend, but it's not really pretense because it's actually a dog. It's an intelligent living being that needs your attention and your care and it's very demanding.

Speaker 2 And I'm helping to raise a dog right now. And, you know, and so they get a dog and they treat it like a little person.

Speaker 2 They name it and they talk to it and they, you know, sometimes they'll even give it its own room and have family pictures and the dog is included.

Speaker 2 And so this is what's known, what I've been calling serious play. What we do is we set up this liminal place.

Speaker 2 Winnicott talked about this as this transitional place where we're neither fully a parent, but we're not just single anymore.

Speaker 2 We're in this like liminal place where we're doing this very serious play by this kind of imagining through the dog, not like imagining a dog, but imagining through the dog what it would be like to have a child that I'm responsible to.

Speaker 2 Now, the thing about the dog is it's still an element of pretense because it's not a human child. And so you can do things with the dog.

Speaker 2 like you can say after three weeks no i'm not up this isn't really for me and then you can find a new owner for the dog and nobody thinks you're a particularly immoral person but if you do that with your kid now I'm three weeks in no

Speaker 2 this isn't for me I'm gonna find another here do you want my child people think there's something and as they should there's something dramatically wrong with you so we use we need serious play which is an imaginal practice in order to try and get a taste uh for uh

Speaker 2 so that we can properly commit ourselves to the transformations that will disclose those unteachable truths. So

Speaker 2 let me give you a more concrete example that goes back to your first thing.

Speaker 2 I'm going to use myself as an example, so I'm going to make myself vulnerable here.

Speaker 2 I've not been what I would call successful in my romantic life. I've had lots of relationships, some of them very long-term, but

Speaker 2 in many ways,

Speaker 2 they did not bring out the best in me, and I did not act my best within them. I'll put it as succinctly as I could.

Speaker 2 So, after my second, isn't that a point of vulnerability, second marriage fell apart? I'm on good terms with both of my exes, by the way.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I realized that I had been doing what you were talking about. I had a type that I found particularly attractive.
And this was probably driven largely by genetic Darwinian factors.

Speaker 2 We sound like Plato now with the monster in our genitalia, right?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I decided I was going to change my attraction radar. I was going to go not go to the women that immediately were salient to me, sort of physically.

Speaker 2 And instead,

Speaker 2 I tried to break against my type.

Speaker 2 Which wasn't easy, by the way, especially when you're like feeling so vulnerable and that you'll never be loved again because the relationship has ended and all that crap that that little thing says in your head.

Speaker 2 And then I found this woman when she found me, and she wasn't my type.

Speaker 2 And because of that,

Speaker 2 and because I really wanted to be different on how I entered into a relationship,

Speaker 2 I allowed myself to be attracted in ways I hadn't been attracted before.

Speaker 2 And I fell in love with her soul.

Speaker 2 And then only did I realize, and now to my great

Speaker 2 joy, do I realize she's actually a very physically attractive woman. And my type that I find attractive has completely shifted because of that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that was powerful for me.

Speaker 2 And I'm not holding myself out as any kind of exemplar for relationship advice.

Speaker 2 I'm saying that sometimes we have to be willing to overcome

Speaker 2 our automatic salience

Speaker 2 projector,

Speaker 2 salient, what grabs our attention, what arouses us, right?

Speaker 2 If we want to actually find deeper connection and meaning.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 this woman and I, Sarah and I, we have made a lifetime commitment to each other.

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 we have found that we reliably bring out the good in each other, which is actually the basis for a relationship.

Speaker 2 And we realize that that is what you should base a commitment on. Not is this person satisfying all of your wants and needs?

Speaker 2 Not is this person, you know, helping you with all your projects and helping you to self-actualize and all the stuff that we say in California.

Speaker 2 But is...

Speaker 2 Are the two of you reliably bringing out the good in each other such that

Speaker 2 I texted her today and I said,

Speaker 2 I love that I get to know you more and more

Speaker 2 while realizing that I'll never completely grasp you.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so that

Speaker 2 is something

Speaker 2 I did not have access to as long as I was going according to what I typically found salient.

Speaker 1 That's a beautiful story. And

Speaker 1 I've been thinking a lot recently about

Speaker 1 why do you

Speaker 1 think that you know what's best for you?

Speaker 1 Like, why is it that you have, you know, you had this assumption? I have a type. I have a type.
I have a type. And

Speaker 1 there's a need for control. There's a desire for control there.
You know, I have a predictive model of how things are going to unfold. I can therefore have a good example of the trajectory.

Speaker 1 I know exactly where this is going to come into land, kind of-ish.

Speaker 1 And I know that maybe a couple of times this evidence has shown you're actually denying evidence, especially if you've had a couple of these things occur and you go, Well, ah, those ones didn't quite go the way that I wanted to.

Speaker 1 Uh, and this is something different. Well, maybe different could lead to a different sort of an outcome.

Speaker 1 It's like, ah, no, I'm pretty sure that the same will somehow lead to a different kind of an outcome. And, um, yeah,

Speaker 1 as

Speaker 1 in a world where people want to control, they do not like the idea of not being able to fully predict where things are going to come into land.

Speaker 2 Uh,

Speaker 1 reminding

Speaker 1 everybody, myself included, that you are not necessarily the best judge of what is best for you. You don't actually always know,

Speaker 1 you can't always predict what's best for you. And that's a

Speaker 1 lovely example of a time where perhaps

Speaker 1 you were right to be wrong in that regard.

Speaker 2 Yeah, thank you for saying that. I mean,

Speaker 2 one of the hallmarks of modernity given to us from the period of the European Enlightenment is this sort of

Speaker 2 putting on a pedestal,

Speaker 2 enfranchising autonomy,

Speaker 2 self-government. It's Kant's biggest virtue.

Speaker 2 And there's value in that, again, because autonomy reminds us that

Speaker 2 we are simultaneously our best friends and our worst enemy,

Speaker 2 and that we are responsible for the content of our behavior and our thoughts and our affect. And so that's important.

Speaker 2 I don't want to just go back. But

Speaker 2 it's also given us this,

Speaker 2 and there is no other word for it, a lack of humility. It's given us an arrogance that we always know what is best for us.

Speaker 2 And that's simply not true. In fact, we are really bad at discovering our own self-deception.
We are really bad at affective for what's called affective forecasting.

Speaker 2 We're really bad at predicting what will make us long-term happy and what will make us long-term, really, really sad. We're really bad at that.
We're really bad at it.

Speaker 2 We're really bad at it because we fall prey to hyperbolic discounting. That's a fancy sounding term.
It means we find present stimuli very salient and long-term stimuli very non-salient.

Speaker 2 This is why it's hard to lose weight and it's hard to study and all those kinds of other things because the chocolate cake is there or the party is there and health and you know the exam are off in the future

Speaker 2 and by the way you can't argue yourself away from that hyperbolic discounting it doesn't help

Speaker 2 giving people lots of reason and evidence for why for example why they should save for their retirement doesn't really help them do that but if they

Speaker 2 do some serious play by imagining their future self as somebody, a family member that they've always loved and taken care of

Speaker 2 and they form that effective bonding, then they'll start to save for the retirement kind of thing.

Speaker 2 So there are lots of ways in which we are not

Speaker 2 the best authority.

Speaker 2 We have to become adults

Speaker 2 in which we take responsibility.

Speaker 2 But, and that's important, and I don't want to denigrate that, but that's only one half of of maturation john russin i think is uh

Speaker 2 right when he talks about the the the main part of maturity is facing up i like that phrase it's beautiful facing up to reality um and facing up to reality is humbling you're looking to something

Speaker 2 when you're looking up That's a humbling stance. And you're facing it.
You're confronting a reality that is making you look up. Right.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 that is an attitude in which you realize that you don't know best.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 so how

Speaker 2 for example,

Speaker 2 as things started to

Speaker 2 succeed for me,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 I had the Verveki Foundation, but I was blessed by terrific people, but I asked them to act as

Speaker 2 a constant check on the fact that I could fall prey to

Speaker 2 self-aggrandizement,

Speaker 2 hubris, arrogance, all the proclivities we see in social media people.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they, and

Speaker 2 I committed them to this because I did not trust that I would be a good enough

Speaker 2 person for determining that issue.

Speaker 2 And this, and we've done things specifically, uh, like we pivoted away from voices with Raveki, and I was doing all these videos, and we just do now a couple videos a month.

Speaker 2 And I've become very clear. We now have what's called the lectern.
My role, I'm a teacher. People are not my fans.
They're not my followers.

Speaker 2 They're my students if they want to study what I'm teaching. That's my role.
That's who they are.

Speaker 2 And I'm emphasizing quality over quantity.

Speaker 2 A lot of things to try and prioritize virtue over success. And that initiative wasn't my initiative.
It was the initiative from

Speaker 2 Ryan Barton and Christopher Masti Pietro at the Verovicchi Foundation. But as soon as they said it,

Speaker 2 I recognized that it was true. So thank God for that.

Speaker 1 This is one of those moments. My background when I first started the show was a sort of productivity bro

Speaker 1 world. I was very much trying to wrangle chaos and have the right notion template and the morning routine and time blocking and the calendar and all of this stuff, trying to

Speaker 1 create some sense of organization out of what had been a pretty sort of messy 20s. And

Speaker 1 it's funny that even in things like this, you know, we're talking about transcendent, we're talking about, you know,

Speaker 1 accounting for the various machinations and ways that your ego is going to pervert the incentives and, you know, your higher calling and how do we really pay this forward in the best way and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 And what it comes down to, in some ways, are an operational set of principles, like that you need some hard and fast rules.

Speaker 1 You need to actually put some bright lines in the sand and sort of draw those around you. And I've got it in my head sort sort of thinking about

Speaker 1 people for whom that approach is very seductive. I would probably put myself in that category.

Speaker 1 That again, if I just have the perfect to-do list template, then all of my problems will be sorted, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Let's say that somebody is operationally pretty effective when it comes to... that sort of stuff.

Speaker 1 What are some of the practices that you like, that you use the most yourself to get you out of that kind of of mode, to get you out of the mode of logic, of reason, of rationality, of logistics, of operations, and get you into a more embodied awe, dread, joy kind of sense.

Speaker 1 Because I feel like that's important.

Speaker 2 So we've been talking, this ultimately goes back to

Speaker 2 sort of a compilation put together by Nathan Vanderpoel, who I was working with. We talk about dime.

Speaker 2 We talk about these four dimensions.

Speaker 2 The dialogical, which I'll come back to each one in a minute the imaginal which I've been talking about a lot the mindful both meditation and contemplation sitted and moving and embodiment so you need these four dimensions you need practices in all four of these dimensions and you need you need sets of practices because there is no panacea practice

Speaker 2 practices have

Speaker 2 strengths and weaknesses and you need to align them so they're correcting and compensating for each other. So, one of my standard examples is meditation is training attention.

Speaker 2 Meditation is you're stepping back and looking at the lens through which you're normally looking through at the world. You're trying to pay attention to your mental framing.
This is meditation.

Speaker 2 The problem with that is you need to determine if any intervention, well, I stilled my mind. Well, does that allow you to see better into the world?

Speaker 2 And you have to do contemplative practices where you look out and see if you're seeing the world more deeply, more clearly. You have to to and fro between them.

Speaker 2 You have seated practices where you're sitting, right? But then you should do moving practices where you're trying to carry mindfulness into your movement. So I do like Tai Chi Chuan

Speaker 2 and things like that. You need imaginal practices where you're engaging your imagination, not

Speaker 2 for entertainment,

Speaker 2 but you're doing that serious play that allows you to taste what it might be like to be somebody other than who you currently are and

Speaker 2 uh

Speaker 2 how you might ident uh identify with that um and and those are very important practices uh so

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 dialogical practices we have a bunch of those we have um oh let me give you an example of uh an imaginal practice lexio divina which is reading a text in an imaginal fashion you're not just reading it to get information you're trying to create the you're trying to take up the text as a serious play as something imaginal through which you're trying to see

Speaker 2 the world differently take a different way taking perspectives you haven't taken before and what and taste what the transformation might be like that that text is providing you that other voice that other perspective the sage that you're reading is like a parent to a child as the adult as the child is to the adult the adult is to the sage and you're doing this imaginal work uh in order to try and undergo a transformation that's that's a kind of imaginal practice lexio Divina.

Speaker 2 You want to do dialogical practices. We have a whole bunch we've been teaching on the Awakened to Meaning platform where you can go now.

Speaker 2 And there's a whole website where, yep, where you can do all of the practices. You can take courses.
There's drop-in things.

Speaker 2 My good friend Taylor Barrett, by the way, that is now running autonomously, separate from John Dravecki.

Speaker 2 I get nothing from that other than the satisfaction of knowing that some of my ideas have been put into practice.

Speaker 2 And Taylor's a good friend of mine.

Speaker 2 And so we have what a practice called dialectic into dialogos, which is how can you talk, how to how can two people enter into this mutual midwifing, this fellowship where they're trying to give, I'm trying to help you to give deeper birth to yourself.

Speaker 2 And you're trying to help me. We're trying to do that in a reciprocally opening fashion.
And how can we do it with like three or four people?

Speaker 2 So that sort of gets into a shared flow state where we start to be drawn into those kinds of life-giving conversations, which we've all had

Speaker 2 because they take on a life of our own and they take us to places we didn't think we could go to.

Speaker 2 And we don't necessarily end up agreeing, but we all say, wow, I never thought I could get here and I couldn't have got here on my own.

Speaker 2 Those kinds of practices.

Speaker 2 We're just putting the final touches on a practice we've been working on, cultivating, developing for the past year or so,

Speaker 2 in which you teach people a Socratic practice of go into something, a deeply personal problem you're having, and then how can you go through a set of,

Speaker 2 with the help of other people's, a set of transformations on your perspective and also on your sense of identity, so that you can go from it being your personal problem, which is just yours, to an existential dilemma that is probably shared with many people.

Speaker 2 And then once you get at the level of existential dilemma, the tradition can talk to you and tell you what virtue might be relevant to the existential dimension.

Speaker 2 And then you can then address that part of it. And then that you bring that back into and transform your personal problem.
We're doing things like that.

Speaker 2 Where can people go?

Speaker 1 Where should they go if they want to check out more of that?

Speaker 2 Awaken to meaning.org. It's a

Speaker 2 platform. That last thing, which is called the Socratic Search Space, we're just going to roll it out in the next month or so.
The The Dialectic and the Dialogos, you can do that.

Speaker 2 Philosophical Fellowship, you can do that. You can learn about Lexio Divina, meditation, contemplation,

Speaker 2 various other kinds of practices.

Speaker 1 That's so awesome. John, I appreciate the heck out of you.
I really have to say as well,

Speaker 1 it's beautiful to see you smitten.

Speaker 1 It's really lovely. It genuinely is, mate.
You know, I think good people deserve good relationships, and I'm very glad that you've managed to find yours. So

Speaker 1 what can people expect next? You've kind of rounded out this chapter.

Speaker 1 I mean, when was the first

Speaker 1 Meaning crisis video put on YouTube?

Speaker 2 February 2019.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah.
So a good half-decade journey on one thing.

Speaker 2 Well, the book is only part one.

Speaker 2 There's part two coming out, which is the second half.

Speaker 2 That'll have even more revisions in it because all the scientific work on relevance realization has gone through a lot of revision and collaboration with other people publishing papers like this year and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 The next thing is,

Speaker 2 well, I've got a bunch of books coming out. I've got a book on,

Speaker 2 well, I'm working on Einstein and Spinoza's God,

Speaker 2 and then a book called Reimagining Religion.

Speaker 2 And then a book by Greg Enrique.

Speaker 2 We've got a lot of that written on

Speaker 2 consciousness. That's coming out.
The big project is

Speaker 2 the Philosophical Silk Road, which is going to be my next big multimedia endeavor.

Speaker 2 It's going to be sort of at four levels of presentation. One is...

Speaker 2 Well, it's based on this thesis. This is what's next.
I made a fundamental mistake in Awakening for the Meaning Crisis.

Speaker 2 I thought, you know, the solution was to engineer an ecology of practices, a religion that's not a religion, failing to realize that's exactly the framing that I was criticizing throughout.

Speaker 2 So I fell prey to a very serious performative contradiction.

Speaker 2 Because I realized,

Speaker 2 like that example of the living conversation, the sacred,

Speaker 2 you can't manufacture it. You can't engineer it.
It has to show up with a life of its own or it's not the sacred.

Speaker 2 It's not that fount of rejuvenating meaning that is deeply transformative of individuals and communities.

Speaker 2 But what's happening and what I've seen since all of the connections that were formed by Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is communities around the world and things happening in academic cognitive science and philosophy and psychology and biology.

Speaker 2 What I call the advent of the sacred, it's like sacredness is trying to be born in a new way for us, I think, as a response to

Speaker 2 It's the, I'll be Hegel here for a second. So this is my only technicality.

Speaker 2 This is the Weltgeist, the spirit of reality that's challenging the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times of the meaning crisis. And so I want to do this.

Speaker 2 I want to, in fact,

Speaker 2 it's not I want to do this. I feel called

Speaker 2 to do this.

Speaker 2 One of the things I'm going to do is I want to try and

Speaker 2 teach by undergoing a pilgrimage. I want to go to the various places in the world where the sages of three great traditions that

Speaker 2 sort of built comprehensive ways for people to deeply dialogue with each other, the Neoplatonic tradition that runs through Christianity and Judaism and Islam. So I want to talk about, right?

Speaker 2 I want to talk about, you know,

Speaker 2 Maximus the Confessor or Nicholas of Cusa, and I'm going to go there, or Clement of Alexandria, or Suravardi the Sufi, right? I'm going to go there and I'm going to walk and

Speaker 2 talk and live

Speaker 2 and really undergo and try and make myself vulnerable to hearing these people. I'm going to go to India

Speaker 2 with all of the

Speaker 2 Vedanta and everything wrapped around it. And Vedanta is like wrapped with Tantra and Jainism and original Buddhism.
And then.

Speaker 2 I want to go to Japan because there's Zen, because Zen integrates Buddhism and Taoism and Shinto

Speaker 2 and get all three of these.

Speaker 2 Like, what would it be like to do the philosophical Silk Road, create a lingua philosophica so we could engage in these, not just an ecology of practices, but an ecology of traditions where we could really deeply talk to each other and people can travel and transform

Speaker 2 and maybe return and recover their home or travel and find a new home. That's going to be the upper level.

Speaker 2 Then below that is going to be a lecture series like Awakening from the Meaning Crisis where I go through each one of these thinkers and explain them in great detail.

Speaker 2 And then below that is going to be specific video essays on more technical topics like comparing the non-duality in Vedanta to the non-duality

Speaker 2 in Zen, for example, or Neoplatonism. And then below that, we have what's called the Codex.
We have a whole bank of volunteers.

Speaker 2 taking all of my language and they're creating like a Wikipedia of it where there's and it's at it's it's being written at multiple levels of accessibility. Somebody in grade 10,

Speaker 2 completed high school, you know, all these levels. There's cross-referencing, there's diagrams, there's practices that you can undertake to get a deeper understanding of the concepts.

Speaker 2 And so there's going to be these four tiers, and there's going to be like a narrative structure and an argumentative structure, right? And a reflective structure. It's going to be this.

Speaker 2 And the hope is that that And that a lot of the teaching will not go just in what I'm saying, but what I'm undergoing and how I'm being transformed.

Speaker 2 There's going to be people that are going to travel with me in various places and meet me in various places.

Speaker 2 And the hope is to open people up to the advent of the sacred so they can

Speaker 2 properly orient to receiving it so that we can

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 transformatively trust each other in the way we need to in order to address the meeting crisis.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm glad after taking on such a medium-sized topic, you're taking it a little bit smaller for the next.

Speaker 1 Very, very reassuring that you're going to

Speaker 1 keep it nice and niche. John, I appreciate the heck out of you, mate.
I can't wait until you get whatever you've got coming out next out, and I would love to bring you back on whenever you're ready.

Speaker 2 I'll always come back and talk to you, Chris. Thank you very much, and thank you for allowing me to shamelessly plug my new book, which I really appreciate.

Speaker 1 Everyone should go and check it out. I appreciate you, mate.
Thank you.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much, Chris.

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