How Did You Come to Recognize Meaning in Your Life?

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Adam Roberts: I've been getting really into these kind of imaginal practices recently and noticing actually how your lectures in particular really helped kind of ground that exploration. He says people don't even know they feel a sense of meaninglessness, so we can come to recognize the flows of meaning in our life such that we can kind of be like oh I'm feeling like really like there's no meaning in my life or you know what it would be like to experience a really rich tapestry of meaningfulness. The next episode will focus on breaking the dichotomy between theory and practice.

Today's guest is John Vervaeke, PhD. John is an award-winning lecturer at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science and Buddhist psychology. John joins Emerge to discuss the meaning crisis, it's consequences, and how we might design ecologies of practice to chart a path to new vistas of meaningfulness. We cover: what is the meaning crisis, how does the meaning crisis intersect with the ecological and political crisis, how our consciousness prioritizes what is most meaningful out of the totality of perception and how much flexibility we have in adjusting and transforming what we find meaningful, why it’s problematic to ‘unbundle’ and decontextualize practices like mindfulness from a larger integrated ecology of practice, how everything from literacy to rationality to mindfulness could be considered a ‘psychotechnology’, what the highest leverage practices for resolving the meaning-crisis in our own lives, how to think about building the religions of the future, why new communities of practice ought to focus on process instead of personality, John’s own journey in amplifying the meaning in life, and how our bodies can function as ‘meaningfulness’ compasses in our lives. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis