The Past and the Future Are Psycho Technologies and Is That Right?

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The past and the future are psycho technologies or would it be more right to say they emerge from sets of psycho technologies. I think there's a past that preceded me for example and stuff like that but us being tense beings a tense TEN SED like having past present and future tenses to our sense of identity yes I think that emerges from psycho technologiesYeah what I really love about your work John is is that you when I listen to you I get taken to a place that I typically only get taken by like kind of more mist like overtly mystical people but by getting there through the lens of cognitive science and your whole kind of method it reveals them in a new way, he says.

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