Bridging Theory and Spirituality

Speaker 2
You're also hosting an online lecture series on the elusive tradition of Platonism, I believe. Yeah, the elusive
Speaker 1
shape of
Speaker 2
the platonic tradition thank you thank you for the correction the elusive shape of the platonic tradition and you said uh um i had sort of won you over you're originally sort of um not antagonistic but skeptical of cognitive science uh but i mean you're you're pretty much a cognitive scientist in a lot of ways you're doing psychology and psychotherapy and you're doing philosophy and classics. You're doing a lot of interdisciplinary work. Um, and you're directed towards sort of fundamental questions about, you know, the nature of experience and cognition. Um, so I, I know you won't welcome the label, but I, I, I see there as a, there's a kinship between your work and my work.
Speaker 1
Well, I didn't mean to question your work in any way because I'm really interested in what you do. Yeah, yeah. But maybe the explanation of it is that in parallel with my academic work, I was also engaged in spiritual and religious practice. So I saw, well, of course, as a scholar, I'm not supposed to, maybe not to talk about this or write about this, but I alluded to it, at least in the book, that for me, it's not just a matter of thinking about Plotinus or thinking about what Plotinus had to say, but for the last 22 years, I really tried to experientially sort of invest myself in the tradition, primarily, I would say, Christian Platonic tradition. And I think it enriched my scholarship greatly. And also my sort of academic and scholarly work has become a way of enriching my spiritual practice. So I found a way to marry both aspects. So that's a more practical and experiential thing. I'm not an academic psychologist. I don't do any empirical research on anything like that. I work with patients, I supervise therapists and so on. academic work and in the book as well. For me it's a fascinating question. What is the relationship between kind of theoretical, propositional, scientific, scholarly, however you want to put it, aspect of life and this experiential, intuitive, non-propositional one? Because it's a personal question for me in terms of my work and and spiritual life but it's also a fascinating question in general when we work on on the great figures of of the platonic tradition yeah
Speaker 2
i agree with you um it's it's the scholarship here has changed a little bit it used to be about 10 years ago, it was the same thing, a sort of a coldness to people who are practicing as well as theorizing. But now, especially in, you know, third generation for ECOG sci and related fields, there's more of a welcoming of people who are both theoreticians and practitioners because of something we're going to get to very shortly this need to integrate the conceptual and the phenomenological if you want to have a true understanding of mind and intelligibility so but i'm like you i've been practicing for so i
Speaker 1
just want to say that what i admire what i admire your work is your attempt to sort of breathe the spirit, if I may use a metaphor, breathe the spirit into academic psychology or cognitive science, which I think as any kind of intellectual enterprise, it can be dry. it can be dried out and hollowed out. And, you know, you just get a play with words and this empty or not empty, this dry skeleton without any flesh. But what you do, and I think very successfully, is that you try to be a serious scientist, but also you realize that it's ultimately not about, you know, answering some questions with some formulas and getting paid for it. So I think this is something which made me want to invite you to all sorts of events and be in dialogue. And I've greatly appreciated
Speaker 2
those invitations.

The Interwoven Mind | Plotinus, Contemplation, and the Structure of Reality

Dr. John Vervaeke

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