If you give people a very powerful meaning structure, they will make Titanic sacrifices. I think we have evolved with the capacity to make tremendous sacrifices to our sort of standard of living. We are moving out of a political system that used to be opponent processing and into adversarial processing where commitment to democracy is almost completely absent. People are now clinging to shrinking meaning systems.
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