Sally Kohn: How does the meaning crisis sort of intersect or influence, or how does it relate to these other more perhaps well-known crises? Kohn: The problem for many people in the West is that they are post-religious. We need systematic sets of psychotechnologies, but we need it in a framework other than traditional religion," she 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