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John Vervaeke

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2022-09-04

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2022-09-04

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1. “So, one of the ways you address this, and it's not sufficient, and I did say the work is preliminary, but if I can give you a plausible mechanism that's new, and then that lends credence. And part of what happens is illusory social comparison. Think of Instagram. People are posting things that are not accurate representation of their life or life events. In fact, they will stage things, but the people that are looking at these, they take it often as real. And so they get downward social comparison. And this is like compared to how you and I probably live, where we may get one or two of those events a week. They're getting them moment by moment. And so it's a plausible mechanism that why it might be driving people into a more depressed state.”

   2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “That's a good thing to ask, and you should always challenge the things that you intuitively want to believe. I agree with that.”

   2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “They couldn't transfer. Yeah And then they were able to step back from that and then take up the cognitive science and write about it and work on it. Also, I'm not so sure about the resiliency claim because there seems to be... Mounting evidence. It's not consensus. But it's certainly not regarded as fringe, that the increase in social media is being pretty strongly correlated with increase in depression, self-destructive behavior, things like this.”

   2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I do, I do. First of all, I did qualify, and I'm saying it's not the case for all video games or for all people. I'm holding out the possibility, and I know this possibility because I've had students who actually suffer from this and have done work around it with me.”

   2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Which is we of course have figured out, and I'm playing with words here, how to game this and how to hijack it by creating things like video games. I'm not saying this is the case for all video games, or this is the case for all people, but the WHO now acknowledges this as a real thing that you can get into the flow state within the video game world to the detriment of your ability to get into the flow state in the real world. What's the opposite of flow? Depression. In fact, depression has been called anti-flow. So you get these people that are flowing in this non-real world and they can't transfer it to the real world and it's actually costing them flow in the real world. So they tend to get depression and all kinds of things.”

   2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Think that's part of the phenomenology, but I think the functionality has to do with the fact that what's happening in flow is that dynamic non-propositional connectedness that is so central to meaning is being optimized. This is why flow is a good predictor of how well you rate your life, how much well-being you think you have, which of course is itself also predictive and interrelated with how meaningful you find your life. One of the things that you can do, but there's an important caveat, to increase your sense of meaning in life, is to get into the flow state more frequently. That's why I said you want a moving practice that's conducive to the flow state. But there's one important caveat.”

   2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Fair enough. And I don't think Hogarth was saying it's going to be epistemically as rigorous as a scientific experiment. But he's saying if you structure that, it will tend to do what that scientific method does, which is find calls. Think of the rock climber. All of those things are the case. They need clear information, right? It's tightly coupled and error matters. And they think what they're doing is very real because if they're not conforming to the real causal patterns of the rock face and the physiology of their body, they will fall.”

   2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “What kind of environments have we created that are good at distinguishing causation from correlation, experimental environments? What do you do in an experiment? You make sure that the variables are clear, no confound, no ambiguity, no vagueness. You make sure there's a tight coupling between the independent and the dependent variable, and your hypothesis can be falsified. Error matters. Now look at those three LECs. Those are exactly the three conditions that you need for flow. Clear your information, tightly coupled feedback, and error matters. So Flow is not only an insight cascade, improving your insight capacity, it's also a marker that you're cultivating the best kind of intuitions, the ones that fit you best to the causal patterns in your environment.”

   2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Implicit learning when we like it, it's intuition when it's picking up on stuff that's bogus. We call it prejudice or all kinds of other names for intuition that's going wrong. Now, he said, okay, what do we do? What do we do about this? And this will get back to flow. What do we do about this? Well, we can't try to replace implicit learning with explicit learning because we'll lose all the adaptiveness to it. So what can we do explicitly? What we can do is take care of the environment in which we're doing the implicit learning. How do we do that? We try to make sure the environment has features that help us distinguish causation from correlation.”

   2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “How far do you stand away from somebody at a funeral? There's a lot of complex variables. There's status, closeness to the person, your relationship to them, past history, all kinds of stuff. And yet you know how to do it. And you didn't have to go to funeral school. I'm just using that as an example. So you have these powerful intuitions. Now, here's Hogarth's great point. Implicit learning. Remember I said before the things that make it adaptive make us subject to self-deception? Here's another example. Implicit learning is powerful at picking up on complex patterns, but it doesn't care what kind of pattern it is. It doesn't distinguish causal patterns from merely correlational patterns.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “So there's a phenomena called implicit learning. Also very well replicated. Starts way back in the 60s with Reber. You can give people complex patterns like number and letter strings. And they can learn about those patterns. Outside of deliberate focal awareness. That's why it's called implicit learning. What's interesting is if you try and change that task into tell me the pattern, but explicitly try to figure it out their performance degrades. So here's the idea. You have this adaptive capacity for implicit learning, and what it does is it results in you being able to track complex variables in a way, but you don't know how you came up with that knowledge. And this is Hogarth's proposal in educating intuition. Intuition is actually the result of implicit learning. So an example I use is...”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “And so we actually proposed to interlocking cognitive processes. The first thing we said is, well, what's going on in flow? Think about it. Think about the rock climber. Rock climber, and I talked about this earlier, they're constantly restructuring how they're seeing the rock face. They're constantly doing something like insight. And if they fail to do it, they impasse and that starts to get dangerous. So they got to do it an insight that primes an insight, that primes an insight. So imagine the aha experience, that flash and that moment and imagine it cascading. So you're getting the extended aha. That's why things are super salient. There's a sense of discovery. There's a sense of atonement, of deep participation, of grace. But there's something else going on too.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “The flow state when you're sparring, your hand just goes up for the block and your strike just goes through the empty space or if you're a goalie in hockey. I've got to mention hockey once I'm a Canadian, right? You put out your glove hand and the pucks there, right? So there's this tremendous sense of grace at one mint, super salience, discovery, and realness. People don't, well, people don't, when they're in the flow state, they don't go, I bet this is an illusion. The interesting question for me and my co authors in the article we published, the Oxford handbook of spontaneous thought with Arian Hara Bennett and Leo Ferraro is that's a descriptive account of Flow. We wanted an explanatory account. What are the causal mechanisms at work in flow?”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Person that persists. Yes, yes, yes. Now, when you're in the flow state. Notice how this sits on the boundary between the secular and the sacred. When you're in the flow state, People report a tremendous sense of at one mint with the environment. They report a loss of a particular kind of self-consciousness, that narrative naturing nanny in your head that, how do I look? Do people like How do I look? How's my hair? Do people like me? Should I have said that? That all goes away. Free from that. You're free from the most sadistic superego self-critic you could possibly have. At least for a while, the world is vivid. It's super salient to you. There's an ongoing sense of discovery. Although often you know you're exerting a lot of metabolical effort, it feels effortless”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “There has to be tightly coupled feedback between what you do and how the environment responds. So when you act, there's an immediate response. There isn't a big time lag between your action and your ability to detect the response from the environment Failure has to matter. Error really matters.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Now, in this circumstance, people report optimal experience, optimal in two ways, optimal in that this is one of the best experiences I've had in my life. It's distinct from pleasure, and yet it explains why people do very bizarre things like rock climbing, because it's a good flow induction. But they also mean optimal in a second sense, my best performance. So it's both the best experience and the best performance. Chicksat Mahai also talked about the information flow conditions you need in order for there to be this state of flow. And then I'll talk about what it's like to be in flow in a sec. What you need is three things. You need the information that you're getting to be clear. It can't be ambiguous or vague. Think about a rock clamber. If it's ambiguous and vague, you're in trouble, right?”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I share that. I mean, I can tell you that within. My area is important, and he's famous in academics. So the flow state, two important sets of conditions, and very often people only talk about one, and that's a little bit of a misrepresentation. So the flow state is in situations in which the demand of the situation is slightly beyond your skills. So you both have to apply all the skills you can with as much sort of attention and concentration. You possibly can, and you have to actually be stretching your skills”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “I do because during COVID, I decided at the advice of a good friend to do a daily course. I taught meditating with John Verveki. I did all the way through meditation, contemplation, even some of the movement practices. That's all there. It's all available. That was largely inspired by Buddhism and Taoism. And then I went into the Western tradition and went through things like Stoicism and Neoplatonism, cultivating wisdom with John Ravicki. That's all there. All free.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “No, I teach people how to do the meta practice. I also teach them how to do a Neoplatonic contemplative practice, how to do a Stoic. Another one you can do is the view from above. This is classic Stoicism. I get you to imagine that you're in this room and then imagine that you're floating above the room. Then above Austin, then above Texas, then above the United States, then the Earth. And you have to really imagine it. Don't just think it, but really imagine. And then what you notice is as you're pulling out to a wider and wider contemplation of reality, your sense of self and what you find relevant and important also changes. No, for all of these, there is a specific step-by-step methodology.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “contemplative practice is to try and It's actually apropos because we talked about that participatory knowing the way you're situated in the world. So this is a long thing because there's different interpretations of meta. And I go for what's called an existential interpretation over an emotional one. So, what I'm doing in Meta, right, is I'm trying to become in two ways. I'm trying to awaken to the fact that I am constantly assuming an identity and assigning an identity. So I'm looking at that. Trying to awaken to that. And then I'm trying to awaken from the modal confusion that I can get into around that. And so I'm looking out onto the world and I'm trying to see. You in a fundamentally different way than I have before.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Puppy dog never learns to stay. What do I need to do? I have to neither fight it nor feed it. I have to have this centered attitude. I have to befriend it. So you step back and look at your sensations. You step back and look at your distracting processes. You return your attention to the breath and you do it with the right attitude. That's the core of a good meditative practice.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “And then I return my attention to the breath. And I have to return my attention in the correct way. A part of your mind that jumps around in the Buddhist tradition, this is called your monkey mind. It's like a monkey leaping for branches and chattering. If I was trying to train that monkey mind to stay, or as Jack Cornfield said, train a puppy dog. Stay puppy dog. And if it goes, and I get really angry and I bring it back and I'm yelling at it, I'm going to train it to fight and fear me. If I just indulge it, if I just feed its whims, oh, well, look, the puppy dog went there. Oh, now it's there.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Meditative practice like vipassana. And so what's the primary thing I look through rather than look at? It's my sensations. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on my sensations rather than focusing on the world through my sensations. So I'm going to follow, for example, the sensations in this area of my abdomen where my breathing is. So I can feel as my abdomen is expanding i can feel those sensations and then i can feel the sensations as it's contracting now what will happen is my mind will leap back to try to look through and look at the world again right i'll start thinking about i need to do my laundry or what was that noise and so what do i do i don't get involved with the content i step back and label the process with an ing word listening imagining planning”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Yes, I would tell them to do at least three things. And I lucked into this when I started meditation, I went down the street and there was a place that taught Vipassana meditation, metta contemplation, and Tai Chi Chuan for flow induction. And you should get, you should have a meditative practice. Should find a contemplative practice and you should find a moving mindfulness practice, especially one that is conducive to the flow state and practice them in an integrated fashion.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “So if you adjusted contemplation, you could suffer from inflation and projective fantasy. If you just do meditation, you can suffer from withdrawal, spiritual bypassing, avoiding reality. They need each other. You have to cycle between them. It's like when I talked about earlier, when I talked about the opponent processing within the autonomic nervous system or the opponent processing at work and attention. And that's what I mean by an ecology of practices. You need both. Neither one is a panacea. You need them in this opponent processing, acting as checks and balance on each other.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “And the ability to make a new frame. That's what actually happens in insight. You have to both break an inappropriate frame and make, see, realize a new frame. This is why mindfulness enhances insight both ways, by the way. Meditative practices and also contemplative practices. Mindfulness is frame awareness. Can be appropriated in order to improve your capacities for insight and self-regulation.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Causing me to, right? Now, if I just did that, that could be helpful. But how do I know if I've actually corrected the change I made to my lenses? What do I need to do? I need to put my glasses on and see if I can now see more clearly and deeply than I could before. Meditation is this, stepping back and looking at. Contemplation is that looking through and there are different kinds of practices. The fact that we treat them as synonyms is a deep mistake. The word contemplation has temple in it in Latin, contemplatio, means to look up to the sky. It's a translation of the Greek word theoria. We get our word theory from. It's to look deeply into things. Meditation is more about having to do with reflecting upon, standing back and looking at. Mindfulness includes both. It includes your ability to break away. From an inappropriate frame.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “You step back from looking through your frame and you look at it. I'm taking my glasses off right now and I'm looking at them. Why might I do that? To see if there's something in the lenses that is distorting.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “So, what I mean by an ecology is exactly what you have in an ecology. You have a dynamical system in which there are checks and balances on each other. And I'll get to that with this about mindfulness. So I'll make that connection if you allow me. So we're always framing. We've been talking about that, right? For those of you who are not on YouTube, this podcast, I wear glasses and I'm now sort of putting my fingers and thumb around the frames of my glasses. So this is my frame. And my lens is, and that frame, the frame holds a lens, and I'm seeing through it, in both senses, beyond and by means of it. So right now, my glasses are transparent to me. I want to use that as a strong analogy for my mental framing. Now, this is what you do in meditation, I would argue.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “I've critiqued the sort of standard definitions being aware of the present moment without judgment because I think they're flawed. And if you want to get into the detail of why we can. But this is how I want to explain it to you. And it also points to the fact of why you need an ecology of mindfulness practices. You shouldn't equate mindfulness with meditation. I think that's a primary mistake.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “So, published on that as well. And I practice. I've been practicing many forms of mindfulness and ecology of practices since 1991. So I both have practitioners knowledge, and I also study it scientifically. I think, I'm pretty sure I was the first person to academically talk about mindfulness at the University of Toronto within a classroom setting, like lecturing on it.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Yes, there was, and so the jazz, the jazz and getting into the flow state. And trying to share in a participatory and perspective of fashion the learning with the people rather than just pronouncing at them. Yes.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Think of what that's doing. You've got dialogues and then you've got this meta dialogue like you're describing. And think about how things like podcasts and YouTube, they break down old boundaries between the private and the public, between writing and oral speech. So we have the dynamics of living oral speech, but it has the permanency of writing. Like we're in the midst of creating a vehicle, right? And a medium for distributed cognition that breaks down a lot of the categories by which we organized our cognition.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “I think so. I think so. So that communitas, that's Victor Turner's phrase, and specifically linked it to flow. And I study flow scientifically, that that within distributed cognition as the home, as the generator of mythos and ritual. And those are bound together as well. I think that's fundamentally correct.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “They're saying it well, see, that's what the most recent conversation was about. I was trying to say. But I don't think mythos is, I think mythos is really important. I think these kinds of narratives are really important. But I think this ability to connect together in distributed cognition, collective intelligence, and cultivate Shared flow state within that collective intelligence so it starts to ramp up perhaps towards collective wisdom. I think that's more important because I think that's the basin within which the myths and the rituals are ultimately created and when they function. Like a myth is like a public dream. It depends on distributed cognition and it depends on people enacting it and getting into mutual flow states.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Took on a life of their own and took us both in directions we did not anticipate, afforded us insights that we could not have had on our own. And we don't have come to an agreement, but we were both moved and we were both drawn into insight. And we feel like, wow, that was one of the best moments of my life because we feel how that introduced us to a capacity for tapping into a flow state within distributed cognition that puts us into a deeper relationship with ourselves, with another person, and potentially with the world. That's what I mean by deal logos. And so for me, I think Diologos is More important. Boy, I could just, I'm sorry, I can hear Jordan and Jonathan in my head right now. But I think it's more.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “I use the word discourse or dialogue for just people having a conversation. And this is deeply inspired by. Socrates and Plato, especially the Platonic dialogues. And I'm sure we've all had this. And so give me a moment because I want to build onto something here. We've participated in conversations.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “I think most of our problem solving is done in distributed cognition. Like, look around. You didn't make this equipment. You didn't build this place. You didn't invent this language that we're both sharing, et cetera, et cetera. Now there's more specific and precise experimental evidence coming out Let's take a standard task that people, reasoning tasks, I wanted to do the details. It's called the Wasin Selection Task. You give it to people, highly educated psychology students, premier universities across the world. You've been doing it since the 60s. It replicates and replicates. And only 10% of the people get it right Put them in a group of four and you allow them to talk to each other. The success rate goes to 80%. That's just one example of a phenomenon that's coming to the fore.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Notice how all of these patterns are emerging and what does that say about us and reality. And those myths, I think, are genuinely profound.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Yes. And so we keep returning back to them again and again and again. It's important to see that some of these stories Recursive. They're myths about one particular set of patterns. They're myths about not just the important pattern. Like you get Jordan stuff about there's heroes and myths are trying to make us understand the need for being heroic in our own lives. One of the things I like to put in counterbalance that is the Greek also have myths of hubris that counterbalance the heroic. But then there are myths. Not about those deeply important patterns, but they're myths about religio itself, that the way religio means to bind, to connect, the way relevance, realization connects us. And so the point of the myth is not, notice that pattern or notice that pattern or notice that pattern.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “When they talk about reading these stories, they think the literal interpretation is the weakest and the least important. You move to the allegorical or the symbolic, to the moral, to the spiritual, the mystical. And that's where, right? So they would say to you, you know, but how is the story of Adam and Eve true for you now? And I don't mean true for you in that relativistic sense. I mean, how is it pointing to a pattern in your life right now?”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “So here's where Jordan and I are in much more, actually all three of us are in significant agreement. I said this in my series, but I want to say it again here. Myths aren't stories about things that happened in the deep past that are largely irrelevant. Myths are stories about perennial or pertinent patterns that need to be brought into awareness. And they need to be brought into an awareness not just or primarily at the propositional level, but at those non-propositional levels. And I think that is what good mythos does. I prefer to use the Greek word because we've now turned the English word into a synonym for a widely believed falsehood. And I don't think, again, if you go back even to the church fathers, I'm not a Christian, I'm not advocating for Christianity, right? But, right, neither am I here to attack it.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Yeah, I think he has, he and I, especially because Neoplatonism is a non-theistic philosophical spirituality, and it's a big part of Eastern Orthodoxy. He and I, I think, he would say things like, God doesn't exist. What? You're a Christian, right? And then he's being coy, but he'll say, well, God doesn't exist the way the cup exists or the table exists. The same kind of move I was making a few minutes ago. He'll say things like that. He will emphasize the no-thingness of ultimate reality, the no thingness of God, because he's from that version of Christianity, what you might call classical theism. But classical theism looks a lot more like non-theism than it looks like modern theism.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “I think that's relatively clear for me with Jordan. Jordan's a really complex guy, so it's very hard to just pin. To my best sort of understanding, yes, I think that's clearly the case for Jordan. It's not the case for Jonathan. Jonathan is, remember I said I was talking about modern atheism and theism. Jonathan is a guy who somehow went into icon carving and Maximus the Confessor and Eastern Orthodoxy and has come out of it the other end as a fifth century church father that is nevertheless being, rightfully so, to be increasingly relevant to many people.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Yes, especially Neoplatonic Christianity, which is very important. I have a lot of respect. Well, I have a lot of respect for both of them, but I have a lot of respect for Jonathan. But in my participation in that dialogue, you can see me. While repeatedly, but I think everybody, including Jordan, thought constructively, challenging sort of the attempt to build a theistic model. And I was challenging it from a non-theistic perspective. So I think we don't. Agree on certain sets of propositions, but there was a lot of acknowledgement. And I think genuine appreciation on his part and Jonathan's part of the arguments I was making.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “And it's around this question, Lux. He's basically sort of making. He's putting together an argument for God. I mean, I think that's a fair way. I don't think he would object to me saying that. And Jonathan Pageot is also a... Jonathan is a Christian. It's unclear what Jordan is.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “But you didn't just passively receive it either. You're engaged and involved in it. That's why you get. So that's what I mean by you participate in it. You participate in meaning.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “There's a Latin word that doesn't separate them called inventio. And I would say that, and before you say, oh, well, give me a chance because you participate in it. Experienced an insight, yes. Did you make it happen”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “You think of sacredness as a property of a particular being. God and that way that is meaningful to them is by asserting a set of propositions or beliefs. Now, I want to point out that this is what I would now call modern Or common theism. You go back into the classical periods of Christianity. You get a view that's really radically different from how most people understand theism today.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “That is bound up with okay. What I need to do in order to be in relationship with, so it's a misconstruing of ultimate reality as a supreme being, which is a category mistake to my mind. And then my relationship to it, that sacredness is a function of belief. And I have been presenting you an argument through most of our discussion that meaning is at a deeper level than beliefs and propositions. And so that is a misunderstanding of sacredness because I take sacredness to be that which is most meaningful and it connected to what is most real.”

    2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source