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Meaning crisis and awakening

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From: jimruttshow8596

This article draws extensively from a conversation with John Vervaeke, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto [00:00:41], specifically referencing his video series Awakening From The Meaning Crisis [00:00:36]. The discussion centers on the nature of the meaning crisis and pathways to “awakening,” largely defined as a profound transformation through altered states of consciousness and an enhanced understanding of meaning.

Higher States of Consciousness and Transformation

A core idea within religious philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism is that higher states of consciousness are more real than everyday reality, leading to profound individual transformation [00:02:40], [00:03:02], [00:03:07]. Unlike dreams, which are often strange and incoherent with our worldview, these “higher states of consciousness” (HSCs) are unique and ineffable but are perceived as profoundly real [00:03:55], [00:04:04]. The focus should be on the underlying functionality of these states, particularly their capacity for insight, rather than just their altered phenomenology [00:05:32], [00:05:52], [00:06:03].

Fluency and Insight

The concept of “fluency” describes the brain’s use of processing ease to make judgments about information content. It represents gaining an “optimal grip” on a situation [00:08:09], [00:09:16], [00:11:00].

  • Insight is characterized by a “fluency spike,” a sudden increase in gaining a better grip on a problem [00:09:37], [00:11:58].
  • Chaining insights together leads to a “flow state” [00:09:43], which is an extended “aha” experience [00:12:27].
  • A “mystical experience” is interpreted as a flow state where one gains an optimal grip on “the world” or “realness” itself, rather than specific objects or situations [00:12:56], [00:13:02]. This “continuity hypothesis” suggests that fluency, insight, flow, mystical experiences, and transformative experiences all use the same underlying machinery [00:10:05], [00:10:10].

De-Centering

A significant benefit of altered states of consciousness is “de-centering,” which involves shifting perspective away from one’s own egocentric viewpoint [00:15:11]. This process moves individuals from being “egocentric” to “world-centric,” where reality and connection to the world become more salient than the ego [00:16:57], [00:17:02].

The Solomon Effect

The Solomon effect is a practical example of de-centering: by redescribing a personal problem from a third-person perspective, individuals often gain insight that was unavailable from a first-person view [00:17:17], [00:17:35]. Psychedelics, especially in strong doses, can induce an “ego death” state, demonstrating that the ego is not an essential part of one’s being [00:18:00], [00:18:05]. Even the flow state can lead to a loss of the “nattering nanny manager ego,” enhancing agency and offering existential lessons [00:18:27], [00:18:43].

The Role of Tradition and Community

Vervaeke emphasizes that altered states of consciousness should be embedded within an “ecology of practices” and a community with some form of tradition [00:20:12], [00:20:16]. Humans generally perform better in collective cognition than individual cognition [00:20:30]. Engaging in such practices independently can lead to “autodidactism,” whereas groups can mutually correct biases and leverage collective intelligence [00:21:07], [00:21:10]. This “inter-subjective collective verification” is crucial, akin to how science functions or how face-to-face communities resolve problems [00:22:06], [00:22:18]. New emerging communities, like the Game B movement, can establish new traditions that fulfill this need for collective sense-making [00:21:27], [00:22:46].

Complexification

“Complexification” is defined as a system that is simultaneously differentiating and integrating, leading to emergence [00:26:14]. The brain, for instance, exhibits complexification at many levels [00:26:47]. The process of complexification can be coupled to the world’s complexity, allowing individuals to better fit into the world by appropriately complexifying [00:27:32]. The metacrisis can be partly attributed to attempts to solve complex problems with complicated (rather than complexified) solutions [00:27:54].

Addressing Parasitic Processing

Meaning crisis and its components includes understanding and dealing with “parasitic processing.” This concept describes how individually adaptive cognitive biases (like confirmation bias or availability heuristic) can self-organize and mutually reinforce each other, leading to maladaptive spirals of anxiety or depression [00:29:04], [00:31:00], [00:31:41]. These “parasites” run off adaptive machinery but take on a self-preserving life of their own [00:31:54]. The Buddha’s genius, in this view, was to propose creating “counteractive dynamical systems” – ecologies of practices that intervene at multiple points and levels to dismantle these maladaptive patterns [00:32:40], [00:32:49], [00:33:40], [00:34:32].

Dukkha as Loss of Agency

The Buddhist concept of dukkha, often translated as “suffering,” is reinterpreted not merely as pain or distress, but as a “loss of agency” [00:35:15], [00:36:16], [00:36:47]. Parables used by the Buddha emphasize self-entrapment and a struggle for freedom, rather than just physical pain [00:35:41], [00:36:20]. The ocean tasting salty (everywhere) and the teaching of freedom (everywhere) suggest that the core of Buddhism is about regaining agency [00:36:38], [00:36:44]. This reinterpretation helps explain why ignorance is a primary mark of dukkha, as it profoundly leads to a loss of agency [00:38:26], [00:38:31].

Historical Drivers of Meaning Crisis

Domicide

The term “domicide” refers to the loss of “home” – not just physical housing, but the profound sense of belonging and rootedness in a community or nation [00:43:51], [00:44:05].

  • Alexander the Great’s Empire: The spread of Hellenistic culture through Alexander’s conquests led to people being displaced and governed from distant capitals [00:45:55], [00:45:56]. This contrasts sharply with the intimate, deeply situated life of the Greek city-states (polis), where everyone was connected [00:42:44], [00:44:33]. The loss of a shared religion, language, and ancestral roots created a deep sense of displacement and anxiety, paralleling modern globalization [00:46:10], [00:47:00].
  • Modern Domicide: Beyond globalization, the decline of extended families and face-to-face communities over the last 120 years, replaced by the abstract government and market, is seen as a primary driver of modern domicide [00:47:20], [00:47:31], [00:47:41]. This loss of rootedness contributes to loneliness, isolation, and the rise of tribalisms and nationalisms [00:46:51], [00:47:04].

Philosophy’s Shift: From Wisdom to Therapy

Following the Alexandrian age, philosophy shifted from being about cultivating wisdom to countering foolishness, to becoming a therapeutic tool to relieve existential suffering [00:49:31], [00:49:36], [00:49:39].

Stoicism

Stoicism emerged as a response to the domicide and anxiety of the Hellenistic age [00:50:08], [00:50:11]. Many modern cognitive therapies, particularly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), explicitly draw from Stoic practices [00:50:18], [00:50:26]. Stoicism emphasizes controlling one’s “internal dialogue” (Socratic dialogue) rather than succumbing to rumination [00:50:50], [00:51:00]. It proposes finding “home” not in contingent external things (wealth, power, fame) but by reconfiguring how one “homes” oneself through consciously intervening in the homing process to make it resilient to life’s contingencies [00:51:47], [00:52:19], [00:52:31], [00:53:07].

Jesus and Agapic Love

Jesus (and Paul, for his spread and cosmological vision) introduced the concept of agape, a creative love distinct from eros (consummation) or philia (reciprocity) [00:56:09], [00:56:40], [00:57:36]. Agapic love is embodied by a parent’s love for a child, focused on the child’s independent development [00:57:41], [00:57:48], [00:57:55]. Jesus connects God’s creativity with agape, suggesting that becoming more agapic makes one more “God-like” and compassionate (“womb-like”) [00:59:28], [00:59:35], [00:59:40], [00:59:43]. The Gospel of John integrates this agape with the Stoic concept of logos (reason, order, gathering together), creating a powerful vision of a new way of being in the world – the “kingdom of God” – where individuals are transformed and connected [01:00:10], [01:00:12], [01:00:18], [01:00:39], [01:00:46], [01:00:48], [01:01:21]. This insight, that all are “equal children of God,” laid fundamental groundwork for many positive Western developments [01:01:54].

Augustine’s Synthesis

Augustine, a “titanic individual” and the last great philosopher of antiquity [01:03:28], created a synthesis that defined Western civilization’s meaning for over 1500 years [01:06:01]. He integrated:

  1. Logos: The philosophical tradition of Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic thought, culminating in Neoplatonism [01:03:33], [01:03:52].
  2. Agape: Christian love and connection [01:04:06], [01:04:09].
  3. Moral History: The Judeo-Christian idea of an overarching historical narrative [01:04:13]. He personalized this synthesis, creating a template for the autobiographical self and showing how individuals could experience their own “kairos” (turning point) [01:04:22], [01:04:28], [01:04:35]. This yielded massive coherence (from logos), purpose (from moral history), and significance/connection (from agape) [01:05:03], [01:05:06], [01:05:08], [01:05:12].

Aquinas and the Two Worlds Model

The rediscovery of Aristotle’s works, particularly through Islamic civilizations, challenged the prevalent extreme Platonism in Christianity, which had emphasized a “beautiful and glorious” upper world over a “filth and muck” lower world [01:09:07], [01:09:15], [01:09:38], [01:10:01]. Thomas Aquinas, in response, created a division that solidified the “two worlds” mythology into distinct natural and supernatural realms [01:10:33], [01:10:46], [01:12:06].

  • The natural world was accessible by reason and observation (science) [01:10:54].
  • The supernatural world was only accessible by faith, a special gift of grace [01:11:02]. This division, while saving the “jobs” of both theology and nascent science, ultimately destroyed the Platonic concept of anagoge (ascent from lower to higher reality) and made wisdom less about a continuous relationship between worlds [01:12:30], [01:12:36]. It also made the natural world appear self-sufficient, leading to the gradual erosion of the supernatural world’s plausibility [01:12:48], [01:13:00], [01:13:03]. This is seen as a foundational crack in the meaning system of the West, leading to the contemporary meaning crisis [01:13:10], [01:13:55].

Galileo and the “Death of the Universe”

Galileo, building on nominalism (the idea that most patterns are in the mind, not the world) and the Platonic emphasis on mathematics, asserted that mathematics is the true language of the universe [01:15:00], [01:15:21], [01:15:47], [01:16:07]. This led to a radical shift: trusting mathematical descriptions over direct phenomenological experience or spoken language [01:16:50], [01:17:35].

  • Through experiments, Galileo discovered “inertial motion,” implying that things don’t happen “on purpose” and don’t have an inner drive [01:17:49], [01:17:50], [01:17:55].
  • This effectively “killed the universe” in the sense that it ceased to be a living, purposeful entity with a grand narrative, reducing it to inert matter [01:18:28], [01:18:31], [01:18:33], [01:18:41], [01:18:42].

This scientific revolution led to a reduction of “knowing” (scientia) to propositional knowledge (justified true beliefs), losing the importance of perspectival, participatory, and procedural knowing [01:21:17], [01:21:53], [01:22:00], [01:22:04]. The sense of realness became confined to conviction, neglecting senses of power, presence, and belonging [01:23:10].

Luther and Descartes

Martin Luther’s theology, an extreme version of Augustine’s, posits that personal transformation (conversion) is entirely “heteronomous” (driven by God) and not dependent on human participation or effort [01:24:40], [01:24:50], [01:25:13]. It emphasizes an unmediated, individual relationship with God, fostering individualism [01:25:42]. René Descartes, in contrast, suggests no transformation is needed; only a mathematical method of certainty is required to connect to the world [01:26:56], [01:27:03]. For Descartes, God’s only role is to guarantee the scientific method [01:27:15], [01:27:21]. Both Luther and Descartes, inadvertently, made God profoundly irrelevant as a supernatural entity, contributing to the fragmentation of the Protestant church and the irrelevance of the supernatural world [01:27:34], [01:27:36], [01:27:42], [01:27:46].

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment, heavily influenced by figures like John Locke and Isaac Newton, proposed that reason (understood as logical-mathematical manipulation of propositions) combined with evidence would alleviate human suffering [01:31:57], [01:32:00], [01:32:07], [01:32:10]. This vision led to secularism, science, democracy, and a market economy as self-organizing processes governed by reason [01:32:32], [01:32:41], [01:32:50], [01:32:58], [01:33:00], [01:33:07]. God became irrelevant to the natural world’s functioning, leading to deism or atheism [01:30:38], [01:31:21]. However, this Enlightenment 1.0 is critiqued for:

  • Its “propositional tyranny,” assuming standard adults have all tools needed to navigate the world, neglecting distortions in thinking and the need for deeper understanding of rationality [01:34:03], [01:35:05], [01:35:15].
  • Its “naive Newtonianism,” a focus on complicated rather than complex systems, lacking concepts like complexity, relativity, or systems thinking [01:35:51], [01:35:56], [01:37:38].

Romanticism

Romanticism arose as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s austere and truncated view of reason, particularly against Kant’s idea that the mind shapes experience without knowledge of the “thing in itself,” leaving humans “locked inside their heads” [01:39:35], [01:40:06], [01:40:08], [01:40:40]. Romantics sought to reconnect to the world by delving into the “irrational” aspects of the mind, going “backwards through layers of processing” to discover a “true self” prior to the influences of civilization [01:41:50], [01:41:53], [01:42:06], [01:42:12]. Critiques of Romanticism:

Conclusion: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

The historical analysis highlights the progressive erosion of traditional meaning systems and calls for new approaches to cultivating wisdom and meaning. This includes embracing a nuanced understanding of consciousness, leveraging collective cognition, and developing “counteractive dynamical systems” to navigate the complexities of modern existence.

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