Meaning crisis and wisdom

From: jimruttshow8596

The meaning crisis is identified as a significant contemporary challenge with two core components: a perennial susceptibility to self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior, and a pertinently present lack of established ways to cultivate wisdom [00:09:11]. This situation has led to a “wisdom famine” in modern society [01:09:56].

Understanding the Meaning Crisis

The meaning crisis stems from complex cognition that is dynamical, self-organizing, recursive, embodied, and enacted, making one-shot interventions ineffective [00:09:27]. People struggle with absurdity, alienation, and pervasive anxiety as symptoms of this crisis [01:12:42]. There is a lack of accessible avenues for cultivating wisdom, leading many to either attempt to make “legacy religions” work or try to piece something together themselves [01:10:20].

A significant demographic affected by this crisis are the “nuns” – those with no official religious belief who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, essentially seeking wisdom and meaning through autodidactic means, which carries inherent risks [01:10:36].

The meaning crisis is also linked to the “Philosopher’s disease,” which is the search for firm foundations [01:07:16]. Modern philosophy has shown that such foundations may not exist, and clinging to the Cartesian promise of certainty to alleviate anxiety is problematic [01:10:08]. When this pursuit of certainty fails, it can exacerbate anxiety and leave a vacuum, which is often filled by “pseudo-religious ideologies” [01:11:29].

Meaning of Life vs. Meaning in Life

A crucial distinction in understanding the meaning crisis and its resolution is between “meaning of life” and “meaning in life” [01:13:21].

• Meaning of life refers to a metaphysical proposal about a pre-authored plan or destiny that one must find [01:13:37].
• Meaning in life is agnostic to such plans and instead focuses on the “enacted senses of connection” one has to oneself, others, and reality that make life worth living despite inherent futility and frustration [01:14:05].

The “religion that’s not a religion” explicitly rejects the “meaning of life” framework due to its presupposition of a teleology to the universe that is deemed absent [01:14:05].

Wisdom as a Response

Wisdom is presented as the ability to ameliorate self-deception and enhance fundamental adaptive connectedness, which people experience as meaning in life [00:09:48]. It involves the coordinated action of these two processes [00:10:04]. The current societal challenge is that while information and knowledge are abundant, the cultivation of wisdom is unclear [01:10:11].

The “Religion that’s Not a Religion”

This project is proposed as a necessary response to the meaning crisis [00:03:01]. It aims to provide:

1. A home and community for ecologies of practices [00:03:06].
2. Integration with the non-avoidable scientific and technological worldview [00:03:19].
3. Functionality to afford people practices to deal with self-deception and enhance their connectedness and meaning in life [00:03:32].

The name “religion that’s not a religion” highlights the need for the transformative, community-level, and cultural functions historically provided by religions, but without their traditional “Two Worlds mythology” which is no longer viable with scientific evidence and philosophical arguments [00:04:48]. This initiative seeks to exact the beneficial functionalities of religion while avoiding its worldview, organizational issues, and historical problems [00:04:48].

Reconceptualizing the Sacred

A key aspect of this new framework is a non-supernatural understanding of “the sacred” [01:41:49].

• Sacredness is a phenomenological experience where one feels liberated from systemic self-deception, gains comprehensive insight, and experiences an intense, reciprocal intensification of connectedness with reality [01:42:27].
• The “sacred” is the ontological placeholder for that which we relate to during experiences of sacredness [01:42:11]. This experience is possible within a scientific worldview and does not require belief in a super-agent or destiny [01:44:32].
• Mystical experiences, even those that lead to atheism, can be profoundly sacred and transformative [01:44:47].
• The sacred is understood not as something finished or perfect, but as an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility in reality, always beyond full comprehension [00:58:52].
• The sacred also encompasses things that are profoundly important and/or dangerous, around which potent practices are built for well-being and survival [01:48:22].

The Role of Religio

The term “religio” is used to convey a fundamental sense of connectedness, drawing from its etymological roots meaning “to bind” (like a ligament) [01:14:20]. It captures:

1. The sense of binding and connectedness [01:14:34].
2. Its etymological link to religion and sacredness [01:14:38].
3. Its association with secular conscientiousness and being rightly ordered towards reality [01:17:51].

Religio is part of “secular intelligence” and involves the relevance realization process where things grab attention and one cares about information [01:18:11]. This fundamental connectedness underpins general intelligence and is what meaning in life is [01:18:59].

Ecologies of Practices

Ecologies of practices are crucial for addressing the meaning crisis and cultivating wisdom. These are not one-shot interventions but complex, dynamic, self-organizing, and self-correcting systems [01:21:50]. They operate through “opponent processing,” similar to how brain networks or the autonomic nervous system function [01:21:05].

Examples of practices and design principles:

• Self-knowledge/Self-awareness: Mindfulness, combining meditative practices (stepping back to examine mental framing) and contemplative practices (exploring new frames) [01:25:25]. These act in an opponent fashion to make one “insight prone” [01:26:29].
• Moving mindfulness: Such as Tai Chi Chuan, which develops Mind-Body integration and transfers broadly to other domains of life, fostering flexibility and adaptiveness [01:30:16].
• Active open-mindedness: Practices that dampen inferential machinery to allow for more careful inference [01:27:50].
• Ritual enactment: Using the “imaginal” (imagination for perception, sensitizing to subtle patterns) for aspirational goals, such as imagining one’s future self as a beloved family member to encourage saving for retirement [01:31:34]. Effective rituals transfer broadly and deeply, affording profound reciprocal opening with reality [01:33:16].
• Dialogical commuting: Practices designed to access collective intelligence and distributed cognition, creating a “we space” that serves as a normative touchstone for individual practice [01:29:11].
• Prosaic rituals: Activities like singing and dancing together can create a sense of something greater than the sum of individuals [01:28:26].
• Life event rituals: Critical life events such as birth and death require ritualization to deepen connection and provide meaning. The modern “secular show” has often “vivisected” these meaningful aspects [01:41:00].
• Synergistic satisfiers: Practices that achieve multiple important outcomes simultaneously, like breastfeeding, which integrates physical, emotional, and relational benefits [01:43:42]. Re-adopting such practices, even if autodiadactically (due to broken lineage), is a conscious choice to re-ligature human capacity [01:44:27].

Scaling the “Religion that’s Not a Religion”

The scaling of this new cultural framework is a critical consideration. It is not about propagating propositional content, which was a weakness of old religions [01:54:19]. Instead, it focuses on designing a culture that leverages positive returns to scale, specifically Metcalf’s Law [01:56:02].

Key design principles for scaling:

• Focus on experience and practice: The culture must be designed consciously and intentionally to maximize the benefits of Metcalf’s Law [01:56:21].
• Holographic, not photographic: The approach is not centralized and based on content, but distributed and focused on context [02:00:16]. Individuals are empowered to become sovereign and choose to engage in practices that create meaningful relationships [02:01:13].
• Strong relational lines: The culture is built on the strongest possible relationship lines (e.g., spouse, children, close friends), which carry the highest potential for meaningfulness [01:59:13].
• Peer production and distributed learning: Individuals who discover something deeply meaningful will naturally share it with others who are willing to learn and connect [02:01:53]. This leverages modern technology to create a distributed learning environment that is censorship-impregnable and capture-impeccable [02:01:57].

The current “metacrisis” or societal breakdown creates a perverse opportunity, as the “secular world” has catastrophically failed in providing meaningful aspects of human life, pushing people to seek alternatives [02:03:06]. This provides the necessary energy for the “religion that’s not a religion” to be adopted and scale through a “combinatorial feedback loop” [02:04:08].