From: jimruttshow8596
The concept of The Religion That Is Not a Religion is a project proposed by John Vervaeke, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto, and discussed with Jordan Hall, a tech executive and entrepreneur, and Jim Rutt [00:00:39]. This initiative aims to address a fundamental need for humanity in the contemporary world [00:03:01].
Origin and Purpose
The need for The Religion That Is Not a Religion stems from the necessity to provide a “home and a community for ecologies of practices” [00:03:10]. This new form of religion must be compatible with our scientific and technological worldview, which is described as “non-avoidable” [00:03:19]. Its purpose is to equip individuals with practices to combat self-deception, enhance connectedness, and foster a sense of meaning in life [00:03:36]. Traditional religions have historically fulfilled this function, but many are no longer viable for a host of reasons [00:04:06]. Therefore, The Religion That Is Not a Religion seeks to extract the functional benefits of traditional religions without adopting their specific worldviews or historical problems [00:04:48]. It is explicitly non-supernatural [00:22:50].
The Meaning Crisis
John Vervaeke conceptualizes the meaning crisis as having two components: perennial and pertinently present [00:09:11].
Perennial Aspects
Human cognition, being complex, dynamical, self-organizing, recursive, embodied, and enacted, makes people perennially susceptible to self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior [00:09:18]. One-shot interventions are ineffective, requiring complex ecologies of practices to ameliorate self-deception and enhance fundamental adaptive connectedness, which people experience as meaning in life [00:09:44]. The coordination of these two processes constitutes wisdom [00:10:04].
Present Crisis
The current meaning crisis is characterized by a “wisdom famine” [00:10:56]. While information and knowledge are abundant, people struggle to find avenues for cultivating wisdom [00:10:11]. Many individuals, especially the growing demographic of “nones” (spiritual but not religious), seek wisdom but attempt to do so auto-didactically, which carries inherent risks [00:10:44]. The traditional “homes” for these ecologies of practices, legacy religions, are no longer viable for many [00:11:19].
The meaning crisis is exacerbated by pseudo-religious ideologies, such as fundamentalisms (looking backwards) or utopian proposals (looking forwards), which can lead to totalitarianism and violence [00:12:00]. The aim of The Religion That Is Not a Religion is to address perennial problems like self-destructive behavior, alienation, and pervasive anxiety within our current worldview, while also navigating the accelerating complexification of our technological milieu [00:12:47].
A key distinction is drawn between:
- Meaning of life: A metaphysical proposal about a pre-authored plan or destiny for existence [00:13:37].
- Meaning in life: The enacted senses of connection to oneself, others, and reality that make life worth living despite inherent futility, failure, and loss [00:14:05].
According to Jordan Hall, pseudo-religion and “meaning of life” concepts often make a “category error” by prioritizing propositional knowledge and narrative above the “participatory mode” or “embeddedness in the complex flow of life itself” [00:15:27]. This error is evident in “technocracy,” which attempts to manage complexity and participatory aspects through complicated, propositional frameworks, often exacerbating problems [00:16:49].
Critique of Axial Age Religions
The axial age religions emerged following the Bronze Age collapse (around 1200 BCE) [00:19:05]. This period saw social and cognitive experimentation, leading to new “psycho-technologies” like alphabetic literacy and numeracy [00:19:30]. People developed new reflective capacities and began to take responsibility for suffering caused by human framing of the world [00:19:51].
Examples of axial age religions include Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, the birth of prophets in ancient Israel (leading to Christianity and Islam), and philosophical revolutions in Greece (Socrates, Plato) [00:20:21]. What unites them is a “Two Worlds mythology” [00:20:54]:
- Everyday world: Seen as illusory, decadent, misshapen, full of violence and suffering.
- Real world: Attainable through wisdom practices, offering liberation, realization, and reduction of suffering [00:21:03].
This “Two Worlds mythology,” while an emergent antidote to earlier power-based systems, is no longer viable for many today, as modern scientific evidence and philosophical argumentation contradict it [00:22:16]. This division has permeated human cognition, leading to divisions between mind and matter, self and world, and natural and supernatural, contributing to the meaning crisis [00:23:18]. If the purpose of this world was to reach a “higher” world that is now seen as absurd, then this world becomes empty of meaning [00:23:57].
The axial revolution also gave rise to the project of social engineering, a “Promethean spirit unbound” [00:30:29]. When secularized and uncoupled from service to something greater than itself, social engineering can become the bearer of sacredness, leading to dangerous “ends justify the means” ideologies [00:31:18].
Re-evaluating Sacredness and Mystery
The Religion That Is Not a Religion is explicitly non-supernatural [00:33:57]. The idea that religion requires an appeal to the supernatural is challenged [00:34:36]. Instead, the “sacred” is distinguished from the “supernatural” [00:34:56].
Sacredness
Sacredness is defined as a phenomenological experience and process [00:41:56]. An experience is sacred if it is:
- Liberating and clarifying: Leading to insight out of comprehensive patterns of self-deception and self-destructive behavior, akin to being “born again” or “waking up” [00:43:05].
- Reciprocal opening: A feeling of the world opening up and oneself opening up to it, intensifying a sense of connectedness [00:43:09].
- Optimal connection: A sense of being in “right relationship” (religio) with reality, often resembling a Flow State [00:43:52].
This definition of sacredness is entirely compatible with a scientific worldview and does not require a super-agent or destiny [00:44:32]. Mystical experiences, even those that lead to atheism, can be profoundly sacred and transformative [00:44:50]. Historical mystical traditions, particularly their titans, also argue for a strict monism that rules out a Two Worlds mythology, converging with conceptual and scientific arguments [00:46:07].
Jordan Hall adds that sacredness can be understood as a discovery that some things are “very important and very dangerous” [00:48:30]. Practices are built around taking care of these fundamental aspects of life, from raising babies to avoiding danger [00:49:07]. It evolves to encompass feelings of oneness, wholeness, and being part of something greater [00:50:11].
Mystery
Mystery refers to that which is “very poorly addressed through speaking” and where propositions fail to map [00:38:58]. It acknowledges that complex reality is always larger than our conceptions [00:39:11]. Jordan Hall outlines four “modalities of truth” to disambiguate:
- Science: Relates propositions to measurable states of affairs [00:37:45].
- Religion: Pertains to what is “steadfast” and “anchored in a life that works,” successfully navigating the challenges of being in the world [00:38:27].
- Spirituality: (briefly mentioned as distinct) [00:38:46].
- Mystery: The domain where propositional engagement is an epistemological error [00:39:07].
The traditional “supernatural” endeavors to “clothe the mystery in story” [00:54:40], which is a category error because the “is-ness” of mystery transcends language and thought [00:54:52]. For John Vervaeke, mystery is the inexhaustible fount of intelligibility in reality; no matter how much framing is done, there is always that which goes beyond the frame [00:59:09]. This capacity for new insight and realization points to the richness of reality itself [00:58:11].
Mystical experiences and epiphanies are viewed by Jim Rutt as additional attractor states in the brain, allowing for breakthroughs in thinking and disclosing aspects of reality, rather than requiring an appeal to the supernatural [00:56:30].
Religio as Ecologies of Practice
Religio is understood as a fundamental sense of connectedness, drawing from the Latin “to bind” (ligament) [01:14:20]. It encompasses conscientiousness, right order towards reality, and is the root of “religion” [01:14:04]. John Vervaeke uses “ratio religio” to imply a “properly proportioned” and rational (in the sense of rationality) connectedness [01:17:56]. This relevance realization process, where information grabs attention and fosters care, is fundamental to general intelligence [01:18:41]. When consciously cultivated through practices, it leads to enhanced meaning in life [01:19:16].
Ecologies of Practice
Complex cognitive and conscious dynamics, like self-deception or anxiety spirals, cannot be fixed by single, one-shot interventions [01:21:19]. Instead, “ecologies of practices” are needed [01:22:21]. These are self-organizing, self-correcting, and dynamic systems that intervene in parallel at multiple points, providing checks and balances, similar to a natural ecology [01:22:00]. The goal is to “govern complex systems using complex systems” [01:23:18].
A key design principle for these practices is “opponent processing” [01:24:47]. Examples include:
- Mindfulness: Meditative practices (stepping back to examine mental framing) and contemplative practices (applying corrected lenses to see more broadly) work in opponent fashion to make one “insight-prone” [01:25:25].
- Layering: Combining still and moving mindfulness practices (e.g., Tai Chi Chuan) to engage different cognitive loops (e.g., cerebellar cortex) [01:26:50].
- Active open-mindedness: Practices that dampen insight machinery to allow for more careful inferential reasoning [01:27:48].
Tangible Practices and Rituals
Practices can be categorized into three poles:
- Sapiential training: Cultivating wisdom [01:28:57].
- Dialogical commuting: Accessing collective intelligence of distributed cognition [01:29:10].
- Ritual enactment: Practices that integrate the “imaginal” [01:30:08].
Imaginal vs. Imaginary
- Imaginary: Forming mental pictures that disconnect from the world [01:29:55].
- Imaginal: Imagination used “for the sake of perception” [01:30:11]. For example, in Tai Chi Chuan, imagining sinking into mud or water flowing through the body sensitizes individuals to subtle sensory-motor patterns, leading to procedural insight [01:30:22].
The imaginal can serve the “aspirational,” which is the relationship between one’s current and future self [01:31:41]. For instance, studies show that people save more for retirement if they vividly imagine their future self as a beloved family member they are responsible for [01:32:26].
Rituals
A “ritual” is defined as a cultivated use of the imaginal and aspirational that transfers broadly to many life domains and deeply to many levels of the psyche [01:33:01]. This allows for profound reciprocal opening with reality [01:33:14]. Rituals have a normativity: good rituals facilitate broad and deep transfer, while bad ones do not [01:33:20]. Tai Chi Chuan, for example, can structure flow states that transfer to cognitive flexibility in daily life [01:34:38].
Jordan Hall, in his work on “sybiums” (communities similar to “Proto-Bs” in Game B) [01:35:35], identifies categories of practices for a mini-society:
- Technologies of sovereignty: Practices for an individual’s relationship with themselves and life experience [01:36:59].
- Technologies of “we”: Practices for relationality when multiple individuals interact, recognizing the relationship itself as an ontological primitive (e.g., the relationship between a husband and wife) [01:37:36].
- Reintegration with nature: Practices to re-weave human capacity, especially concerning technology, back into symmetry with nature [01:39:31].
Specific examples of rituals identified as “almost certainly necessary” include:
- Birth rituals: To support the difficult process of raising a child properly [01:41:04].
- Death rituals: To process loss [01:41:32].
- Family binding rituals: To maintain the integrity of family relationships while allowing for individual uniqueness and generativity [01:41:58].
- Breastfeeding: Described as a “good religious practice” and a “high-dimensional, very complex synergistic satisfier” due to its numerous benefits and profound connection [01:42:50].
Scaling and Propagation
The question is not whether The Religion That Is Not a Religion can scale (as it’s a form of culture, and all human cultures scale), but how [01:53:41]. The traditional method of scaling via disseminating propositional content (like catechism) is seen as a “category error” and “weak sauce” that leads to dilution and confusion [01:54:46]. Science, by contrast, is much better at distributing propositional knowledge [01:55:39].
Two key principles for scaling:
- Positive Returns to Scale (Metcalf’s Law / Factorial Growth): Designing the culture to take maximum advantage of exponential growth [01:56:05]. This involves designing for “zero turbulence” as the scaling velocity increases [01:56:31].
- Holographic, not Photographic: The focus is on propagating context rather than content [02:00:19]. The old religions’ errors were being propositional and centralized, which inhibits true scalability [02:00:32].
A distributed approach where individuals become sovereign and empowered to share their “learnings,” “wisdom,” and “experiences” is crucial [02:01:43]. This creates a “distributed learning environment” that is peer-produced, censorship-impregnable, and capture-impeccable, leveraging modern technology [02:01:53].
The propagation is driven by intrinsic human motivation: people will naturally share deeply meaningful discoveries, especially when they upgrade the quality of their closest relationships [02:02:23]. The current “meta-crisis,” with societal institutions collapsing and the secular world proving “absurdly terrible” in providing meaning, creates a “wind at our backs” for this new approach to be adopted [02:02:50]. Once it reaches a “certain degree of criticality,” the holographic, combinatorial feedback loop will accelerate its uptake [02:04:05].
Ultimately, The Religion That Is Not a Religion is about presenting “beautiful ways of life” that draw people in, fostering a love of wisdom through lived experience rather than solely academic philosophy [02:05:46].