From: jimruttshow8596
The development of “a religion that is not a religion” is proposed as a crucial project to address humanity’s challenges, particularly the meaning crisis [00:03:01]. This new approach seeks to provide a home and community for Ecologies of practices in a way that integrates with a scientific and technological worldview [00:03:19]. The objective is to help individuals deal with self-deception, enhance their connectedness, and find meaning in life [00:03:36].
Addressing the Meaning Crisis through Practices
The meaning crisis is understood as having two components: a perennial susceptibility to self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior, and a current wisdom famine [00:09:16]. Cognition is complex, dynamic, and embodied, meaning one-shot interventions are insufficient to ameliorate self-deception [00:09:27]. Instead, complex Ecologies of practices are needed to enhance “meaning in life”—the enacted senses of connection to oneself, others, and reality that make life worth living despite its inherent frustrations and losses [00:10:04] [00:14:05]. This contrasts with “meaning of life,” which implies a pre-authored metaphysical plan or destiny [01:13:37].
Legacy religions, particularly those born in the Axial Age, are no longer viable for many due to their “Two Worlds mythology,” which is seen as irreconcilable with modern scientific evidence and philosophical argumentation [00:04:06] [00:04:28]. The goal is to exact the functionality of past religions (providing a framework for practices, community, and transformation) without adopting their outdated worldviews [00:04:48].
Ecologies of Practice
The concept of Ecologies of practices is vital because human cognition involves complex, dynamic, and opponent-processing systems (e.g., task-focused vs. default mode networks, sympathetic vs. parasympathetic nervous systems) [01:21:05]. One-shot interventions fail because these systems can reconfigure themselves [01:21:19]. Therefore, interventions must be multi-faceted, self-organizing, and self-correcting, much like a natural ecology with its checks and balances [01:22:00].
Jordan Hall emphasizes the need to “govern complex systems using complex systems” rather than relying on complicated (propositional) approaches [01:23:00]. This shift moves from a “hard-wired” hierarchical relationship to a “fluid relationship” with cross-flows and shifts [01:23:32].
Components of a New Operating System
The Role of Sacredness
The role of symbols and sacredness in cultural meaning is reinterpreted as a phenomenological experience that does not require a supernatural invocation [00:41:53]. Sacredness is described as an experience that is:
- Liberating and clarifying: Providing insight into patterns of self-deceptive behavior [00:42:50].
- Reciprocal opening: Feeling the world open up while also opening up to it [00:43:09].
- Intensification of connectedness: Experiencing a deep, optimal, and properly proportioned connection with reality [00:43:28]. This is akin to the “Flow State” [00:44:01].
Jordan Hall views the sacred as a discovery of things that are “very important” or “very dangerous,” around which “potent practices” are built to ensure care [00:48:30] [00:48:57]. Examples include the feeling experienced by a grandparent seeing a newborn grandchild or an individual’s smallness during a tremendous thunderstorm [00:49:37]. This expands to experiences of oneness, wholeness, or being part of something greater, like a mystical experience, which involves expansion, connection, and a sense of being part of something larger [00:50:11].
The “mystery” aspect of reality refers to that which is inexhaustibly available for new insight and realization, always going beyond any given frame [00:59:09]. It’s not a fixed entity, but rather a dynamic, ungraspable basis of all knowledge and experience [01:00:11].
The Concept of Religio
The term “religio” derives from Latin, meaning “to bind” (like ligament) and “conscientiousness, sense of right, obligation or duty towards anything” [01:14:01] [01:14:20]. John Vervaeke uses “religio” to convey an integration of three aspects [01:14:31]:
- Binding and connectedness: The fundamental sense of being connected [01:18:39].
- Etymological root of religion: Association with sacredness [01:17:38].
- Secular domain of conscientiousness: Being rightly ordered towards reality [01:17:48]. This is sometimes called “ratio religio,” implying proper proportion and rationality [01:17:58].
Religio represents a secular intelligence or “relevance realization process” where things “grab your attention” and evoke caring [01:18:11]. This fundamental connectedness is what meaning in life is [01:18:59]. When people become aware of this, they can deliberately cultivate practices to enhance this meaning, leading to what is broadly understood as religion [01:19:16].
Types of Practices
Specific types of practices include:
- Mindfulness practices: These involve “opponent processing” like meditation (stepping back and examining mental frames) and contemplation (exploring new frames) [01:25:25]. This dynamic process makes one “insight-prone” [01:26:29].
- Moving mindfulness practices: Such as Tai Chi Chuan, which cultivate flow states that can transfer broadly and deeply into one’s psyche and daily life, fostering balance and adaptability [01:26:58] [01:34:38].
- Active open-mindedness practices: These dampen the “insight machinery” to allow for more careful inferential reasoning, providing another layer of opponent processing [01:27:48].
- Dialogical commuting: Practices designed to access the collective sensemaking and decision making of distributed cognition [01:29:10].
- Ritual enactment: This involves the “imaginal,” which is imagination used “for the sake of perception” to sensitize individuals to subtle patterns and afford procedural insight [01:30:11]. Unlike the “imaginary,” which disconnects from the world, the imaginal integrates and connects [01:29:51]. When the imaginal is used in service of the “aspirational” (the relationship between one’s current and future self), and this cultivation transfers broadly and deeply to afford profound reciprocal opening with reality, it constitutes a proper ritual [01:32:44] [01:33:16].
Community Structures and Scaling
Jordan Hall’s work on “sybiums” (similar to Game B’s “Proto-B’s”) focuses on building on-the-ground communities [01:35:35]. These structures involve:
- Technologies of sovereignty: Practices for individuals to live well in relationship with themselves [01:36:59].
- “We” integration: Practices for relationships (e.g., marriage) that recognize the relationship itself as a unique being requiring its own set of practices to maintain wholeness and richness while preserving individual uniqueness [01:37:50].
- Reintegration with nature and technology: Addressing how human capacity and technology can be re-weaved into symmetry with nature, moving from “man who knows” to “man who is wise” [01:39:36].
Certain life events necessitate ritualization, such as birth and death, which the secular world often fails to address meaningfully [01:41:00]. These “singular events” are potent and dangerous, requiring careful practices [01:41:25]. Breastfeeding is cited as an example of a “synergistic satisfier” practice with numerous benefits, which has been broken by modern “technocracy” and now needs to be consciously re-learned [01:43:42].
Scaling the “Religion That’s Not a Religion”
Scaling this new system requires careful consideration [01:46:31]. It’s not about scaling propositional content (like the old Axial Age religions tried with limited success) [01:54:50]. Instead, it’s about fostering a culture consciously designed for positive returns to scale, ideally exponential growth, akin to Metcalfe’s Law [01:56:05].
Key design principles for scaling include:
- Context over content: Emphasizing the environment and framework for meaning-making rather than fixed doctrines [01:59:01].
- Distributed over centralized: Moving away from centralized control, which tends to produce negative outcomes [02:00:22].
- Holographic propagation: Rather than a “photographic” replication of information, the system should propagate like a hologram, where each part contains the essence of the whole [01:53:17] [02:00:16]. This means individuals, empowered to become “sovereign in themselves,” will naturally seek to enhance and share the most meaningful relationships [02:01:16]. This creates a “distributed learning environment” that is peer-produced and shared [02:01:53].
- Leveraging intrinsic motivation: When people discover something deeply meaningful, they are intrinsically motivated to share it with others who can benefit [02:02:28]. The enhancement of strong, meaningful relationships (e.g., with spouse, children) creates a positive feedback loop, as improving these most sacred connections incentivizes their propagation [01:58:14] [02:04:39].
The current “meta-crisis”—the breakdown of old institutions and the perceived absurdity of the secular world—provides a perverse “wind at our backs” for this new approach [02:03:06]. As people increasingly seek ways to satisfy basic needs and live meaningful lives, a system that effectively presents characteristics like these will gain traction and scale rapidly [02:03:49].
Ultimately, the goal is not to teach philosophy through propositional knowledge, but to present “beautiful ways of life” that draw people in and encourage them to adopt these practices [02:05:41].