With incredible pleasure and gratitude, we invite you to our talk with John Vervaeke. John is really interesting to us because not only has he mastered lecturing and talking about these topics with such a passion, but he also lives and is a living representation of the things he talks about! In fact, I believe we lived the things we talked about during the podcast. 

We were talking about John's background, and how did he become interested in these kinds of topics. Thereafter we described what the meaning crisis is and the symptoms of it we can see throughout the world, culture, and ourselves.  

What are the ways to make meaning? What are the lost ways of knowing and how important they are to make sense of the world and optimally grip it. We talked about the ecology of practices both inside and outside of mindfulness and how they lead to insight, wisdom and ultimately meaning as well.   

We described the participatory nature of everything including ourselves and how that's important in cultivating meaning and wisdom. What role does love play in those processes and if you can fall back in love with reality again?  John described what the awakening experience might look like and how meditation and contemplation lead to it.  Last but not least the concepts we've mentioned were modal confusion, what is it, and how to overcome it.  We hope that you are going to enjoy this talk with John as much as we did!

Timestamps:

15:50 Meaning. How your experience unfolds, fits together, and makes sense.  

19:35 Self-deception and modern environment. Wisdom and meaning in life.  

21:00 CUltures and cultivation of wisdom and meaning. Distributed cognition. Meaning crisis.  

26:40 Symptoms of meaning crisis.  

30:13 Core ecology of practices. Mindfulness. Active open-mindedness. Sensory-motor practices. Discourse practice.  

33:20 Awakening from the meaning crisis. Four types of knowledge and the difference between them.  

44:45 Inverted life with conflated meanings of different types of knowledge. Monological mind culture.  

49:56 Insight and its role in wisdom cultivation.  

57:42 Socrates. Socratic faith. Wanting final forever knowledge vs knowing yourself and constant adaptation. Philia Sophia. 

1:05:40 Cognitive flexibility. Change of state of consciousness.  

1:09:13 Being present and catching insight and being aware of and being aware through.  

1:25:22 Fromm, Having and Being existential modes. Agent-arena relationship.  

1:30:05 Developmental needs. Becoming modes.  

1:41:05 Falling in love with reality. Finding real patterns in the world.  The practices John does daily and his videos with expanded explanations on them:  

1:50:10 Dream journaling https://youtu be/rWwmJ912NJU 

1:50:42 Walking and practicing savoring https://youtu be/IeziyBT_Utg , invoking logos https://youtu be/xkfEb1FnRRM 

1:52:30 Tai Chi  https://youtu be/OWiANJeO_yc and Chi Kung https://youtu be/BMqbW0M6VUw 

1:52:39 Vipassana meditation https://youtu be/oszQ5QL11W8, Metta contemplation https://youtu be/IXWB60QaAVA and Prajna https://youtu be/O8rZNE0hVyA  

1:52:46 Lectio Divina https://youtu be/j_dUgJCja48 

Books list: The Enlightned Heart. The Enlightened Mind. Wisdom of Hypatia. The Daily Stoic: 366 meditations on wisdom. Stoic Spiritual Exercises. The 25 Cognitive Biases. Damascius: Problems and solutions concerning the first principles.  

1:53:13 Stoic journaling  

1:54:50 State of wonder. Curiosity - Having Mode. Wonder - Being Mode. Falling in love with being.  

1:58:00 Zen, mountains, rivers, and whoosh.