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Ep. 36 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Religio/Perennial Problems/Reverse Eng. Enlightenment

John Vervaeke continues his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series, exploring symbols as participatory mythos, sacredness as inexhaustible reality, and reverse-engineering enlightenment.

Key Takeaways

  • Symbols are participatory acts that reactivate deep cognitive processes to bring us into contact with reality.
  • Sacredness is best understood as the inexhaustible, non-essential dynamism of reality and of relevance realization rather than a fixed absolute.
  • Religion and mythos are intrinsically valuable because they engage the machinery that underlies all valuing and meaning-making.
  • Perennial problems of self-deception are built into the machinery of relevance realization, making meaning crises recurrent.

What the video covers

  • Vervaeke frames symbols as participatory acts that reactivate exapted cognitive machinery, allowing deeper contact with reality.
  • Symbols are described as ecstatic, integrative, and complexifying, drawing the self into a larger world through trance-like wonder.
  • Mythos is presented as always a combination of symbol and story, which points toward ritual because myth is enacted to produce transformation.
  • Religio is argued to be intrinsically valuable and constitutive of our ability to value anything else, grounded in relevance realization.
  • Flow states are explained as optimal because they involve seriously playing with intrinsically significant cognitive machinery.
  • Vervaeke moves from sacredness as experience to the sacred as its source, critiquing the idea that sacredness is essentially and absolutely relevant.
  • He reframes the sacred as the inexhaustible aspects of reality, connected to the never-finished, evolving process of relevance realization, comparing it to a shark that must keep swimming.
  • He draws on the Bodhidharma anecdote to illustrate that Shunyata (emptiness) is sacred without being holy in a supernatural sense.
  • Vervaeke discusses perennial problems, such as self-deception and vulnerabilities that can drive people toward meaninglessness and despair.
  • He announces an aim to reverse-engineer enlightenment as a scientific project, touching on craving, optimization trade-offs, and absurdity (citing Thomas Nagel).

Chapters

  1. 00:00Recap: Sacredness and the Experience of Symbols
  2. 03:37Symbols, Mythos, and Ritual
  3. 06:54Religio, Flow, and Relevance Realization
  4. 22:54The Inexhaustible Source of Sacredness
  5. 34:12Meaning Crisis and Perennial Problems
  6. 40:30Reverse-Engineering Enlightenment
  7. 46:54Absurdity and Nagel's Argument

Answers

Questions about this video

What does Vervaeke mean by symbols being participatory?

He argues that using a symbol activates the reactivated, exapted cognitive machinery behind it, so that we participate in and re-experience the understanding it carries. This makes symbol use a transformative act rather than passive signification.

How does Vervaeke distinguish sacredness from the sacred?

He treats sacredness as the experience and the sacred as its source. He rejects the idea that the sacred is absolutely and essentially relevant, proposing instead that it is the inexhaustible, ever-evolving aspects of reality.

Why does Vervaeke use the Bodhidharma story?

The anecdote illustrates that Shunyata (emptiness) can be sacred without being holy in a supernatural sense. It supports his view that sacredness need not rest on an absolute, transcendent foundation.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00
Speaker A
[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis so last time we were continuing our examination of sacredness the experience of sacredness the the Schirrmacher side of things and I was trying to develop an account of what
00:35
Speaker A
symbols are at least symbols insofar as they are distinct from signs in a way of trying to understand the roles that the role that symbols have in our understanding of sacredness so I was presenting to you the view that symbols
01:00
Speaker A
are a participatory machine I that's not the right word the symbols are that the word I want is there they're a participatory act that's the word I want they're participatory act and that that participation is has a connection to the
01:23
Speaker A
activation of a profound kind of metaphor by activating that metaphor we are reaching backwards through our exaptation and reactivating that material so that we can re exact our cognitive processes and re-experience re appreciate resi we understand some aspect of reality and that reacts apt
01:50
Speaker A
ation makes the use of a symbol a deeply participatory transformative thing that we do and that with a symbol we're activating all that reactive machinery in order to hold something in mind so that we can see more deeply into it be
02:12
Speaker A
more in contact with it and then I argued the point of that is ultimately to set up an ANA gaagh Express by which I am transformed so I can see through the symbol into reality and so that reality can speak through
02:30
Speaker A
the symbol to me and that we get an Anna Gaga flow happening and I'm becoming deeply integrated the world is becoming disclosed and that mutual reciprocal realization feels deeply sort of like love coupling to reality in a profound
02:49
Speaker A
way and so that symbols are in that sense designed to get me into a trajectory of trance framing they're designed to in wonder open up the world and also grow me so that I can be in that larger world and that points to how
03:10
Speaker A
symbols are ecstatic they're participatory they're integrative they're complex because they help to complexify me and disclose the complexity of the world in a coordinated fashion and then I suggested to you that we understand symbols as mythos that it's always a symbol and a story
03:36
Speaker A
together and that the story points to the ritual and the ritual is also right there because the mythos is always enacted if it's going to bring about the transformations that it wants to bring about or that we want to use it to bring
03:54
Speaker A
about I think both of those are right we can use mythos to activate accelerate articulate and appreciate religio religio is inherently valuable to us so even that alone is going to be very valuable to us but in addition the act of seriously
04:22
Speaker A
playing not only is it development of what we are what we find intrinsically valuable because it's constitutive of our ability to value anything else or interact with anything we consider valuable because it's primordial not only is that the case but relevance
04:40
Speaker A
realization which is at the heart of religion of giving your argument for that is constituted to it it functions it is structured to function it functions by being interested in itself correcting itself transcending itself developing itself so that's why we we
05:06
Speaker A
love the flow state right it mark not only not only is it a optimal in the right this playing with religion like the flow state is not only optimal in that it's getting us to be our best we
05:19
Speaker A
also find it to be an optimal experience because we're seriously playing with this intrinsically valuable machinery in a way that is constitutively intrinsically significant to us and I propose that when we are using the symbol to get us to play with the
05:49
Speaker A
machinery the meta assimilation the meta accommodation or sacredness or the least the meta assimilation the meta accommodation of the higher order relevance realization within sacredness and that's what we deeply mean by the experience of sacredness and then I
06:15
Speaker A
propose to you a proposal I need to return to now because I only initiated it last time I propose to you that we move off of sacredness and on to the sacred in a particular proposal as to what is the cause or the source of
06:33
Speaker A
sacredness the sacred and again I'm using that term because it's as neutral as I can find and the proposal which again you don't find in some accounts of sacredness the sacred that is the DAO I do not think is supernatural or absolute
06:55
Speaker A
the sacredness of Shunyata is definitely not right so when Prince Wu asked Bodhidharma what was you know what was wholly about his doctrine and he keeps pressing bodhidharma he keeps saying no no not that and then the Prince gets upset says
07:12
Speaker A
well what is holy about your doctrine Bodhidharma says nothing holy vast emptiness Shunyata is in that sense sacred but it's not holy at least not in the sense of you know a supernatural source of righteousness so I proposed an alternative to that idea
07:44
Speaker A
born from a critique the critique was there's something wrong about trying to essential i's sacredness in the sacred right to say that that what that the source of sacredness is something that is essentially relevant to us absolutely unquestionably undeniably relevant to us
08:08
Speaker A
and that it is the the culmination in and the the or it is the origin and the culmination of relevance and then I propose to you that that just struck me ultimately and I do mean this with as
08:22
Speaker A
much respect I mean this is I hopefully regarded as a respectful criticism but nevertheless it's a Christmas I regard that as a category mistake relevance realization right is not about detecting finding something that's inherently relevant in the sense that it absolutely
08:50
Speaker A
commands our attention relevance does not have an essence it doesn't work that way relevance realization is in trinsic ly an evolving process it functions by evolving and it evolves in its functioning does that mean we should just dispense know because I proposed to
09:19
Speaker A
you a couple well I propose one thing and then I want to add another thing to it I propose to you that there's a different way of thinking about sacredness that comports well with this idea of right the sacredness of
09:30
Speaker A
sacredness there's an idea a way of thinking about the source of sacredness that comports well with the picture of sacredness that I've tried to argue for which is namely the idea of sacredness as the inexhaustible the inexhaustible aspects of this
09:54
Speaker A
reality it's kind of a turning conte on his head this reality is always a source of wonder for me not because there is an object that is specifically or absolutely has the claim on me of being the source of wonder every object
10:21
Speaker A
everything is calm editorially explosive vast emptiness ultimately there is a no thinness to reality because everything is combinatorially explosive in terms of what it is but my processing precisely because of the way it operates has an inexhaustible nough stew it - and no thingness to it
10:58
Speaker A
the I that is never reducible there is always the framing that is never capturable in the frame because the process of relevance realization is ongoing its inexhaustible because it can't stop it's like a shark that if it stops swimming it drowns and there's a
11:26
Speaker A
deep transactive 'ti there's a deep participatory identification between the inexhaustible no thickness in me and the inexhaustible no thickness of reality vast emptiness that now they can be spoken is not the DAO and so I can return again and again and
11:51
Speaker A
again to the world and again and again and again there is the real potential in the world of sacredness now why might people now this is a conjecture on my part I'm trying to offer an explanation and it is not intended to be a
12:13
Speaker A
justification because that would be inconsistent with what I'm saying but why is it that we might get this way where we we we get this this is where it is to be found and this is where I think
12:29
Speaker A
we do need to be more charitable oh man and I don't want to sound condescending there is a real sense in which particular symbols particular mythos is indispensable for people it might be and in fact it's highly plausible if you
12:55
Speaker A
think about it given my own personal history the way relevance realization has unfolded the way religio is for here now me that certain symbols are indispensable for me to activate articulate appreciate accelerate my religion those symbols may be
13:26
Speaker A
indispensable for me because of the way my relevance realization machinery is evolving they may be indispensable to my religion because of the Kairos that is always part of my on my on going see the problem with religiosa sit sit down
13:49
Speaker A
right but my ongoing religio if even saying my is wrong right because that makes it sound like something I possess the religio that my world and I part dissipate in and Co emerge from it maybe to a certain set of individuals that
14:09
Speaker A
these sets of symbols are indispensable that makes sense to me and that that is how relevance realization works you may say that only through this mythos do I get the access I need to activate accentuate appreciate accelerate articulate my religion I
14:39
Speaker A
think that is a completely plausible hypothesis I think therefore it is it it makes sense to say for example that given the way this person's evolved fitted miss as unfolded and the particular timing the historical context that only this mythos gives them the
15:05
Speaker A
access they need and in that sense it may be it's a Christian mythos maybe it's a Hindu mythos that mythos is indispensable to them but here is what we shouldn't do we shouldn't confuse indispensible to an individual to a community to a group to
15:30
Speaker A
a tradition we shouldn't confuse psycho cultural cognitive cultural indispensability with metaphysical necessity metaphysical necessity English is indispensable to me I cannot communicate you to you without it given this time this place my own history where we are the timing of
15:57
Speaker A
things English is indispensable to me that doesn't mean that English is metaphysically necessary it didn't exist and it will not exist at some point and it is not some final complete or absolute version it is not the perfect
16:15
Speaker A
language it is not the final language in fact it performs precisely because it's continually evolving as a language so that it stays at least to some degree in touch with the world I don't think we should confuse these
16:45
Speaker A
they are not the same I do not think we should understand the sacred we shouldn't do this of course these are linked the inexhaustible source of respectable participatory procedural and ultimately propositional intelligibility we may have I think it's reasonable that
17:54
Speaker A
in fact I think it's highly plausible that a certain mythos is indispensable for an individual a group a community a tradition but that should not be confused with meta physical necessity nor should it license the idea that that
18:13
Speaker A
adheres in some supernatural entity or thing the shark being the way the shark is is indispensable to the Sharks capacity to survival but that doesn't mean that that is the final finished absolute form of fitted nurse the world and the capacity
18:51
Speaker A
for biological adaptation the process of evolution means that there's an inexhaustible Ness to life's capacity forfeited miss that to me is a reasonable alternative to understanding sacredness than to think of it as in hearing in some final absolute so if we
19:26
Speaker A
could give up the confusion of indispensability with metaphysical necessity if we could give up identifying the sacred that which generates sacredness as the supernatural then we would not have to be committed to a two worlds mythology for accessing
19:57
Speaker A
sacredness the deep connectedness of religio now that and of itself is not well that's not the response like to the demeaning class that's insufficient that is and I mean the sir this is the first step the first step is to try to
20:22
Speaker A
understand the machinery of connectedness and understand it in a way that allows us to disconnect it from a metaphysical essentialism disconnect it from the supernatural and its commitment to a two worlds mythology instead understand it in a fashion that is
20:49
Speaker A
completely integrated with science because if you remember this is all grounded in a naturalistic interpretation of relevance realization this would be an account that we situates us back within that scientific worldview well also giving us a way a
21:16
Speaker A
deep way of talking about experiencing sacredness deep connectedness deep self transcendence deep transformation etc now I need to do a lot more work and that's why this series is not yet finished I need to show how this model
21:37
Speaker A
of relevance realization does address the historical issues I vote but already suggesting that to you but how does it help to address where we got to historically the historical factors but there's another thing that I've been alluding to that we also have to address
21:57
Speaker A
and they are integrated together and now that I have this theoretical machinery I can talk about it better because we now have I think a more careful way of understanding the meaning crisis this marker is good so we have and we did this in the first
22:28
Speaker A
off the series we have the historical factors that basically have unhold us thwarted worldview tune meant all the stuff we've been talking about and of course they need to be addressed and part of how we can awaken from the
22:52
Speaker A
meaning crisis is we have to respond to these historical factors we have to wet and we have to come up with a way of RER tickle aiding our worldview in which we can get back that sense of deep
23:06
Speaker A
connectedness what I've been calling in the last couple of lectures sacredness that kind of deep connectedness that affords the satisfaction of our sense of being in contact with the world affords self transcendence affords meaning in life in a profound way so can this view
23:35
Speaker A
give us something analogous to what the three orders we got to get to that that's how we respond to the historical factors but you're starting to see how it might do that we're starting to see how we can get an account of sacredness
23:47
Speaker A
that can fit into the scientific worldview and fit us back into it we need to do more on that but you're getting a beginning of that but there's something else now that's come that's coming to the fore that we need to
23:58
Speaker A
address which is right the structural functional analysis of meaning making what I've been calling the scientific analysis because I think that's fair in contrast to the historical analysis there's also disclosing something out and that we've seen this all the way
24:17
Speaker A
along and I've been hinting at it because the machinery of meaning making of course also is the machinery that is going awry when people are experiencing a sense of meaninglessness remember the core argument that the very machining that makes you adaptive is the
24:50
Speaker A
machinery that makes you vulnerable to self deceptive self destructive processing the very machinery of our our relevance realization that is making all of this deep connectedness possible for us it's also the machinery that can go horribly wrong we've already seen that I
25:20
Speaker A
want to start talking about the perennial problems you've seen examples along the way but I want to bring them out more I want to develop that thesis about how the very machinery that makes us adaptive is the machinery that makes
25:38
Speaker A
us prone to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior here's what I want to argue I want to argue that all cultures all all people in the sense of being participants in their culture not necessarily every single individual but all cultures across time place history right people
26:12
Speaker A
are prone to perennial problems these are ways in which the machinery of relevance realization can drive them into meaninglessness despair so the idea is that inherent in the machinery that makes us adoptive is inescapable vulnerabilities to self deceptive self
26:46
Speaker A
destructive patterns that can deeply undermine our religio the agent arena relationship such that we experience meaninglessness absurdity alienation etc we fall into despair these are perennial because they are inherent in our machinery now cultures and individuals communities and multiple scales what
27:28
Speaker A
people have developed is they have developed sets of psycho technologies the colleges of practices that help alleviate the suffering of these perennial problems so for example in India you have the rise of Buddhism right as a set of psycho technologies
27:48
Speaker A
for dealing with dukkha etc dealing with modal confusion this is broadly we have practices for cultivating wisdom right and pursuing enlightenment or salvation the meeting crisis emerges I would argue when historical factors have undermined and that's what I tried to show you in
28:25
Speaker A
the hit into history have undermined a worldview a tradition D legitimatize a language a cognitive grammar made obsolete or made dismissive practices sets of psycho technologies so that this undermines this the historical factors lead to the undermining of the whole
28:51
Speaker A
ecology of practices and psycho technologies and cognitive cultural grammar that people have created in order to respond to the perennial problems so we need to do two things and now that's where we're gonna start drawing the historical and the and scientific
29:21
Speaker A
together is this account that I'm trying to argue for for relevance realization as our meaning-making machinery and for understanding sacredness in terms of religio a higher order form of relevance realization can I also use that machinery to give and I've tried to
29:51
Speaker A
suggest how this is possible to give a response to the historical factors I'm gonna try and do that in terms of what's called right third generation or four II cognitive science and I'm already doing that and I'm also I'm already been exemplifying
30:12
Speaker A
it to you throughout this course but right now I want to do something else I want to take all this machinery of relevance realization and religio and sacredness and I want to use it to talk about how we can address the perennial
30:36
Speaker A
problems I want to do something that's at the core of a scientific ocular scientific project this sounds pretentious and maybe hubristic and I hope it's not I want to read and I want to reverse-engineer enlightenment I want to
30:55
Speaker A
understand what the perennial problems are and using this machinery what are the practices what are the processes we can use in order to address the perennial problems that that's what I'm going to take enlighten meant to mean the enlightenment is the set of
31:15
Speaker A
practices that ameliorate the perennial problems and alleviate us from the distress and the suffering that they inflict upon us I already suggested that possibility of that when we talked about higher states of consciousness and trying to give a cognitive scientific
31:39
Speaker A
account but now I want to take that deeper because to awaken from the meaning crisis is not just to have a theory it is not even to have a good scientific historical theory it is to have an understanding that helps afford
31:56
Speaker A
and facilitate the process of transformation that we need to undergo in order to awaken from the meaning crisis I have failed if what I'm doing will not ultimately lead to ways in which you in your life can respond to
32:20
Speaker A
how the perennial problems might be gnawing away at the fabric of meaning in your life so I want to concentrate on that I want to concentrate on trying to reverse-engineer enlightenment and then if I can take that and situate it into
32:48
Speaker A
this account of sacredness and relevance realization and show how that fits into our scientific worldview and you can see how this is start pretending together then we have a way of awakening from the meeting crisis not as an absolute final
33:10
Speaker A
answer that's ridiculous but it's a way of maybe getting the process of awakening from the meaning crisis started all right let's think of relevance realization and religio we can think about there's a functional aspect a structural aspect of
33:38
Speaker A
course and a developmental all of this has been seen throughout this series of course the functional aspect is ultimately the relevance realization there's sort of three central features the way it's which its self-organizing right and then there's aspects of self
34:04
Speaker A
identification and self reflection the structural has to do with the whole meta meaning of the agent arena relationship the developmental right I'll come back to because I need to unpack these more before I can talk more about that but
34:42
Speaker A
we've already seen how an intrinsically developmental relevance realization and religio are okay the self-organizing aspect how can that go awry well I've already made I think a very good case for that for you that's parasitic processing when we get
35:09
Speaker A
into those complex cycles that take on a life of their own and take life from us complex patterns of self deception and self destruction self identification when we know what that is that's modal confusion what about self reflection well I
35:47
Speaker A
haven't talked about that very much so I need to talk about that now this goes to some important work done by bellman and others so we have to go back again to the work of Harry Frankfurt and Frankfurt's notion of a wanton a wanton
36:07
Speaker A
is a being who acts in a wanton fashion that acts completely impulsively and so the idea is if I just knocked completely impulsively I'll actually lose my agency because my impulses are often in conflict with each other they undermine
36:21
Speaker A
each other we'll think about Plato and the inner conflict right so what I need to do is I need to step back and reflect in order to try and get the coordination and integration and reflection actually helps reduce my wantonness see when I'm
36:42
Speaker A
in meshed in a perspective here's a particular perspective right I am a meshed in its salience landscape how it's making me care how it's motivating and arousing me so when I'm thirsty right when I'm thirsty I'm seeing the
36:58
Speaker A
world thirstily right so things having to do with water and kindig um salient I'm drawn in right that's to see the world thirstily but I can do a transparency opacity shift I can actually step to a different perspective
37:19
Speaker A
in which I'm aware of my thirst now I'm not this perspective is not thirsty this is thirsty but this perspective for example is curious oh that's what thirst is like now my motivational machinery is not driven just by thirst it is driven by a carrier
37:39
Speaker A
perhaps curiosity and what happens is I start to gain some relief from the compulsion of immediacy and urgency of my thirst I'm using thirst by the way cuz that's also a metaphor in Buddhism for craving right so at the right if you're at the
38:05
Speaker A
bottom and you don't you if you don't do any self-transcendence your are you're a wash and impulsiveness and self-destructive wantonness and as I start to move up away as a self trance and I start to regain agency but as you
38:34
Speaker A
may expect you can't simply maximize this and this is Velma's point it's an excellent point as I open up this is the reflectiveness gap I get in a gap by reflection as I open up this reflectiveness guy gap I'm gaining
38:55
Speaker A
agency but if I keep opening it up do I keep enhancing agency no because then you get into the problem that is typify beautifully by the way in one of our great tragedies namely Hamlet Hamlet is always reflecting and he's always
39:18
Speaker A
reflecting on his reflection and so he's always stepping back and looking at are we stepping back and looking at and so he becomes incapable of acting his tremendous because he is gifted right his tremendous powers of reflection and
39:37
Speaker A
self transcendence are actually making him incapable of acting she get as dumb and says he becomes disconnected from the motivational machinery of interacting with the world he loses agency see as I open up here's agency here's the reflectiveness gap as
40:13
Speaker A
I open it up I gain agency but as I push it too far I lose it now of course you're tempted that you know the Canadian response oh I'll just stay in the middle and remember that never works right because
40:28
Speaker A
how much I need to be towards this end and how much I need to work be towards that end is going to be very contextually sensitive the problem is the problem with this is how do i optimize this how do I get the
40:55
Speaker A
involvement the immersion of the wantin how do I get the flexibility the self-correcting capacity of Hamlet how do I get them together how do i optimize them together so this is the problem of the reflectiveness gap but of
41:18
Speaker A
course the fact that it's an optimization problem tells you that it's immediately a mashed with relevance realization because another way another trade-off that remember there's trade-offs we've saw between exploring and exploiting there is trade-offs between generalizing and specializing
41:34
Speaker A
another trade-off is you're constantly trading between right stepping back and looking at your cognition to monitor it and stepping through and being involved with intervening in the world there's a trade-off relationship between them it's also part of relevance realization
42:03
Speaker A
what about meta meaning well there's three I want to talk about absurdity we've talked about some of these this one already anxiety alienation all of these of course show up and Dom aside because Dom aside is the loss of the
42:30
Speaker A
agent arena relationship so alienation of course is when the connectedness between you and other people is lost absurdity is when the connectedness between you and the world is lost and absurdity can be pushed into of course horror when you're finding a particular
42:51
Speaker A
mystery when you're finding a particular absurdity deeply mysterious so it's drawing you in right as such that your your ability to make sense and get a grip on the world is being deeply thwarted that's horror and of course
43:09
Speaker A
anxiety remember it's not the same as fear anxiety is ultimately when you are disconnected from yourself in an important way the to the problems we face down here when we've talked already before this is existential inertia when you're trapped
43:36
Speaker A
in a worldview and you can't get out of it you can't activate an agave and move to a new worldview or existential ignorance right you're indecisive you can't you don't know what you're gonna lose if you go through the
43:52
Speaker A
transformation you don't know what you're gonna miss if you don't right this is existential entrapment so let's talk a little bit about I've talked a lot about this and this I explained this we we know a lot about
44:18
Speaker A
the anxiety the inner conflict we've got aspects of the alienation I've been talking about I've talked about this already but this which I've alluded to many times we need to talk about this because it points to something really
44:34
Speaker A
central and important a very important article on this is by Thomas Nagel it's called the absurd it also talks about in his book the view from nowhere and what I want to try and show you is how much
44:55
Speaker A
absurdity is a perspective of participatory all of this is at the level of right respectable participatory knowing but this in particular first of all Nagel does something very very important in the absurd he talks about how we behave as if the absurd is
45:16
Speaker A
a result of our inferential processing and we purport to give arguments that lead to the conclusion of absurdity so we give an argument like well what I do now doesn't matter because it won't make any difference to people a million years
45:36
Speaker A
from now so I made insignificant by that you know the vast expanse of time a niggle points out that argument doesn't work because if what's happening now is irrelevant notice my language to people a million years from now the symmetry
45:58
Speaker A
applies their opinion of me a million years in the future is it relevant to me it's complete asymmetry if I make no difference to them they also should make no difference to me it can't matter to me because I can't
46:20
Speaker A
matter to it well you know what people are pointing to is you know they they you know they're so small they're so brief well natal says well if you existed for millions and millions of years would that make your life more meaningful in
46:46
Speaker A
fact isn't it the very real possibility that existing for a very long period of time would make your life absolutely absurd if if your smallness in reality makes you feel absurd makes you insignificant then would your life be more meaningful
47:11
Speaker A
to you if I blew you up to the size of a galaxy why would that do anything and as wolf has argued in her book meaning in life of white matters being can be this sense of being bigger is actually a
47:29
Speaker A
metaphor for being connected to something larger than oneself and that's ultimately a metaphor for being connected to something that has a value independent of my valuing of it and we're going to come back to that because that's at the core of sacredness because
47:46
Speaker A
there's a there's a problem sort of for all of these so what's going on with absurdity right if it's not really being generated by these arguments what are the arguments doing well he's basically saying the arguments are after the fact expressions
48:13
Speaker A
of absurdity not before the fact generators of absurdity well I might you know oh my life is made up served by the fact that I'm gonna die you can't experience being dead how can that be relevant to you well I won't exist you
48:30
Speaker A
didn't exist a million years ago is that particularly relevant to you now notice what I'm doing I'm not trivializing your experience I'm trying to say that the arguments aren't generating it because the arguments are ultimately invalid so let's drop out of propositional knowing
48:59
Speaker A
and we don't we know that that's right we've had this whole argument that relevance realization the meaning making processes are below the propositional level below the level of our inferences and our beliefs is at the level of procedural and ultimately perspectival
49:24
Speaker A
and participatory no but let's take an example so Nagel gives an example now he wrote the article in the 80s and that was way before cellphones and like people had voice recorders which is very different time very very different time but he
49:45
Speaker A
gives the example of what he calls everyday absurdity an example goes like this Tom on the phone and he calls he's been all day just I got to do this I got to do this I'm gonna call Seuss and I'm
50:00
Speaker A
gonna tell her that I love her I gotta do it I've been working on this all day and working himself far up and it's oh it's good ruling we sort of we got a friendship but I might be losing a
50:09
Speaker A
friendship but I might be gaining a lover and oh and he's oh this is happening right right so ah he picks up calls Susan picked dials he hears her here's the phone picked up click kid he goes Susan don't say
50:27
Speaker A
anything don't say anything at all before you can say anything I have to tell you I love you I love you Susan and then he hears Susan is not here right now please leave a message at the tone beep and it's kind of funny and
50:43
Speaker A
it's kind of sad at the same time and humor has humour can overlap with absurdity in fact you can get a lot of humor by playing with absurdity Monty Python you know was those guys that troop was talented in that because
51:04
Speaker A
what's going on in humor points to what's going on an absurdity what's happening is a clash of perspectives we have Tom's perspective and from within his perspective his action is deeply meaningful but the Machine gives us the perspective but an impersonal mechanical
51:28
Speaker A
perspective in which his actions make no sense they have no meaning absurdity is a clash of perspectives because of course that's why it overlaps with humor because in humor what you do is you play between a clash of
51:51
Speaker A
perspectives and then you resolve it by a trick by an equivocation right you play with two different perspectives that's what's a punchline you were in this perspective and then you're suddenly shifted to this one but not in some incongruous way but in a way that
52:09
Speaker A
you can ultimately make sense of but of course absurdity doesn't always and very often does not overlap with humor because the perspective of clash can be one that we can't ultimately resolve with humor and make sense of the clash
52:29
Speaker A
instead is a raw clash of perspectives and we experience just the incoherency just the loss of connectedness so absurdity is this clash of perspectives that's why it can become horror because this perspective the perspective that I'm looking at if I look at this
53:02
Speaker A
perspective from the perspective of all of time in history what's relevant and here is undermined there there's a clash in these perspectives so what do we need to do we can see how all of this machinery all of this is ways in
53:35
Speaker A
which the adaptive nature of religion relevance realization is also making us prey to vulnerable to losing our agency to suffering distress to experiencing horror meaninglessness absurdity being trapped right being deeply confused overwhelmed by parasitic processing these are perennial problems because the
54:00
Speaker A
very machinery that's making adopt making us adaptive is making us always susceptible to them we can't jump over our own shadows now what I want to do next time with you is can we use the very same machinery of relevance
54:18
Speaker A
realization and see how we could engineer a comprehensive response to all of these perennial problems because I would propose to you that any developmental change any development of our perspectival participatory and procedural knowings that affords a response a reliable
54:52
Speaker A
response that ameliorates and even alleviates the perennial problems that is a good candidate for enlightenment instead of making enlightenment as this unachievable superlative that only the super human beings in the distant past can achieve what's the use of that
55:12
Speaker A
let's make enlightenment what it it might be difficult but let's not do that let's acknowledge the difficulty with an understanding that actually facilitates us being able to respond let's I'm going to stipulate that enlightenment is the developmental process that gives us role
55:37
Speaker A
i of all amelioration and alleviation of the perennial problems and i'm going to show you next time how that can be explained with the theoretical machinery of relevance realization and religio thank you very much for your time and
55:52
Speaker A
attention [Music] you you
Topics:sacrednesssymbolsmythosrelevance realizationreligiomeaning crisisenlightenmentShunyataparticipatory knowingJohn Vervaeke

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