Beyond The Meaning Crisis

Extract of new book on John Vervaeke by Andrew Sweeny

https://www.parallax-media.com/books/beyondthemeaning-crisis

Chapter 1 - Kairos

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Zombies and Meaning

John Vervaeke’s lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is sufficiently important, broad, and rich, it seems to me, to warrant an extended commentary. My aim here is, therefore, to have a conversation with the series. (Note: I will also jump around between episodes to compare and contrast ideas).

In ancient Greek, there are two words for time. Chronos means linear, sequential time, whereas Kairos means something more like “turning point in time”: it blends the notions of time, crisis, and opportunity. It seems to me that this is the essence of the series: to try to characterize this Kairos, the crises and opportunities present in this turning point in world history.

Perhaps the popularity of Vervaeke’s work—in the wake of his colleague Jordan Peterson’s massive success—is a good indication of an awakening of some kind. Today, public intellectuals and YouTube philosophers are developing massive audiences, a quite novel and welcome phenomenon after years of cynical marketing, talking heads on TV, and sound bites. It appears as if suddenly, meaning has become a much more valuable commodity. There also seems to be a need for these new priestly figures to help us understand the present zeitgeist.

Importantly, Vervaeke distinguishes between the perennial search for meaning—that is, universal existential suffering and the search for a meaningful life—and the particularities of the present meaning crisis, which has various symptoms related to our time. These include a rise in depression, suicide among young people, social media narcissism, the opioid crisis, a lack of interest in the political process, the rise of ideology, the fear of climate catastrophe, etc. Essentially, there is a general sense that we are living in the end times.

We have to observe a seeming paradox. On one hand, there is an all-pervading sense of nihilism, mindlessness, and an apocalyptic mood—represented in popular culture by the zombie apocalypse—a plague of the so-called living dead. At the same time, there seems to be a renewed interest in religion but also neo-Platonic philosophy, Stoicism, Buddhist psycho-technologies like Vipassana meditation, Hindu yoga, and psychedelics. In other words, arising simultaneously from this dark, almost suicidal sense of gloom and doom is a meaning renaissance of sorts.

It has almost become a truism to say that we are fast approaching the annihilation of the human species, or at least the biggest apocalypse since the Bronze Age collapse, which wiped out the Egyptian and other great early empires. However, to be more hopeful, apocalypse also means “revelation”—or to “reveal” and “uncover” meaning. The Bronze Age collapse also created the causes and conditions for the Axial Age to arise and a ‘modern world grammar,’ as Vervaeke calls it. And although the Axial Age was, like today, a stark time of existential questioning, it also brought about mass literacy and all the major religions and philosophies of today.

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Bullshit

Many people today are asking the question: Is this a new foundational age of sorts—or are we living in the end times? On the eve of an artificial intelligence revolution, it is urgent to think about unifying principles to navigate the storms that are certainly coming. However, before we can build new grand narratives, we must see through our various forms of self-deception.

Perhaps the first step in awakening from the meaning crisis is to notice our intense capacity for bullshit, which has been magnified of late in the internet age. The all-pervasiveness of bullshit is directly proportional to the severity of the meaning crisis. When we lack an orientation towards truth and meaning, we inevitably find refuge in deception and a certain kind of gleeful but suicidal postmodern nihilism.

This has something to do with our machines and our tools—our incredible ability to create powerful technological appendages. It’s interesting that one of our first real technologies was clothing, or the proverbial fig leaf, covering our private parts, representing the need to hide ourselves from God, so to speak. Deception seems to be a human inheritance and a double-edged sword. This capacity for bullshit also makes us artists, entrepreneurs, and mythmakers.

The fall from the Garden of Eden is the story of how we became essentially cyborgs, that is, creatures dependent on tools and technologies. This also imparts in us what George Gurdjieff called a “being-obligation-debt,” or a certain responsibility: we are obliged to use our extensive magic technology with justice, humility, and mercy. If we abuse this privilege, we can make the world a living hell. The cautionary tale of “stealing fire” is to end up like Prometheus, bound to a rock, with our innards being continually devoured. How do we use our fire for the benefit of all, rather than to enslave us further in our own self-created bullshit?

The bullshit factories of social media machines can turn people into atomized zombies. And yet within the disease is a potential cure. First, we have to understand what the machines are doing to us and how to design them wisely, understand the powerful hypnotic sway they have on us. We also need to know when to retreat from them—to turn them off. This requires a whole “ecology of practices,” to navigate this Kairos. These practices—for instance, meditation and mindfulness—are remedies to self-deception. And they help us to use the serpentine power of technology responsibly and wisely.

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Psycho-Technologies and Flow

Our technologies include not only external appendages like fire, clothing, and cell phones but also internal psycho-technologies, one Vervaeke’s most beloved concepts. Psycho-technologies arise from the subtle realms of thought and imagination. They are our intangible spiritual tools, like language, numbers, logic, meditation, contemplation, altered states of near clairvoyance, and various modes of metaphorical reasoning.

Psycho-technologies help us get into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow states. The thesis here is that flow states create meaning revolutions within us and in society at large. Why? Because the flow state is the realm where we experience maximum meaning and go beyond the everyday bullshit of our chattering, monkey minds. I write, practice martial arts, and play music—a dancer dances, a gamer plays video games—all to get into a state of flow. In the flow state, time and space shift, expand, dissolve.

We become fully human and even superhuman in the flow state. Real presence and aliveness are characteristic of flow—a state beyond bullshit. In the flow state, we feel fully alive, not mechanically zombie-walking through our existence. This is also the state of real learning: cascades of insight, both verbal and non-verbal, arise to remake and transform us. Real education can be measured by how effectively the learning technology gets us into this kind of flow. We, therefore, need to create educational contexts with feedback for our errors that continually push us towards greater insight.

The fact is, the human being is always in search of this flow and will even risk death to experience it.

It’s important to note that flow doesn’t mean relaxation or ease necessarily—but a challenging state of maximum learning. The example of rock climbing is used: the mountain will constantly give the climber life-or-death information, and he or she will need to be extremely present or risk falling. This also shows how flow states are potentially dangerous and deceptive, causing the human being to contort itself endlessly in search of a peak state and neglect the more mundane aspects of human existence. The taste of flow can also lead to addiction, the hungry ghost-like need for constant feedback and stimulus.

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The Shaman

Sometime about 40,000 years ago, a quantum change occurred in human beings. Disturbingly enough, the first signs of this leap in cognitive development were projectiles or bone-tipped weapons. The early hunter could now “project” something into the future and tell the story of the past. Having “projects” and reflecting on the success and failure of these projects, and beginning to express them as stories and myths—puts us in the flow of time and history.

Behind the hunter and his projectile was a visionary guide: enter the shaman. Vervaeke describes the shaman as the first rock star, faith healer, and artist—but we could add alchemist, proto-scientist, teacher, and even diplomat. And the shaman was (and perhaps still is, archetypically speaking) more instrumental to the health and power of a society than we imagine.

The shaman may have been the first person able to think “outside the box.” His or her great achievement was to “meet the strange” or “the stranger” in a way that an ordinary person, bound in the tribal ego, could not. This was achieved literally but also through imaginative “soul flights.” By way of example, the bear shaman of Siberia supposedly inhabits the soul of a bear, helping the hunter understand the bear’s movements and making him extremely skilled in tracking the bear.

Another interesting point is that the shaman may have been responsible for the leap from hunter-gatherer societies to more extensive agricultural civilizations. Through diplomacy and the magic of communication with the stranger, the shaman created networks beyond the tribe, planting the seeds for larger cultures to develop.

The shaman’s task was, among other things, to serve as a “translator” of the world, a communicator with the unknown, and someone who could orient his or her people in relation to the unseen forces of nature. In this sense, the shaman was a meaning maker—and the whole reason a shaman is needed in the first place is to help his or her community better understand the meaning of death and life’s hardships, particularly in relation to the natural environment. As such, the shaman served as a guide for the tribespeople through the underworld of the unknown, of the unconscious and irrational. We could say that the shaman is the first “zombie hunter,” chasing away the forces of darkness.

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The Nine Dot Problem

To illustrate how the Shaman thinks “outside the box,” Verkavke presents something called the nine dot problem. When most of us do this basic puzzle, we fail to see a simple solution, because that solution lies beyond the parameters of our habitual framework. Vervaeke says, You must disrupt your framing to get an insight — a profound point. We need shamans for precisely this reason.

This is a pedagogical issue. How do we create insights from flow states? Real learning occurs not through memorising a lot of information or generating beliefs but in creating contexts where we can get into a state of flow. Vervaeke says: You shouldn’t reduce all of your sense of knowing to believing. That is, you can’t answer the nine dot question through your beliefs or known logics, but only through exploration and profound experience.

As a healer and magician, the Shaman was the master of the placebo effect, but Veraveke also acknowledges that the placebo effect is very real and effective. Of course, placebo cures are considered bullshit by our hyper-rational standards, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be effective. Actually, the shaman is not engaged in bullshit but in radical truth—even if that truth expresses itself in unconventional, non-linear, and symbolic terms.

A potential disagreement: is Vervaeke correct in trying to understand the shaman merely from a rational perspective? For example, I’m not so sure a Shaman cannot actually inhabit the soul of a bear—and I’m willing to suspend disbelief in this unexplained phenomena. Is he stuck within his own “nine dot” paradigm, as we all are to a certain extent? I’m skeptical about his rational scepticism, even if, philosophically and spiritually, he is exploring territory that goes way beyond the new atheist paradigm.

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Andrew Sweeny is a Canadian-born writer, creator, and educator living in Avon, France. He holds a degree in literature from McGill University and works as a writer, editor, YouTuber, podcaster, poet, musician, and teacher. He has released several albums, published two poetry books, and hosts two popular podcasts alongside a philosophical blog. His creative path has also been shaped by long engagement with contemplative traditions, particularly Zen and Vajrayana Buddhism, which inform his approach to culture, philosophy, and community. He has been active in men’s circles, intentional communities, and diverse therapeutic and somatic practices.

Andrew is the co-founder and editor of Parallax magazine and teaches at École des Ponts in Paris. He lives near Paris with his wife, Amelia—a therapist and coach—their two children, and their pug, Walt Whitman—close to George Gurdjieff’s grave. Contact: andrewpgsweeny@gmail.com