The Religion that is not a Religion

An interview with John vervaeke from 2020

Editors Note: Dr. Vervaeke has moved away from the term ‘the religion that is not a religion’ and has evolved his way of thinking since this conversation in March 2020. However, I believe this is still relevant and gives a good overview of his thinking. Also, this has been edited for flow and readability.

Andrew: One of the many things I appreciate about you is that, although you are an accomplished university professor, you’re also reaching out to the people. You're bridging those two worlds.

John: That's very much what I'm trying to do. I don't want to be I don't want to be disrespectful to my academic home because the University of Toronto treats me extremely well, and I'm deeply appreciative of that. So, take that into consideration when I say that I don't think the academic world is going to be the place where we come up with solutions to the meaning crisis. Academic work has a role in that, but it will not be the locus of the response to the meaning crisis. My work was motivated by the deep belief that the academic world is too insulated and spun up in just propositional exchange. So the kind of stuff happening right now between you and I, that's the place where it's going to happen.

Andrew: I’ve been blogging or doing a kind of ‘street writing’—writing about what you do for the masses. In a way, going through your ‘Awakening from the meaning crisis’ and taking notes has made me a student again—

John: A lot of people are extending the learning process outside of the confines of whatever monopolies of learning there are, right? One woman told me: thank you for bringing the university to us. And so I'm glad you feel that because that's actually one of the goals of what I'm trying to do with my work.

Andrew: I have a list of questions for you. One of the big ones I have is: what is a religion that is not a religion that you talk about? This is important to me because I've been a practising Buddhist in a formal sense since my 20s. There have been times when I decided not to identify with the label and other times when I thought it was important to do so. In any case, I want to get your view on the whole thing. I fear that a religion that's not a religion might still be a religion!

John: I mean, obviously, there's a sense in which by deliberately and explicitly using a contradictory statement, I'm trying to be engaged in what I call serious play, right? I'm trying to be provocative rather than give a definitive declaration.

But first, two things I want to do: I just wanted to, again, I wanted to thank you for the excellent critique you do of my work. It's been, it's really good. And I also wanted to let you know that earlier this morning, I was just actually talking to Jordan Hall explicitly about this question. We were doing some further work on it.

So let me try and answer that question again, with the understanding that this is in conversation with Christopher Mastropietro, and deep conversation with Jordan Hall. It's very important for me to people always know the collaborative cohort that I'm working with.

First of all, part of it emerged out of a problem that I see. I think something like religion, for the reasons I articulated, is inevitable to human beings. This sense of a participatory connectedness to ourselves, to each other, and to the world isn't just propositional. It's deeply embodied. It's deeply enacted. We need to not only have that happening but also be able to reliably activate it, celebrate it, accentuate it, and develop it. It has a developmental aspirational drive to it.

And we get a kind of deep existential and motivational, even emotional reward from engaging with and celebrating our religio. In that sense, it's inevitable to us because I think it's so central to our cognitive agency. So we need that. We need a set, you know, we need sets of practices, you know, ecologies of psychotechnologies, as I put it, for doing that, for activating and accentuating and aspirating our religio in reliable developmental ways.

Andrew: So the question I have then is: why do we not keep the actual traditions and reform them rather than just start from scratch? Isn't there a danger in a sort of blank slate kind of ideology?

John: Yeah, totally, totally.

That’s a perfect segue. So thank you. There is demographic evidence to support the fact that with the rise of the nuns (non-religious) and a culturally accepted sort of nihilism and cynicism, the traditional religious forms are not working for many people. We can't get rid of, we can't unlearn, a lot of psychotechnologies and practices and the way they've transformed our consciousness and cognition. But what many people can no longer adhere to—believe and connect to—is the Axial Age Two Worlds mythology that legitimised and valorised and provided institutions and guides for most people in the past.

Andrew: Oh, great. I have another question for you. I’ve asked the question about tradition. But I'm very sympathetic to the religion that is not a religion because when I talk to Christians, they seem to think that their way is the only way. And this seems almost all-pervasive with Christians and others in all the major religions. Why the orthodox boundaries? For instance, why can’t a Christian do Zen Buddhist meditation?

John: Let me reply to that and then also finish the larger point I was making, trying to keep the nesting clear for people. I definitely have met those people. As you may know, I grew up in a Christian family background. And know very deeply from the inside what you're talking about. Of course, I've met Christians who are much more open and exploratory, and I get into excellent conversations. I should also point out that I have met Buddhists who also say their way is ultimately the only way.

Andrew: I’ve met lots of those too, I agree.

John: So I don't want to pin this on a particular religion. I find this as a sort of perennial problem with the religions. If we agree that there's that sort of institutional sort of constraint, I think there's also an epistemic constraint in that the two worlds view, and there's all kinds of actual variations on it. It can be heaven and earth, nirvana/samsara; it can be the promised land—there are all kinds of mythological representations. The variation is part of why that mythology was precisely so powerfully successful that it was capable of a kind of evolution that gave it sustaining presence.

Nevertheless, that two-world grammar—and I have an argument out there I'm gesturing towards—is deeply incompatible with the scientific worldview. It’s a scientific worldview, not just science, right? This is a Heideggerian point; it has permeated our cultural grammar, and it surrounds us with our technology, right? People say I reject the scientific worldview while they're using all of this technology and psychotechnologies like graphing and mathematical equations to understand reality.

But is a scientific worldview incompatible with the traditional religious worldview? Now that's a better question, right? And then the way I posed it, what I want to say is, and this overlaps with your point about a kind of conservatism in the institutions, if the religious tradition is identified with that axial age two world grammar, I think that renders it incapable of reconciliation.

Now I think you can see traditions of orthodoxy that have basically made that identification sacrosanct.

Now, I want to step back and be fair; there are lots of Christians that I'm talking to publicly who are willing to pull those apart and say, yes, we want to somehow change the ontology of Christianity and get it free from the axial age. So again, I want to be fair. But what I'm saying is, in general, for most people looking at the traditions axial age mythology and the religious tradition are deeply identifiable.

Andrew: I don’t want to pick on Christianity either, as it's definitely the case that there are fundamentalist Buddhists. And maybe I've been one at one point!

John: I've met, I've met Stephen Batchelor and Evan Thompson is a good friend of mine. You know, Stephen Batchelor has written ‘After Buddhism’. Evan Thompson has written ‘Why I'm Not a Buddhist.’ These are deeply thoughtful, academic people who have wrestled with trying to reconcile, for example, Buddhism with the scientific worldview and find so much resistance, again, about a commitment to the Axial Age mythology that they finally felt that they had to abandon their relationship to Buddhism. So again, that's part of my argument.

Andrew: I’ve also met many people who take on the traditional Buddhist thing 100% and find absolutely zero problems with the scientific worldview. And in the tantric traditions that I practice, there are all kinds of transrational practices—not the least bit compatibile with rationality. So, that ties into my second question about rationality.

John: To finish the point—and why it's also the religion that's not a religion—is also that many people find the attempt to go into the traditions non-viable for them. It's not a livable proposition for them. That’s the ‘not a religion’ part. But why is it a religion—if you'll allow me the contradiction—is because the secular alternatives of the pseudo-religious ideologies drenched the world in blood. I don't think that, ultimately, they were purely secular, but they styled themselves as a purely secular alternative, purely political. That is not an option for most people either.

People feel trapped and can't go back to religion but the secular alternatives won’t do either. I was trying to capture that tension with the contradiction. It's not a religion for the people who can't go back to the tradition, but it's still a religion in the acknowledgement that the secular alternatives don't work either. That's the tension I was trying to capture.

Andrew: In Vajrayana, you have yogas where you visualise yourself as some kind of wild deity in sexual union in wrathful and peaceful forms. These practices are very bizarre to modern sensibility even though they are effective and beautiful. But I don't think I could apply rationality to them.

John: That’s an excellent question. Because as you know, many people, including myself, are trying to get back to at least an ancient Greek notion of rationality, as opposed to a very Cartesian notion of rationality. We need a notion of rationality that connects us back to wisdom.

Let's take it for granted that that's a reasonable proposal. Let's say that what we're interested in is a notion of rationality as it was in the ancient world that affords some understanding and bridges to the cultivation of wisdom.

This is pervasive through ancient philosophy: that the notion of rationality then is not primarily argumentation. Discourse and argumentation work, but they're in the service of a bunch of other practices because the overarching conception of rationality is two things: a systematic and reliable set of practices for overcoming self-deception and perennial problems that endanger human beings and systematic and reliable ways of enhancing religio, enhancing those aspects of connection that we talked about earlier, that we now have some scientific evidence for reliably improve people's sense of meaning in life. And that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about rationality. I'm talking about rationality that ameliorates foolishness and affords flourishing in systematic and reliable ways.

So, meditating, for me, is a form of rationality precisely because it suppresses inferential processing in a way that is appropriate for trying to train aspects of insight that are important for overcoming self-deception.

Andrew: Sure, but when we think of rationality, we think of cutting things into bits, rationing things. We could explain what meditation does and have some kind of rational explanation for that, whereas what happens in meditation is not really something that you can measure or quantify or put in science.

John: See, I want to challenge you. I don't think the ratio and the rationing is originally to cut up. It's a ratio; it's proportioning; it's also much more like logistics. What is the best way? It's logistical normativity. What is the best way of disposing of your finite, limited resources as a human being? Not the cutting up of bits of things into bits.

Andrew: Iian McGilchrist's book critiques a certain overemphasis on rationality. At the end of Master and His Emissary, he says that sort of we need to restore romanticism in some way. And you're kind of saying the opposite thing. And I'm sympathetic to both views, but I’m a romantic by nature!

John: If you look at Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, who are advocates of rationality, what's happening when you practice something like ‘the view from above’? You're not making an argument; you're not analysing. What are you doing? You're doing this perspectival transformation that is supposed to radically alter your salience landscape so that your sense of self and your sense of identification are radically transformed. So you're capable of aspiring to a different way of being.

This gets me to a third dimension of the notion of rationality that's present in the ancient world that's lost in the modern. And this goes to Agnes Callard's work and the aspirational aspect of rationality. Agnes Callard's point is that when we propose rationality, we're actually proposing an aspirational course.

Because most of us are not very rational, and we're aspiring to become somebody other than we are, to have salient landscapes other than we have, and to have sets of preferences and values other than we have. It's aspirational but impossible. I mean, I don't see myself becoming a fully rational person. Well, let me try. With ‘the view from above’, we engage in aspirational rationality.

That is a way to use systematic and reliable practices to bring about the kinds of transformation that reduce self-deception, egocentrism, parochialism, and over-identification. These are all important ways of becoming wiser. And so, that view from above, which is very similar to some Buddhist meditative practices, is a very rational thing to do. Not because it's argumentative rationality, but because it's aspirational, transformational. And here's the bite in Callard's argument. If you don't include aspiration in your understanding of rationality, you are in a performative contradiction.

Because if aspiration is not a rational process, then you cannot recommend rationality to people. Because when you're recommending to be more rational, you're actually advocating an aspirational transformation. The aspiration to rationality is integral to the existence of rationality. If I were to make it simpler, I'm trying to argue that the process of becoming more rational has to be part of our definition of what it is to be rational. And that is aspirational in nature.

And therefore if I'm trying to overcome self-deception, I'm engaged in an aspirational, self-transcendence project. Argumentation can't capture it because you can't infer your way through those kinds of transformations. But they still have to be central to rationality.

That’s the point I'm trying to make. Rationality is not a linear process. It's more of understanding the whole.

Andrew: Jordan Hall uses the word coherence, which sounds a bit like what you mean when you say rationality.

John: I think so. What he means by coherence is something beyond our cultural cognitive grammar. It's a deeply self-transcendent thing for him. So it's a profoundly aspirational thing. The thesis I'm arguing against is this two-stage reduction. Reason is argumentation, and argumentation is logic.

Being rational is to be logical? I think that is deeply mistaken. I think knowing when, where—this is the ratio—knowing when, where, and to what degree to be logical, knowing where, when, and to what degree one should argue, make arguments, that's wisdom too, isn't it?

Andrew: And that's understanding the context of things rather than just having some ideas.

John: Yes, exactly. That's exactly my point. And that's what I mean about trying to come up with a conception of rationality that bridges naturally into the cultivation of wisdom.

Andrew: Okay, great. The next question I have is about non-theistic religion, as Buddhism and Taoism claim to be. Is that the religion that's not a religion? Is that a non-theistic religion? Because non-theistics don't have a God principle that they adhere to, but they still have something like Buddha nature or sacredness.

John: They definitely have sacredness and symbols for activating, accentuating and celebrating religio. And in that celebration of religio, in its acceleration even, there's a sense of the inexhaustibleness of reality that comes through. All of the religions have that.

And the non-theistic religions have non-god, they have non-personal symbols. Let's take the Tao in Taoism as a quintessential example. The Tao is not a person, it's not a god, but the Tao is, you know, it's nevertheless something that—and the Tao Te Ching explicitly says that—it puts you into a relationship with inexhaustible aspects. It gets you cultivating wisdom.

It really enhances your sense of connectedness of flow. Taoism is the religion of religio and flow in many ways. And so it's a non-theistic religion. And so the non-theist rejects presuppositions that are accepted by both the theist and the atheist, that ultimate reality is a being of some kind.

Andrew: It seems that non-theistic people talk about the ground of being, whereas theistic people talk about the high, the mighty, the supreme being.

John: Now, we have to be very careful, because even within so-called theistic positions, you have mystical traditions and theologians who challenge that, but we're talking about sort of consensus views. So the theist says there is a supreme being, the atheist says there isn't. But the non-theist says that's the wrong way to frame ultimate reality. The theist and the non-theist both seem, in the Abrahamic traditions I'm familiar with, to think that the ultimate relationship to what's sacred is a relationship of belief.

It wasn't always that way, but that's what it's come to be now. The non-theist says, no, it's not about believing or not believing. This is much more about what we were talking about earlier.

Am I on a course of transformation that is making me wiser? Is the procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory just as important as the propositional? So is there a God? Is this a question like, do you believe in a supreme being? The non-theist says, well, I reject belief as the central relationship.

Andrew: It’s the wrong question

John: Yes, you're framing the question the wrong way. The non-theist says there are deep reasons why the question of whether or not reality, ultimate reality, is personal or impersonal is undecidable because the notion of that ultimate reality is similar to ours.

There is the Goodman critique. The similarity of any two things is ultimately logically undecidable because the number of properties they share is indefinitely large, and the number of properties they don't share is indefinitely large. There's no logical procedure for deciding similarity. There's a deep argument there.

So what do we do? Well, we pick points of comparison that are particularly relevant to us, but then it's not a choice about the reality of the thing. It's a choice about what's relevant to us, what's symbolically relevant to us. I get it that for some people, personal symbols are relevant to them, and for other people, they are not.

Andrew: So maybe theism and non-theism can coexist, you know? The people who are more attracted to non-theistic styles can do non-theism, and others who are more attracted to theistic styles can do non-theism.

John: As long as—and here's another non-theistic point—you don't confuse psychological indispensability with metaphysical necessity. Somebody may say because of my idiosyncratic history and cultural heritage, the personal symbol works deeply for me, right? I can't do the impersonal. I get that. That makes sense to me. That's even a prediction of a sort of relevance realisation theory. But to conclude from that indispensability that that's the metaphysically true picture of reality just does not follow. So they could exist together, but you see, whereas the non-theist can say, oh, and this is the point, this is the next point, the pluralism. The non-theist can say, oh, I see that. I get that.

Andrew: Can the theist in good integrity do the same and say, oh, I see that your way is equally as good? The theist gets stuck somewhere and doesn't go the next step, perhaps.

John: That’s what we're saying. And I think what I would say that atheist is similarly stuck in rejecting all of these propositions. So, the non-theist is trying to say all of this has been massively misframed for these reasons and several others. We need to break through that misframing and get back to what's really at issue here, I think, which is the cultivation of wisdom, the enhancement of religio.

Ok. I don't mean to dump a bathtub of concepts on people. I am aware of the fact that I can be sort of oppressive in the density of my thoughts.

Andrew: I think you are being excessively humble because it's a wonderful feast.

John: I appreciate you saying that. I have many arguments, and I'm condensing them as much as possible into something we can bring into conversation. I want to point out that what we just said about non-theism plays into this question of a religion that's not a religion. There's a presupposition that we're trying to get a set of psychotechnologies to break out of the axial grammar.

Andrew: I was doing a podcast with Alexander Bard, who has some pretty wild ideas and who you have also talked to. And he wasn't buying the religion of no religion at all. He was saying we already have the religion of no religion—that we haven’t yet found religion, that religion itself is an aspiration.

John: I take Alexander's critiques seriously, and I try to respond to them, which is not always easy. He’s like Phil Spector who had sort of the wall of sound and music.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. There are so many ideas coming to you all at once with Alexander

John: I'm deeply concerned that I will probably misrepresent him as I try to respond to that critique. I do believe that religio is inevitable to us and indispensable to us. And I would even argue that it is metaphysically necessary to us as cognitive agents. So it's deep. We are practising weak ersatz religions all over the place because it is necessary to our cognitive being and also to our communal social being. In a sense, I agree with him that part of the problem is that we have all these ersatz religions that people don't realise are religions.

Andrew: Dead religion? Religion that doesn't have something living inside of it

John: So I agree with that. And, but that's not what I mean by the religion that's not a religion. As I mentioned earlier, I was trying to capture this problem that we're in, that many people reject traditional religions. And for them, that's what religion means.

It’s a traditional religion because of the problem of its identification with the Axial Age mythology. And they also reject, rightly, the pseudo-religious ideologies, the secular alternative. That's what I was trying to capture with that. And then, as we said, also trying to break free from the stranglehold. And I think Alexander's doing this. He seems to be doing this in his book with his idea of Syntheism.

Andrew: He’s trying to return to The Silk Route. There was a time when there weren’t these monolithic religions; where there was trade and discussion between all of these different schools.

John: In the ancient world you have the ancient philosophical schools, right? I'm trying to articulate that in terms of an ecology of practices instead of arguing for a particular religion with its monolithic metaphysical worldview. So there's a deep point of agreement.

We have these decadent, weakened, almost parasitic religions living in people right now. We need something like an ecology of practices, and we need to get back to transformational practices. Perhaps where there might be more substantial disagreement is that we need a utopic vision.

Andrew: Do we need to restore the grand narrative that sort of died in postmodernism? Otherwise, we're just going to continue deconstructing everything.

John: Again, I don't simply reject that claim; I think there's truth to it. Without a vision, people perish, as it says in the bible. I guess the thing that concerns me is how we—I’m trying to be very careful here—identify the utopic vision and how we disentangle it from the pseudo-religious side.

So, what I've been trying to explore—and this is a partial response to Alexander—is there a way of constructing, not just deconstructing? And let's be clear about this. This can't be purely theoretical construction. Is there a way of constructing, you know, ecologies of practices, communities of practices, networks of communities? I mean, this is how the religions actually became what they did.

They grew this way as communities of practices that network together. And I'm seriously engaged with that project. If we're talking about vision, for me, it’s what is the design and what are the design features? How do we get the architecture that will coordinate this bottom-up process that's already happening? All of this is happening right now. There's all these new emerging psychotechnologies, all these new emerging communities, all this nascent networking that's going on. Let's try and bring some reflective design and architecture to this

Andrew: So I have Alexander's voice in my head because I know his critique. That there's an obsession with the container, there's an obsession with etiquette; there's an obsession with making sure that we have good conversations, and we need a sort of the straight-ahead, visionary sort of principle. He talks about this as a phallic vision.

John: Is it just a container? What makes people think their lives are more meaningful? Connections to other people, right? A sense that they're connected to reality, that they have a sense of purpose is one of the four factors, but you can't reduce meaning in life to purpose, and the evidence is now coming out that purpose isn't as important as we thought it is. You know, our Protestant culture may be over-emphasizing purpose, mattering, being in a sense of deep connection to what's most real and right, and being in developmental caring with others; these seem to be much more important to people's sense of meaning in life.

Andrew: So I'm thinking of Jordan Peterson. This balances Jordan Peterson's view; he's always about purpose and meaning and having an aim and direction, and you're giving this other perspective.

John: Well, I'm trying to say that the evidence is emerging, and it's pretty good evidence, that reducing meaning in life to purpose is incorrect, and that there's other factors: this sense of mattering, and this sense of being connected to something larger than yourself, the sense of, right, the sense of participating in agape. There's some evidence that they matter more than purpose, and that's why I tried to argue for this.

Andrew: Okay, what is the meaning in your scientific understanding? What is the meaning of life?

John: Meaning in life has four factors. There is variation and individual difference, a lot of pluralism. It’s not a simple sort of feature list; it's a dynamic system. Within that dynamic system, meaning in life is a sense of connectedness to what's real and what's significant. It’s somehow bigger than you, a sense of mattering to others and reality, a sense of being cared for by others, a sense of relationships with a developmental import. And a sense of purpose, that there is some overarching goal that all of your other goals are subservient to, which is, I think, what Alexander means by the phallic vision. And I think the meaning in life is to have all of those.

Andrew: Would you agree that this has been lost in the modern world?

John: Deeply so. It's lost in the sense that we're not in touch with it. And we don't have “religio”—a way to channel it or to activate it and accelerate it and celebrate it and extend it, right? That connectedness afforded by religio is not largely held by our propositional knowing. It's held by our procedural skills. It's held by our perspectival salient landscape. It's held by our participatory identifications. It's held by, to the degree to which we are suffering from sort of a propositional tyranny, we have disconnected ourselves from the machinery of that connectedness very fundamentally, right? And we suffer very deeply. And that's why I don't think ideological solutions are solutions, because ideologies just move propositions around, right? Now, propositional theory is relevant because propositional theory can help you get back in touch with these forms of knowing that deeply connect us. We're doing it right now.

This goes back to the non-theism: the degree to which we're just asserting beliefs as somehow the solution to meaning in life is to radically, and not just conceptually, existentially misframe how we try to get more meaning in life. And boy, do we need meaning in life. We really need it.

Andrew: Okay. Great. This brings me to the last question I had on my list of questions. Your series is called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So how do we awaken from Meaning Crisis?

John: Well, that's a big ask. But let's say we understand the Meaning Crisis, and we've somewhat awakened from it. What's the next step? What do we do when we understand? That’s why I'm trying to push this constructive vision.

For example, I love the circling stuff. It's great. It's beautiful. My only fear is that you could do these sort of things forever, you know, like they do at Esalen, these kind of activities where you get together and you, you know, discuss where you're at.

Andrew: The vision I had was that there was a circle. And then there also has to be a line in the circle.

John: This idea about dialectic and about the idea of trying to come up with a meta-psychotechnology that will better fit us so we can access it and activate it better, collect the collective intelligence of distributed cognition.

And as we said earlier, ratchet it up into distributed rationality, ratchet it up into distributed collective wisdom so that we can shepherd ecologies of practices and then enhance religio in a much more systematic, reliable, and scalable fashion. What does that mean? I don't know what that means. What will it look like on the other side? I don't know what the coherence world looks like.

And this is where Alexander is going to disagree, right? He's saying: you’re not giving us enough. We need to know where the promised land is. And I agree with that.

I guess I would ask Alexander to acknowledge that humans have a proclivity to jump to conclusions and not pay enough attention to how well they have formulated their problems. And that is one of our deep, besetting, and pervasive sins. And so I'm very aware of that.

And so that's why I'm very hesitant about trying to leap beyond. I do think the beginning of the answer goes back to the point I'm making, what I made earlier with you. The point I'm making goes back to a point I made earlier with you about being in dialogue and being able to bring dialectic into this, into the dialogue with these people who are creating these communities, the network.

I have to be careful here. There is a real potential, both real and potential, that a new culture is being created, a new way of human beings being. That is clear to me.

Andrew: Yes, that it seems to be happening.

John: Right. And so my hope is that by getting a dialectic, which is both, as you said, the circling this way and also the self-transcending upward, right? Both. But we can use the ancient template of dialectic, platonic dialectic, and bring it into these new emerging practices of connecting and dialoguing and community making because that's what it did in the ancient world.

I'm not a revisionist. I'm not nostalgic. Let's use it as a template, transfer it and adapt it, give it guidance for how we talk, connect, how we do the things that build culture better so that we can perhaps build what Stephen Batcher calls a culture of awakening, where there is wisdom and meaningful life, where a good life is a meaningful life, not just a comfortable or pleasurable life, where wisdom and a meaningful life are foregrounded in what the culture is oriented around because our culture is not oriented towards that. So part of what would happen after we awaken is that process of getting the metapsychotechnology, getting the dialectic, using that, hopefully helping facilitate the process of the emerging culture and oriented towards a culture focused on wisdom and meaning. That's what I would like to see. Is that utopic? Maybe. But I'm really trying to formulate the problem really well.

Andrew. Well, that's wise. Great. As you were speaking, I was thinking: where do mythopoetics and art and music and all of these things fit into all this? Because I find that a lot of the discussion out there is very heady. I'm not accusing you of that. I think you're also very warm in your expression. And also, your partner Christopher Mastropietro, who seems like an amazing poet! I love the way he uses language and speaks.

John: So take this with a grain of salt. Christopher said to me: you’re sort of Socrates to me. And I said, well, if I'm Socrates, you're Plato. One of the reasons why I work with Chris is not only because he's a dear and deep friend, and I think so highly of him as a person. But one of the reasons I work with Chris is precisely to get this balance you're talking about. Artistry.

Andrew: I was wondering about that. Yeah. I wanted to ask that question, actually. It seems that you're just so high-speed, conceptual, and powerful in that way. And he seems to have almost this poetic, feminine quality.

John: He once described it this way. He said, you know, John builds the universe, but then I furnish it. And there's a lot in there. Like many things that Chris says, there's so much in there. You know, that his language isn't only lyrical, it's rich, right? He, you know, finding the right word and finding the right phrase isn't just a matter of sort of its lyrical sounding. It's also, you know, he finds the nexus point in an epistemic web. And he finds, if I make this point vibrate, that will make everything else comprehensible for everybody. And he just does that. He plucks the string and everything vibrates. I struggle to make arguments. He just goes ding.

Andrew: When I started talking to Chris, I felt right at home. I felt like, okay, this is like suddenly a person that I can speak this language to and that this kind of person is rare, that you don't find people like that, that you can actually communicate in that way with. It was just such a breath of fresh air.

John: I mean, I have other great partnerships. The partnership I have with Leo Ferraro is actually also a fantastic partnership, but with Chris we exemplify Dialogos and Dialectic. We produce something together that neither one of us is capable of on our own. And that, that, if you'll allow me, you know, the mixture of argumentation and artistry, both these terms are too simple and too reductive, but I'm using them to gesture. That mixture is exactly what is needed for, as you said, for responding to the meaning crisis.

Andrew: Collaboration as a remedy to the, to the meaning crisis. And maybe something more than individual authorship. I wish I could work that way with the people I'm collaborating with more.

John: I have never published a single work where I am the single author. In that sense, I'm deeply platonic, deeply Socratic.

Andrew: That’s great. Dialogic thought is more powerful than just thinking.

John: It’s so much more powerful. Can we access distributed cognition and can we get it so that it is ratcheting up into distributed rationality, distributed wisdom? It has been my personal experience regularly and reliably that its possible.

And then, and like I said, my best work is done with others. And so I think if we could get past the commitment the individual author and the individual authority, cause those two are deeply related. Then I think that would be a very important thing. So, I think you're right to put your finger on the fact that for me, collaboration exemplifies a lot of what I'm talking about. It is, it is an exemplification of a lot of what I'm trying to argue for.

Andrew: I was watching your wonderful discussion with Guy, Christophe and Jordan thinking there's something more going on here than just intellectual banter. It's like a rare thing to observe that.

John: Guy Senstock’s circling practice is deeply motivated to try and figure out how to translate Heidegger into authentic dialogue. Can we constantly move between theory and theoria? And what we're trying to do is we're trying to exemplify dialectic as something beyond just conversation. In the second conversation, I texted Chris later, and I said, I felt like I was in a platonic dialogue, like one of Plato's texts. I've never had that experience before.

Andrew: I imagine that that's the way people used to communicate in, in olden times, right? I have this vision of sort of sitting around a fire. It wouldn't be a debate—this proposition versus that proposition. You would wait until your heart speaks in some kind of a way.

John: It wouldn't have this intense level of antagonism and competition. Plato talks about that. He distinguishes between Philo Sophia, the pursuit of wisdom and Nikea, the pursuit of victory.

We’ve become so enmeshed and overwhelmed with adversarial processing. We've lost the point of processing as a system that self-corrects like your eyes, right? The point of processing between parasympathetic and your sympathetic nervous system: to constantly, recalibrate your level of physiological arousal, right? And so what you see is a system that is dynamically continually self-corrective and the opponents are always ultimately committed to the shared process of the health of the system.

And that was what democracy was sort of supposed to be—and this is an idea I ultimately got from Leo Ferraro—opponent processing in which the other person is opposing me and they're probably helping me to self-correct. And we're working together in this fashion of self-correcting to maintain the process of democracy. That kind of model has disappeared, and we've replaced it with this adversarial winner-take-all as if nothing else matters.

Andrew: There could be a kind of positive antagonism where you're challenging somebody like in a wrestling match or something, you're wrestling with ideas, and that's positive, right?

John: Right, but think about the commitment to sportsmanship. It can still be a good match when I lose because my opponent helps me to correct my wrestling, right? So, I should be grateful and respectful even when I lose. It can be a good match because winning isn't what I'm ultimately here for.

I'm ultimately here to become a better wrestler, and my opponent is helping me do that, and so I should express gratitude, respect. If we're sportspersons, we share a commitment to becoming better. And so, even in that positive antagonism, there is the sense that having an opponent is one of the most powerful ways to help me self-correct, and both of us are committed to the process of human improvement through wrestling, through this particular sport.

I think sport has lost a lot of this ethos, too. It's become very much the winner-take-all model. And when winning becomes paramount, you don't care about the process, then why not cheat? Yeah. Then why not cheat?

Andrew: I feel it's also the communication level you get on Twitter or Facebook is like that. It's very subtle, maybe, but we're not helping each other. We're trying to pulling each other down; on some level, we're spreading our darkness around.

John: Well, I think, I think this goes back to a point we made earlier. Think about how truncated and isolated and restricted to purely propositional knowing you are with things like Twitter and Facebook.

Andrew: Right, exactly, yeah. So, for this video, we can see each other's faces and hear our voices, and that adds a whole other dimension than text.

John: And what we're doing is we are coordinating our salience landscapes. We're coordinating, at least conceptually, what we're paying attention to and what we're foregrounding and backgrounding. And we're doing this in a cooperative—sometimes we're disagreeing, but nevertheless. Can we get alignment to the salience landscape? And we're also bringing in our particular existential mode. We're bringing ourselves as identities into the discussion. It's not just propositions that's going on here. For example, you asked me how my collaboration with Chris reaches deep into how I work and who I am.

I hope I'm not naive. I think a lot of YouTube can be disastrous for people. But one of the gifts the series has given me is getting to meet and to deeply dialogue with people like yourself. They've been deeply encouraging to me that there is real potential here in this medium and in the community and the competence and the commitment that people are bringing to these communities. There is a real potential here and it's already being actualized. And I want to do more to actualize that.

Andrew: I have two lives now. There's my, there's my day job that I do for money, because I have to, and because I need to survive. And then there's the things I really care about. It's almost like the things I really care about are sort of taking over

John: And this is also where I hope I'm not being naive or have illusions. I understand and I appreciate in all the senses of that word, that I am in a very lucky position, that my profession and my vocation are deeply interpenetrating with each other.

And I understand that that can't be the case for many people. I get that. And so I hope that if at times I'm presumptuous because I'm lucky that people point that out to me because I would be happy, I would be very happy to self-correct on that point because I'm aware of the fact that the thing that calls to me, my vocation, and the thing I get to do for money, that they're deeply interpenetrating in a deeply satisfying way for me.

Andrew: But you must have this one-pointed desire, and you must have had it for a long time. I mean, I can't imagine, you know, how much you read and how much work you do. So I'm sure it's merited.

John: Well, thank you for saying that. I've worked very hard and very long. And I only recently got tenure after being at the university for 25 years. So it was a long, hard, hard, hard work. And I did have to do a lot of what you said. So thank you for saying that.

I did work hard for it. And I think in that sense, it's deserved. But I do want to always be sensitive to the fact that people don't have my temperament; a lot of people might not have my bent for abstract theoretical thought or the kind of need for cognition that I have.

And that doesn't mean they shouldn't be afforded good and reliable ways of pursuing wisdom and meaning in life. And so, again, I want to be sensitive to that. My hope is that being in discussion with non-academics helps to address that issue. It helps bridge between the very lucky life that I have and the lives that many people don't have, such that what I'm saying can still be valuable to people who don't have the kind of lucky situation I have. But nevertheless, all of us need to cultivate wisdom and meaning in life.

Andrew: Well thank you for your gracious attitude. It's very touching to hear you say that.

John: Well, thank you for saying that, but it's sincerely meant and intended. These have all been great questions. I'm open to more questions if you have any more that you'd like to

Andrew: Great. I also want to ask you just a little bit about the philosopher Nishitani.

John: Nishitan wrote one of the great books on the relationship between religious transformation and the response to nihilism. Part of his argument was the West is incapable of responding to nihilism because the West gives an undefended priority to being. And we don't have what I would call psycho-technologies of transformation and self-transcendence that actually afford the profound aspect change in our perspectival knowing and our participatory identification s

Andrew: So that we can go from just saying emptiness to experiencing emptiness as fullness. As a positive principle rather than a negative principle or privation.

John: Yes, exactly. But we need both a conceptual change and a psychotechnological change, the way ancient philosophy kept those two together. We need a philosophical transformation to address the problem of nihilism. So, Religion and Nothingness is a profound book.

Andrew: So emptiness or Shunyata in the Buddhist sense can address this issue of nihilism.

John: I think so. But I think there are deep, and I mean procedurally, perspectively, participatory, deep similarities, not identities, but similarities between the Neoplatonic notion of the one, the Taoist notion of the way. The neoplatonic aspiration to the one, in the Taoist flow resonance with the Tao, right?

I'm not Aldous Huxley; I'm not a perennialist. What I'm saying is that these things have symbolic functional similarities that can engender transformation, that deep and profound and comprehensive aspect shift that is needed for addressing nihilism. So I think that, yes, I think Shunyata is symbolically powerful. But I think there are equally powerful symbols in the west

You even get something similar even in Western theology. I think Tillich's God Beyond the God of Theism is ultimately a kind of non-theism. His great book, The Courage to Be, is about how we bring about a conceptual and existential transformation to deal with the meaning crisis. That was the courage to be. And, you know, the ultimate proposal is the God Beyond the God of Theism.

Even within sort of classical Western Protestant theology, you have people trying to create— and Tillich would be happy with this word—a symbol that affords the response.

Andrew: And negative theology also had some of that in it, didn't it?

John: The thing with pseudo-Dionysus and also with Tillich, and especially with Eregina, is what actually is at work is a dialectic. You're moving between a negative theology, where you're trying to shut down all the ways in which you are trapped in conceptualisation and categorisation. That's always a dialectic with the insights you have and new reconceptualisations. So the idea is that's the cataphatic, right?

It's constantly in what I talk about, right? I'm talking about this constant evolution of what I would say is your relevance realisation machinery, the constant evolution of your religio. That's where the answer is to be. That's a dynamic sort of unending process of potential coming in and out of existence rather than some sort of concrete dogmatic superstructure. Am I making sense here?

Andrew: Yes. I totally agree.

John: The idea that sacredness is not an ultimately completable, finishable, an absolute thing, but rather that sacredness is like Schlegel's notion, the finite always longing for the infinite, that we only experience the sacredness in the transcendence, right? And whenever we try to stabilise it or finish it, we actually lose the moment of sacredness, right? So they had this notion about extasis, that we're not trying to come to rest or completion in God, right? What we're trying to do in God is the affordance of continual self-transcendence, which is a very different notion. And you see that in, it starts with Gregory of Nyssa, and then you see it a bit in Maximus, especially in Eregina. The Orthodox tradition has kept its connections to the Platonic and Neoplatonic roots much more alive than in Western Christianity.

Andrew. We're symbolically illiterate in the modern world, in a sense, right? There are all these things going on that we don't know how to read because we're too much on the surface or in the noisy surface of reality.

John: Ultimately, the relationship between the surface and the depths will require symbols. Because if we are trying to get transcendence, we're always moving from one frame to a more encompassing one. And so we need something that has a non-logical identity.

It has to have one kind of identity inside our frame, and then it has to have another kind of identity that takes us beyond our frame, or it's not going to trans-frame us in any way. And symbols joining together—Symbolon. We can't do without symbols.

It goes back to the point earlier about, you know, the aspirational rationality is going to be bound up with symbols in powerful ways.

Andrew: Wow, it's been great.

John: I’ve really thoroughly enjoyed it. I'd be happy to do this again with you at some point in the future, Andrew, if you'd like.

Andrew: I would absolutely love to, yeah.

John: There’s a community of people addressing what's happening to us collectively and individually right now. I feel like you belong very well within this place of the internet. I know you said in your talk with Chris you didn't feel you have a place where you belong. I think you belong. I think you really belong here.

Andrew: Well, that's good to hear. Thank you. I approach these interviews with fear and trepidation and resistance and terror. But it's usually worthwhile. I know this conversation feels to me extraordinarily worthwhile.

John: For me, too. I thank you for it.