Leviathan Uncut: John Vervaeke
I’m hosting a free session with Trish Blain called ‘NonOrdinary Sensemaking: Conspiracy, Rapture and Murder’ on 16 October at 6pm UK time / 1pm EST. It came out of a conversation we had recently, inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s line ‘when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro’. We’ll be sharing skills that combine the subtle senses with more traditional analysis and sensemaking, all aimed at finding ways to thrive in the very weird times we live in. Read more and register for free here.
In other news, our friends at Open Source Ecology have gone astronomically viral with the films, branding and social media strategy we crafted for them. In a single week, they’ve racked up over 20 million views, and gone from 1000 to 600,000 followers. Check out their Instagram here, and get in touch if you’re looking for communications services.
I feel very lucky to have had the chance to interview hundreds of people over the last decade, as every conversation shapes my perspective and opens up new possibilities. Occasionally, a guest says something that stays with me for years.
For example, during the pandemic we released an interview with author, musician and death and dying sage Stephen Jenkinson.
At one point in the conversation, I mentioned that I run retreats. Jenkinson replied bluntly: “Adults don’t need to retreat from the world.” I’m still chewing that one over five years later.
There are other guests who become friends, and share so many profound insights that they change how I see the world. John Vervaeke is one of them.
Vervaeke is an award-winning professor at the University of Toronto in the departments of Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Buddhist Psychology. He’s particularly well-known for his research on meaning, consciousness, and wisdom, which he explored in his popular YouTube series (and now book) Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
If you’re a paid subscriber, you can find John’s full interview from my documentary Leviathan below. If you aren’t, if you sign up now you can access this, as well as the full interviews with Yanis Varoufakis, Nora Bateson, Josh Schrei, and Minna Salami, with Alexa Firmenich and Douglas Rushkoff coming soon.
There were so many excellent sections of John’s interview that we had to leave on the cutting room floor, including an exploration of the role of Luther and Protestant Reformation in the evolution of the Western mind I was dying to keep in, but eventually had to accept wouldn’t fit. You can watch it in all its glory below.
John also speaks beautifully to his concept of ‘The Advent of the Sacred,’ which I wanted to share here so everyone can enjoy it.
“What’s happening right now in response to the meaning crisis, which is going to be made dramatically worse by the increasing presence of the LLMs in people’s lives… is what I call the Advent of the Sacred.
We’re trying to recover Eros. We’re trying to recover that drive towards wonderment and participation, and that willingness to fall in love with the world…. we’re moving beyond the imperialism of our particular religious homes. [Beyond the idea] that everything is either evil, or a defective or a premature version of Christianity. Or, the tepid, “Well everybody’s got their own truth,” which creates a tragedy of the commons, because it gets us into a really inept model of meaning.
Instead, the sacred is saying something like: in addition to you needing an ecology of practices, and in addition to you needing a dialogos, we need an ecology of traditions, and a dialogos between the various paths towards wisdom and meaning in life… in order to address these new emergent problems and the deep acceleration of the meaning crisis.” - John Vervaeke.
