Ep. 20 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Death of the Universe
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 พ.ค. 2019
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Books in the Video:
• Mark Taylor - After God
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Facebook: / vervaeke.john
Twitter: / vervaeke_john
Twentieth episode of Dr. John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
If you need a break from your existential crisis, go to 31:04 and watch Mars go "wooeeeWOOPeewoozzooooo" a few times
thank you. you just gave me magic pill for my existential angst
Best comment ever
hahahahaha amazing XD
LOL so true
thank you, I’m dying 😂
"All that's out there is a purposeless, inert, chaotic absurdity; and all that's here, within me, is inner conflict, and a battle of wills with other human beings." Devastating. Thank you for sharing your work here, John.
Listening to this series is like being given a diagnosis for a disease... all I had before were terrible symptoms, with no explanation. Hearing the history of it, having them all explained and tied together, is a great relief! It’s not a cure, but somehow naming the suffering and understanding the etiology does help. It’s validating to hear him acknowledge, “this is traumatic, but we’ve just stopped thinking about it”... except for those 3:00am moments.
Couldn't agree more.
This is the assurance and the feeling of a "weight being lifted" that I've experienced through my own studies of psychology and philosophy. Fun to write about it and think about your own thinking processes, and make them more "structurally functionally organized", as it were.
This series changed my life, in conjunction with Yale's free online course on TH-cam on New Testament History. This made me realize that a lot of the religious dogma that was put in my head as a kid is not necessary and that the idea of God that I had in my head was only in conflict with science because it was wrong and short sighted. It's good to dig deeper. It's good to uncover the things these preachers would rather have you leave untouched. Things they don't even know.
hopefully there's a cure for the disease... idk.. i haven't made it to the end yet
Eloquently put
We absolutely must help to publicise this series.
Here is my attempt to do that: twitter.com/StewartalsopIII/status/1229858069250637824
The vervaeke reddit thread has this entire thing manuscripted.
@@polymathpark thanks
I feel like this has helped me fall in love with, and understand that I actually have a culture. Especially helpful at a time when in University learning psychology one is constantly being told how our western influences have only oppressed others.
Just commenting to keep that algorithm running. Thanks again for this beautiful gift of sapience 🙏
I have been lying awake at three in the morning thinking none of this is real and makes any sense since I am a teenager!
I’m 32 now and as much as I have been trying to cling to everything I found good and beautiful there is a void..a dark place in my mind that Your lectures are illuminating 🕯
“Before Galileo you were like everything else because you act on purpose and so does everything else. When Galileo kills the universe, you are just a little island of purpose in a vast desert of purposelessness.”
This series, I feel, really crescendoed here. All these historical paths Vervaeke has been tracing lead to this point at the very heart of the meaning crisis, which constitutes the source of our current cultural and spiritual predicament.
This was one of my favorite episodes so far. The way he described the trauma of living in an inert world without narrative and purpose explains a lot about the behavior of our modern world.
Existential ism
Same here. I listen to the series on Spotify and this episode moved me enough to want to re-engage with it here. The appeal is the Existentialist aspects, though it might be argued that Existentialism is not a philosophy to embraced but to be overcome, which is basically what this entire series is about.
That is so mind blowing. How is it that I have never encountered this kind of teaching? Remarkable insight that explains so much of human development but told with wonder and awe, brilliant .
Saturday morning, NZ time, beach walk in the dark while listening to JV talk about the death of the universe ... what could go wrong 😂.
4:56 "Skeptards"
.....Ok, this is epic
@@TS_Apostolos I couldn't believe my fucking ears, how does John continually find new ways to amaze me
Thanks for confirming my senses. I hoped that’s what he said.
I wonder if PVK will pick up on it and say something about it.
Urban Dictionary definition: A skeptard is a hardcore skeppy fan that goes and spams skeppy memes everywhere, or mostly in BadBoyHalo’s discord. Any one who is blindly skeptical to the evidence around them, regardless of research done on any given topic, in addition to any one who refuses to do the research necessary, before jumping to conclusions.
I thought that particular epithet was inappropriate; a blight on this otherwise brilliant episode.
This reminds me that humanity is going through a perennial and perpetual existential crisis.
The sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we can make amends and move on with our lives.
It blows my mind that there aren't over 100k views on these. At the same time not surprised, but I am forever grateful to have found this series. Thank you, John.
Go listen to "The Forerunners of the Reformation with Dr. Scott Hahn". He did a panoramic treatise of this topic from the religious perspective. I had watched it a long time ago, now going through Vivaerke's series I'm like this is just marvelous.
@@Lerian_V bucks card I
@Lerian V
@@charlesbronson5131 ?
It took me about 5 years of listening to Peterson, Pageau, and Vanderklay before I was able to tackle and understand this series, but it is really powerful for me right now. Thanks for doing this John!
TLDR; Could someone summarize 30 centuries in 30 hours? John Vervaeke: "let me try". Incredible :)
"hold my beer" *
Yeah you're right, that's why I am here at 3 AM. Very soothing to have such a problem articulated so well, feeling like a pile of meat at 3 AM not sure what I am doing and why exactly. Man this series is feeling like a hero's journey kind of story, here we start a path down the abyss, hope we'll have our insight and transform and emerge once again.
Your use of the term "skeptard" brings me great joy.
Awakening more with every lecture. It is an honour to be here with you, in this amazing series on finding better versions of ourselves.
Be happy ❤️
Between Augustine and navigating by the stars seems to really start pointing towards the current state that we find ourselves in right now. This lecture series continues to fascinate and inspire. Thank you, Dr. Vervaeke.
Every lecture I see how everything you’ve said until that point is necessary. I knew about this crisis experientially, but I did not get the colossal gravity of the situation… a true existential crisis faced by all of humanity, stretching back to its inception.
This is so important. Also, thanks for slowly improving my ability to use the psychotechnologies of language :)
Oh God, this is the single best lecture I've heard in all my life. The way you presented the unravelling of the modern worlview is unbelievable. This one made all previous lectures click for me, I feel like this knowledge is going to be lifechanging for me at 26 yo. Thank you so much, John. Love from Ukraine.
This is a mindblowing new perspective on science. Thank you Dr. Vervaeke ♥️
Thanks Again Professor! This series is a must to all humans.
John thank you so much for your work!
I love the passion with which you teach, it's inspiring, riveting and impresses the knowledge and insights into memory.
When I was a kid I had some terrible teachers and that made me adamant that when I grew up and taught I would be a great one, like the many I have found since then, even in high school. I feel blessed to have discovered you, and that's not to pamper your ego, just to say, "Hey, I'm really happy to listen, learn, laugh and disagree, to be compelled to find my questions and answers!"
When I showed my teenager daughter, who complains about her teachers plenty, that this is what really great teachers should teach, be and embody and express their material like, even she, who is (naturally) grandly and mostly disinterested or dismissive, was glued, engaged and intrigued by your presentation of the material for a good 30 mins ;)
This is my fifth time seeing this episode. And every time I see it, it hurts me even more. Therapeutic pain I'd say. Thanks Sensei John 👍🏼.
Go listen to "The Forerunners of the Reformation with Dr. Scott Hahn". He did a panoramic treatise of this topic from the religious perspective. I had watched it a long time ago, now going through Vivaerke's series I'm like this is just marvelous.
@@Lerian_V I just watched it 👍🏼. Great video suggestion, it deepened my faith, I hope.
@@danielfoliaco3873 You're welcome. It deepened mine too.
(in the current environment of information consumption) knowledge is an inner coherence between my propositions rather than a transformative conformity with the world.
Wow. Thank you so much John.
I so appreciate these insights. This makes so much sense of the malaise I see in the world and within myself. Yet, I somehow feel more peace knowing at least in part why its happening and a strange hope that there is a way out. John, thank you for these life changing videos.
Rewatching the series is almost becoming sacred grammar for my understanding. Dr. Vervaeke thank you.
4:50 "often invoked by various skeptards"
I am stealing this. Thanks Professor, lmao ❤
I said that out loud!! 😂 Right there with ya 👍🤙
Remarkable episode!!! Probably in the top two until now.
At 26:50 when you speak of creating insurance corporations- the first one was created in London in the tea trade company’s location- that’s how tea houses were started and most importantly they boiled the water for the tea- it was the first time when ‘clean’ water was used and with that water borne diseases decreased- thank you for the ‘aha moments’!
Thank you John. Wonderful lesson of how our history as a species unfolds.
"A new version of world view ". Well put...💞💞
I can’t believe it’s been twenty weeks! Such a rich lecture series!
skeptards 🤣
John, thank you and bless you eternally!
Very insightful to notice the shift in world view going into the 20th century, was going from good v evil, to will v resistance to will.
You know, I've always been rather gifted when it came to mathematics and had trouble understanding why other people struggle with it. You've really helped me understand and appreciate the complex and seemingly bizarre abstractions. "There's nothing triangular about speed." For me, it just made sense, and it was a way I could express myself. I tend to get very frustrated when I try to explain myself to other people, to the point that I often don't even bother trying. Then I just find myself in despair because I can't talk to anyone.
I am amazed by how much passion, energy and force John has inserted in his lectures, what a beautiful fusion it is, a scientific mind with a human heart.
Last year I had that exact understanding, that I'm just a sack of atoms pretending to be human until I die and stop pretending. That and with the latest psychology findings that there is no "self" - just different parts of the brain fight over control and your ego are the part of the middle trying to rationalize everything (IFS), is the final nail in the coffin (which does not exist). Although it's not the conclusion I hoped for, I still prefer to understand reality instead of living inside a delusion. Thank you for your work!
but the story doesn't stop there, does it? there's like a missing part.
Wow, I never saw the connection between Schopenhauer and Ockham before. That's amazing! Well done, sir!
Love is growth of self AND other
I’m grateful we all have this series to grow from. Thank you John.
Amazing & guiding me to better places.
Just exceptional. Thank you so much for following your curiosity to come together with this
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiits...... EXISTENTIAL RECOVERY TIME!!! 🥳 🎉 🎉 🎉 🧠 🔑 💫 🌟 ⭐️
Reaching the 20th episode has a really been an insightful journey. With each episode I realize how much I don't know and the more I desire to know. I sure would awaken from the meaning crisis. 🙂
Absolutely beautiful lecture. Thank you, John!
Thank you! I watch these re repetitively to really understand.
The part from 33:38 to 44:02 hit me so hard. I love math and science all my life but I can never chase away the constant feeling of painfully loneliness and meaninglessness. If I share this feeling with people they just say I'm crazy and being stupid and moody and stuff because I am so educated. This part of the video just explain everything and my emotions are justified. Thank you so much professor Vervaeke!
Go listen to "The Forerunners of the Reformation with Dr. Scott Hahn". He did a panoramic treatise of this topic from the religious perspective. I had watched it a long time ago and it changed me instantly.
hello mah vietnamese fellow, hope u're still doing fine
Thank you so much for making this series available publicly. I haven't really been able to engage more directly with some of what is being outlined here since my first read / encounter with the thought of Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences) 15-20 years ago. (He was the first person who really put the consequences of nominalism and its successors in perspective for me.) Looking forward to the remainder of these sessions.
32:30 "We titter over our coffee and tea..."
Now I'm imagining JV Koolaid-Man-ing into a Victorian tea house and waving his arms around blowing their minds.
Absolutely appreciate YOUR time and all that you’ve done and continue to do With YOUR time JV ❤️🍄 i am absolutely awe stricken by this series and all that it has offered thus far for me i feel so ignorant yet able to grasp almost a complete understanding of everything you have so far discussed yet i know I haven’t really had the understanding of whats been happening until now so i express my deepest gratitude to each episode i take in and really roll it like a bead between my fingers rewind listen again looking words and terms up so i thank you for this gift of education in this form and all that you do.
Sincerely, DS of Saskatchewan.
JV: ..."how do you know that your mother actually loved you...?"
So....that took a turn
Right? 😅
So much passion and depth of knowledge. Thank you for this incredible series of lectures.
I'm learning so so so much and its sublime! Thank you Dr Vervaeke!
Can't decide if this one's my favorite or not. Definitely going to listen to this one a few more times.
Little did you know... THERE WAS FOUR EVEN BETTER EPISODES !
Dr. Vervaeke. I am taking a Renaissance philosophy class this semester, and we are starting with Plotinus' Enneads. When reading his works I found myself having trouble understanding his mindset, even though I can understand, I couldn't "Understand!" (if you know what I mean). This one lecture really helps me look at those daunting works with a new mindset, and more understanding for their times. A profound thank you.
Some questions were also raised for me during the course of this lecture, such as;
If God's Love is resisted by us where we need to negate our own will in order to clear space for God, what does that say about God?
And,
Assuming that God's will is all powerful, He can "flow" in at any time. So why doesn't He?
I just think the concept of us letting room for God to come into our lives is a little ridiculous, especially since we are only mortal and not all knowing, how could we possibly know when God is making an appearance? Through synchronicities? But earlier in the series you did identify that we have such an amazing ability for complex pattern matching. It is likely that we would come up with any and all reasons to promote our theory with our confirmation bias.
Have you seen "The Forerunners of the Reformation with Dr. Scott Hahn"? He did a panoramic treatise of this topic from the religious perspective.
wow, so profoundly touching! And enlightening!
Hands down the best thing technology has done for us is record these lectures... Amazing to hear all this stuff... And I'm only half way done.. Wow. Thanks for connecting these dots, and logically explaining the importance of our history.
Thank you for this series, sir! You're engaged in the very same project that I've been struggling with: trying to pinpoint the illness of the modern world, its history and its cure. You've traced the thread and explicated it more clearly than I've ever managed to. Thank you!
A couple of observations. It took several hundred years for Aquinas to be broadly read, since all of his writings had to be copied by hand. The same with the "terrifying effect" of Oakham. And while the plague certainly had an effect on people it had happened before. The real change came with the printing press and movable type in the mid-15th century. The Renaissance itself was still dominated by the rhetoric/grammar side of the trivium. In fact, it was a period of retrieval, which is what "Renaissance" means. It wasn't until after Gutenberg that nominalism really took over and dialectic finally won the "war of the ancients and moderns".
Leonardo said, the greatest source of creativity, is the inability to do something. Chaos gives birth to order. Math is the order born of the chaos of love.
Thank you very much for this John.
I was thinking: does this explain flat-earthers?
Do they find the current world so complicated and confusing that they want to return to the Aristotilian world view?
Really enjoying these each week; profound walkthrough of history that really makes me want to learn so much more about these thinkers. Thanks for all your hard work John!!!
Thanks again for putting these lectures out there! They are very valuable. It is amazing to see the power these changing narratives have over us
Thank you so much for amazing lecture pile of atoms called john vervaeke.
14:00 'Your model of God has a tremendous influence on how you see the world and how you see yourself.' I would say that your model of God, or your seeking elsewhere for an integrating principle, is indeed a tremendous influence on how you see the world and how you see yourself.
It really goes to show how insightful you are John. The MOMENT you began talking about the more modern way of looking at the world, it INSTANTLY felt familiar, where all else before had been a mere idea.
Thank You!
Oh my...wow...absolutely amazing episode! It so explains much of the current political turmoil in the world, especially arguments based heavily upon "social constructionism" and the attempt to control the "narrative"!
Your model of god (or nature) influences how you understand yourself and reality. The shift from reading as "recitation" to reading "inside my head", where knowledge is now thought to be how all the signs of language cohere together; which leads to whatever order I see outside, is all just inside my head, or all inside the language I use; there is nothing "out there" in the world. The world is a very real sense, "absurd"; it is only intelligible insofar as I speak about it, or god speaks it into existence
.
It is not god’s "love" that is the source of his creative ability, but his "will" is the source; god “speaks” the world into existence; as an “act of assertion”, god asserts the world. God’s "will" supersedes his "reason". It means god is not bound by rationality anymore. Reason is not in anyway central to god. The ascent to self-transcendence through reason is gone. Any order in existence is arbitrary imposed on it by god's will. He is not bound by any principle of organisation, just "raw power and fiat".
Who else is at 20 hours of Vervaeke lectures?
This is heavy, Doc!
This episode was devastating.
Late to the party here! Amazing so far. found you on Peterson a d went to watch "after socrates" then found out I needed to watch these first. what a nice surprise.
This serious has been profoundly insightful but I feel like this episode turned the series into a great thriller, a detective mystery of whodunnit, with the first shot fired by mathematics and Copernicus, with an audience anticipation of science's involvement in the unraveling of spiritual meaning, but with no clear resolution in sight
Absolutely wonderful lecture. Superb content - brilliantly delivered. I'm SO impressed.
If printed transcripts of this series become available, I would definitely order one.
I love this episode
"I mean, do you ever awake at 3:00am and think I am just a very complex pattern of atoms and that's all that's really there?"
I can't say that I have, probably because whatever that complex pattern is doing to those atoms is pretty amazing. Once that pattern organizes those atoms, whatever it is that emerges from that organization ain't so inert. And you know, the ability to realize that one's senses can fool you is very useful for becoming wise, because it forces you to decentre from your own overly precious point of view.
The second half of this was really good in pointing to that meaninglessness that draws people to a series like this. If you would like to engage people more quickly, I think starting with that is a great way to do so
48:48 🤯 (I think this emoji both represents what happened to my mind, and the whole conception of mind when this happened)
We, mathematically, equated life with no purpose! We looked at a photo and assumed there was no such thing as motion!
Killer title! So excited to listen 🔥❤🔥
CANT WAIT FOR THE NEXT ONE
I had Ockham's insight for myself and it was one of the greatest and most profound I've ever had. I always thought this idea was first Kant's though: that our mind imposes itself on what Hume would call our impressions. I'll have to read Ockham deeper as I've never taken him entirely seriously.
The implications are profound: it means everything known is self-created. There is no knowledge outside what one imposes. There's no knowledge, meaning, or anything, other than raw sense impressions, outside ourselves.
Thanks John.
Beautiful
Book List:
4:11 - After God by Taylor
Best title in the series, by far.
I only wish these were longer, or came out more frequently! Very interesting and engaging stuff
7:39 Wisdom is understood as your capacity for educating yourself in self-transcendence to improve your meaning in life.
'God's will superceed his reason....' God is not bound by reality----and you don't have to be either. Your will of faith has the capacity, like God, to overcome reason and reality. It is possible to shut your eyes that tightly and to will into existence that which truly deserves to exist.
Rigid social structure
Through willpower, I can make myself into something different
I'd just like to put in that Buddhism presents an interesting contrast to the crisis of knowledge John is talking about. It too, for thousands of years, upheld a kind of Grand synthesis of the narrative, the gnomalogical, and the normative. I don't know if there was ever an exact equivalent to st. Augustine but the nearest would probably be Buddhaghosha - the mediaeval Sri Lankan thinker with his magisterial summation of the Buddhist world view the Visuddhimagga.
John has already touched inspiringly on the normative aspect of Buddhist practice. The narrative aspect has two main poles: there is the life of the historical Buddha, which is readily accessible to the modern world; then there is a mythology regarding a succession of enlightened ones who appear, cyclically, over mythological scales of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of years - this is Buddhism projected onto the Old bronze age cyclical view of history. Each new Buddha seems to have exactly the same life story as Shakyamuni Buddha, it really doesn't speak to the modern world at all, and there is little sense of history or society in the making - although I believe some extreme far Eastern sects have taken the coming of the next Buddha Maitreya in some sort of utopian, escatological sense...
However I want to put in a word for the gnomalogical aspect. Buddhist cosmology is little understood in the west, and hardly studied within academia but I feel it has a lot to offer. It is predicated on the same principle of conditioned co arising that the Buddhist path rests on. On a cosmological scale the key idea is that of the condensation of collective karma. Sentient beings with certain shared propensities find themselves in a world that reflects the various strands of creativity and chaos within their minds. The fact that we find ourselves here within a world of beauty and order and meaning as well as chaos and evil is simply a reflection of our shared karma. The intelligible underpinning of the cosmos is simply the principle of karma. It is not a principle of emanation but really one of emergence of a particular kind, in which the higher can have an influence on the lower but is not its direct creation or emanation. In other words Buddhas do not create the cosmos but Buddhas of cosmic power can have a profound influence on it - according to the Mahayana at any rate.
This karmically determined cosmos consists of an infinite number of world systems. Unfortunately from a western point of view these were said to be flat! However I don't see that turning them into globes really affects the overall picture very much… it's vastness and multivalency fits in with modern cosmology quite nicely. And there seems to have been little interest in the planetary spheres or the sun as deities, so modern scientific knowledge about the solar system has little effect on this model.
A striking feature, however, of the Buddhist cosmos is the sheer number of non material orders of sentient existence - there are demons, hungry ghosts, nature spirits and dozens and dozens of levels of gods, extending from humble terrestrial gods up to extremely powerful sublime beings. The Angelology of pseudo-dionysius would seem trim and compact by comparison… the ordering principle however is the division into the three lokas or world levels of karmaloka, rupaloka, arupaloka. That is the sphere of desire, of visionary archetypal form and of very subtle formless form. There is a hierarchy here of increasing intelligibility and universality. The Arupaloka is not described in terms of being and unity like the platonic heaven, but in terms of infinity, and absence of fixed or condensed object hood. Thus we have the subdivisions of infinite space, infinite consciousness, and 'no-thing- ness'. The underlying principle however is very similar to the universals of the platonic intelligible world. The objective order of gods is mirrored by a subjective order of levels of samadhi or meditation. Whilst this is all very foreign to modern ways of thinking, it has the advantage that unlike aristotelian cosmos, being largely immaterial, it can neither be disproved or proved by the methods of science. It is not susceptible to that unraveling of the aristotelian worldview leading to a crisis of subjective knowledge that John talks about so eloquently.
In addition I would say it presents a kind of middle way between emanation and emergence, it is emergent in as much as the higher realms of gods emerge by the efforts of lower beings to practice virtue who are then reborn in heavenly realms. However, there is also the possibility of the influence of the gods emanating down to the karmaloka. This comes out very clearly in the Agganna sutta of the Pali Canon which is a kind of Buddhist creation myth. Here it is described how a new world system arises out of primal chaos when the highest gods of run out of top-level karma and become once more interested in materiality. They do not create the new cosmos but their fall out of heaven kind of catalyses a new world system to arise - this has a somewhat gnostic flavour to it. Quite what it all means within a modern context - what can be salvaged from this mythology - is an open question, but one that I assume modern Eastern Buddhists are grappling with much more than people in the West, who have largely ignored this aspect of Buddhism...
the mechanical world views seems to map to the hermeneutics of suspicion,
whilst the spiritual or transcendent world view maps to the hermeneutics of beauty.
Interesting to note that once we had literally transcended the mechanical world view, we named sub-particles, truth, beauty and strange.
I've found myself sharing this series with people who definitely won't watch it and probably wouldn't be able to follow even if they did. I subscribed to the channel and have started liking every video as I finish them. Now I am commenting, not because I have anything to contribute, I just want to do anything I can to give this series more traction. So many people need to hear this. They don't even have to agree, they just need the seed to be planted.
Does anyone remember which lecture or have a time stamp when Vervaeke talks about humans putting all their hopes and dreams in romantic relationships when God is out of the picture? Thanks in advance
Like math, love is a psychotechnology. The most efficient means of getting from point A to point B. The question is, will it be phased out, say with AI.
I knew we shouldn’t have trusted Galileo
13:45. 'God speaks the world into existence.' So existence does not just exist, it has to be brought into existence. So nature is a creation, an artifact---it is not natural.