John Vervaeke on the Meaning Crisis, Religio, and Religion in the 21st Century

Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0JxL-acvuM&t=10s

The speaker has a hugely successful series of video lectures ('Awakening from the Meaning Crisis') combining insights from the cognitive sciences, buddhism and psychology

Discussion

Brendan Graham Dempsey:

"John Vervaeke, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and creator of the immensely popular YouTube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, has been working diligently to lay the groundwork for something similar: what he calls “the religion that’s not a religion”—a decidedly science-friendly paradigm that avoids both nihilism and fundamentalism by facilitating transformation and transcendence through a diverse “ecology of practices.”

Informed by his study of cognitive science, religion, and philosophy, and drawing upon works such as The Religion of the Future by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton, Vervaeke sees the urgent need for functional religio, mythos, and communitas beyond outmoded supernaturalism. “And so

I propose to you,” he says in Episode 39 of his series,

- we need to do something like what religion used to do. We need a comprehensive set of psychotechnologies that are set within communities of practices that allow for the comprehensive transformations of consciousness, cognition, character, and culture in a way that is analogous to religion. That is what we're looking for.

In conversations with culture architects like Jordan Hall, Layman Pascal, and myself, Vervaeke brings a design mentality to the future of spirituality, considering what organizational principles might guide it and by what means it might be scaled."

(https://brendangrahamdempsey.substack.com/p/emergentism-introduction)