Wisdom Keepers: Healing a Divided People

-Across cultures, language groups, gender, socioeconomic status, political orientation, all the things that divide us, people describe being able to get into the flow state, profound "at one"-ment.

They feel deeply connected.

The world seems clear.

Like, if you're a martial artist and you're sparring, your hand just goes up and the block is there and you see the opening and you punch.

This is the flow state.

Another way of understanding enlightenment is flow state of orienting to reality what's deepest in you to what's deepest in the world.

Enlightenment isn't over there.

It's already in you.

The machinery is already there.

-We're all seekers, searching for answers to life's biggest questions.

There are people who have made it their life's work to explore and uncover the wisdom we all seek.

In this episode, I speak with philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke about the cultivation of wisdom and meaning through our connections to one another.

This is "Wisdom Keepers."

John Vervaeke, welcome to "Wisdom Keepers."

-Thank you.

Pleasure to be here.

-As I was thinking about how to talk to you today, I was standing on a corner in Manhattan and I looked up and on the side of the building was a huge billboard ad for the Institute for Practical Philosophy.

-[ Laughs ] -And I thought, "Oh, perfect.

I'm all teed up."

Is philosophy a practical discipline?

Should regular people, everyday people, think about it that way?

-Well, that's an interesting question.

I wouldn't say everybody needs to do what's called academic philosophy today.

I do think that everybody in some sense should be philosophical in the ancient sense.

People should be concerned with the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, enhanced meaning in life.

They should be asking questions like, "What is it to lead a good human life, what is it to be a good person leading a good human life?"

and put some reflection into it, some deeper dialogue and discussions with others about it.

I think that contributes very significantly to improving the human condition.

-So it could be a tool for getting to those places -- "What does it take to live a good life?"

-Yes, very much.

That's the whole goal of philosophy in the ancient world, the love of wisdom.

And it's philia, which means like -- It doesn't mean individual.

It means a fellowship love -- right?

-- of wisdom.

And the whole goal is, can we use our uniquely human capacities to further enhance our human experience?

-One of the reasons I ask is that everywhere you look you up, it says "philosopher and cognitive scientist."

-Mm-hmm.

-And I think in the ways that we use those terms, philosophy is sort of thought of as an abstract, soft good, and cognitive science -- axions and neurons, impulses and electricity, movement and memory -- is thought of as a harder thing.

-Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

-What do those two disciplines have to say to each other?

-Well, getting those two disciplines to talk to each other, I think, is a significant example of what's needed right now, which is to get a discipline trying to understand the -- we'll call it the hard science of intelligence and consciousness and meaning making to talk to a discipline that reflected a lot on what you might call the spirituality.

How is it that people can improve through these kinds of practices, reflective practice, dialogical practices?

See, the ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle -- they were not ignorant of the science of their time.

They made the best possible use.

In fact, I mean, for a thousand years, Aristotle and science were synonymous.

So the idea that they are somehow separate from each other is something that was given to us during the European Enlightenment as this sort of fable of science went one way and religion and philosophy went another way and they have sort of a relationship of conflict.

That's not really very historically accurate.

And it certainly wasn't the case for the ancient world.

-But if we had somebody laid out on a pathologist's table, we could find their cortexes, the big nerve pathways and blood vessels in the brain, but we'd never find their soul, hard as we looked.

-Yeah, well, I mean, that's a good point.

So, what does that word mean for us now?

How do we land so that it isn't just pleasant poetry, the word "soul"?

How do we land that so it's something that still calls to us and can call us to action, can call us to vision, without thereby trespassing on the unavoidable fact that we live in a worldview that is, like, woven into science and technology?

We're only here, you and I, here right now and with all of this, because of science and technology.

-You have identified a kind of crisis in these areas.

When you refer to meaning making, we've kind of lost the plot in the way that you're looking at contemporary society.

Is that fair?

-Yes.

I mean, the issue about what we mean when we're talking "Are our lives meaningful?"

is one that -- Well, it exemplifies what I've been talking about.

Everybody has an intuitive sense of what we're talking about.

You know, people will say, "My life feels meaningless right now," or the contrast, but what does that actually, deeply mean?

How does that line up with our best knowledge of how human cognition works, about how the mind is trying to help us fit the world, belong to the world, belong in the world?

-You know, we have available the knowledge of how everything works -- the physical world, the digital world, neuroscience, atomic science.

And we have a crisis of meaning making, in your view.

-Mm-hmm.

-I wonder what a serf in Middle Europe in the 14th century, who had an access to none of those things -- -Mm-hmm.

-That person didn't seem like they had a meaning crisis.

-No, because they had a religious framework.

I'm not here advocating for, neither am I allergic to, religious frameworks.

I'm talking about the fact that religion had a very pronounced and profound functionality for us.

So, for example, you talked about all the information.

I'll do this with my students -- "Where do you go for information?"

And like the cyborgs we're becoming, they hold up their phones.

And then I say, "Well, where do you go for wisdom?"

And there's an anxious silence because they're looking for role models that they can imitate.

They're looking for not just beliefs and knowledge.

They're looking for skills and virtues so that they can realize inner peace and come into a deeper -- like, get deeper into reality in a way that's reciprocally opening.

And, you know, that reciprocal opening -- that's like love.

That's what happens when you're in love with somebody.

You open up to them, and they open up to you.

And there's a love of being in the world.

That's what -- That's the kind of functionality I'm talking about that religion afforded for people.

-Undergraduates 50 years ago -- would they have had a more ready answer than your undergraduates just the today?

-Well, in the United States, they would have because the United States has been, until very recently, an anomaly in terms of religious adherence.

Until very recently, the United States was the counterexample of the general proposal that the West, whatever "the West" refers to, is going through secularization 'cause the United States remained quite religious.

So, in '75, if you had asked undergrads that, many of them would have given you religious exemplars, religious traditions, religious homes, if I can put it that way, to which they turned when they were seeking that kind of home and tradition and role models and skills and states of mind, all being cultivated together in this deeply interwoven manner that had sort of the test of time that entrusted it to people.

-Well, I'm a religious person myself, and I've always been, but I also recognize that not everybody's cut out for it.

-Mm-hmm.

-But I wonder, given what you've said about the crisis of meaning making, a wisdom famine in the West, whether there is a something else that'll fit in to that religion-sized, religion-shaped hole that exists in people.

-That's a really key question for my work over the last 25 years.

We've seen candidates to fill that.

We've seen pseudo-religious ideologies, especially in the 20th century, drenching the world in titanic amounts of blood.

We've seen celebrity status and Hollywood and, you know, mythological universes like the MC universe and DC trying to satisfy that hole -- popular culture in general.

And what what we see there is an interesting sort of cycle.

We see a fanatic initial involvement and then some deep recognition, sometimes after suffering, that it's not capable of doing the job.

Right now, we've been also playing with for quite some time a very dangerous surrogate.

And this will sound odd.

We're trying to make romantic relationships fill that hole.

We have this language -- we're looking for "the one" -- which is like -- that's a religious language.

And that person is going to give us all of this missing meaning.

They're gonna take the place of God and tradition.

They're gonna teach us how to be virtuous and wise.

They're gonna bring us to a fulfillment, and we're gonna understand the world and see ourselves and know our-- No human being can bear that.

And so you get this weird -- -That is a lot of pressure.

-It's a lot of pressure.

And so you get this weird paradox, which is, you ask people, "What do you think will contribute most to your meaning in life?"

"Relationships."

"What's causing you the most suffering in your life?"

"Relationships."

Romantic relationships.

And then we fill our popular culture, like, with romantic comedies, which are very kind of dangerous propaganda, the idea that somehow the universe is cooperating with your quest to find this one.

There'll be a little bit of difficulty, but it'll work out, and you'll find this.

And then all the things that were wrong in your life -- they'll go away, and everything will fall into place.

Or mystical experiences.

40% of the population have a spontaneous of some kind mystical experiences.

And that's being accelerated by the psychedelic revolution.

How does our culture prepare to integrate that into people's lives?

We don't have a religious framework for doing that.

So, if you don't have any of that -- right?

-- if you don't have something that can comprehensively orient you when you're wondering about, like, "What is real, what really matters, who am I really?"

then you'll find a surrogate for that ultimate North star of your life will either disappoint you profoundly -- That's, you know, the first truth of -- you know, the noble truth of Buddhism, all of life is suffering, all of life is disappointing in some way.

Or they will capture you, as idols do, and manipulate you and drive you into a kind of servitude.

-It is very common now in this age of disaffiliation to hear younger people especially -- but all kinds of people -- say, "I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious."

-Yeah.

-They seem to want to make very clear that they're not tied to a set of rules and precepts and traditions, but they're open to something less structured, less prescriptive... -Yeah.

-...less programmatic.

Do you hear in that statement, "I'm spiritual but not religious," a yearning for the kinds of things that you think we're missing?

-Definitely.

Look, here's an example of how the hard science and what we're talking about come together.

If you study, like I do, like the -- I'll call it the machinery of our general intelligence, what we're trying to make with AGI, with the ChatGPT, the big quest -- the kind of intelligence that we have.

When you study that, you realize it's this very dynamic, self-organizing process.

But one thing that also becomes very clear is the very processes that make us adaptive make us perennially prone to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior.

And so trying to overcome self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior is not optional for us.

We need -- In that sense, we need to cultivate wisdom.

So, there's a sense of that, the need to cultivate wisdom, and then there's a sense that wisdom and meaning in life require a fundamental sense of orientation.

And so I do think there's that longing there.

I think there's a deep truth they're pointing to.

Meaning's a metaphor.

We're using that metaphor to try and talk about something about the way we find a place and an orientation and a connectedness and a coherence in our life.

The Latin word here, religio, one of the -- -To be tied.

-Yeah, to be tied, to be bound, and also to be oriented towards something that could be sacred -- right?

-- that should be of special interest and concern, right?

All of that is missing in a culture since basically the Reformation and the scientific revolution has become transfixed and fixated on our beliefs, as if that is all and totally what we are.

I think there's a great truth there in the "spiritual, but not religious."

The great disappointment is -- and this is not just for religion -- this is worldwide growing phenomena, Infecting every domain of life -- is the disappointment with institutions.

And what we're losing is we're losing any way in which institutions can stand as bearers of tradition and places where there are exemplary role models for us.

So, there's that deep disappointment.

The danger for "spiritual but not religious" is -- I mean, sociologists, they'll say, "Well, 'spiritual but not religious' just means 'the religion of me.'"

And that carries with it all kinds of problems.

I and you -- individually, we're very poor -- metabolically, cognitively, behaviorally -- at noticing our own biases 'cause when you're trapped in a framework and a perspective, it's very hard to see how it's blinding you.

You are my best chance for me finding biases.

Like, I should come to you.

This is Socrates' proposal.

It's -- I think it's the core engine behind democracy.

I should trust that you are better at spotting my biases than I am.

And in return, you trust that I am.

And then we both commit, above our positions, above our beliefs, to this process of self-correction.

Science and democracy -- that's what they were supposed to thrive on.

And when you do the religion of me, you've removed all of that, and now you're autodidactic.

And that means you can fall into all kinds of ways of not catching your biases, reinforcing bad habits.

And also you can drive narcissism.

-But here's the thing.

-Okay.

-While I would never be as harsh as to dismiss it as "the religion of me," I understand why critics would say that... -Yeah.

-...because while religion might make certain demands, have certain practices, spirituality is diffuse enough.

It has no particular meeting time.

It has no set of practices.

-Mm-hmm.

-It has no set of disciplines.

It has no set of demands.

It is whatever you need it to be at this moment.

Even if it is, in your own view, a rigorous search for the transcendent, but just one that you shape for yourself, it lays a lot less on you than being religious does.

-It does, but think about this.

"Meaning" is a -- "Meaning" is what's called a thick term.

There are thin terms.

Like, that's a chair.

"Chair" is a thin term, right?

Meaning is a thick term.

When I say somebody's life is meaningful, I'm not merely describing it.

I'm praising it, and I'm saying, "Notice that.

Consider imitating that.

Consider learning from it."

-Well, what's the opposite?

"Meaningless."

Nobody wants to live a meaningless life.

-Exactly, but the thing is, that means -- [chuckles] that means that meaning is -- Like, the technical philosophical term here, it's normative.

It involves not just how things are, but how things should be, how you ought to behave.

It involves you correcting yourself, improving yourself.

It involves aspiration in that sense.

Meaning, because it's inherently normative -- right?

-- it has two things on it.

You have to aspire, and that means it also has to be shareable so other people can correct you.

So if I make spirituality just what I want or prefer and I am the sole judge, that's like the person who says, "I will just use words however I wish, and that is what makes them meaningful."

And Wittgenstein's point is, "No, you will actually rob them of all possible meaning."

You don't -- It's a category mistake.

You don't fundamentally understand how meaning works.

Let's call this the horizontal dimension, like the face-to-face, and how important it is to get that.

And Hartmut Rosa, in his book "Why Democracy Needs Religion," talks about religion trains what he calls sacred listening, holy listening.

It teaches you to listen in a way that you're open and vulnerable to being transformed.

And he says if democracy loses that, democracy is dead.

So, I totally agree with that.

But I don't want to lose something that you put your finger on that I think also matters, which is a vertical dimension, a dimension to transcendence.

And what's interesting is how much the hard science is making us realize how much that matters to our cognition and to our sense of who we are.

We need something that both connects this way and gets that reciprocal opening I was talking about, but also connects us this way and gets a reciprocal opening that way.

And they need each other.

In fact, one of the great proposals of Plato is that our humanity is held best when we hold on to the fact that we are both capable of transcendence and we're finite and limited.

If we just hold on to this, we can fall into despair or be subject to tyranny.

And if we just hold on to this, we become inflationary and then we become tyrants.

But if we hold the two together, then we properly inhabit our humanity richly and deeply with each other and towards something that transcends us.

'Cause if you ask people their best way of talking about meaning in life, the metaphor that they predominantly use is, "I want to be connected to something bigger than myself."

Now, they don't mean physically larger.

If I chain you to a mountain, you don't go, "Yeah, that's it.

That's what my life's been missing."

The metaphor's like this.

This is why enlightenment and awakening are used.

When you're in a dream world, it seems real to you.

You're in this little world.

But when you wake up, when the lights go on, you come to a bigger world.

And that perspective allows you to see what was limiting and wrong in the previous world.

You realize, in both senses of the word, more.

That's that transcendent dimension.

We need that, too, because we're coming to the realization that reality is so complex.

Like, it's combinatorially explosive in the amount of information available to you, right?

And it contains real uncertainty -- not just risk -- real uncertainty because it's dynamic.

It's out there making new stuff that you don't know about yet.

And it's really ill-defined.

You don't quite know how properly to frame it or to orient towards it.

That's how reality always is.

And we have this task of trying to always map that large world into a smaller world, but keep constantly correcting our smaller world that we're living in against the larger world, or we become foolish or insane.

So I just want to bring that that transcendent dimension, that vertical dimension, and the horizontal dimension -- both need to be answered together in this question, "Could we replace that functionality that has been lost with religion?"

-My many non-religious friends will look on in bemusement.

And they say, "That's good that you have this thing."

People who aren't my friends will say either, "I don't need somebody to tell me what to do to live right," or, "I don't need a crutch."

-Mm.

-And those two ways of seeing I think are very much part of an age where we do think that we know a lot, that we can make things happen in the world, and find out even more.

So that opening up to transcendence, to supernatural propositions about the world, would be a crutch.

It would be me or anyone else admitting that they need something to hold them up.

I wonder if knowing so much has lulled us into this idea that, in fact, we don't need anything.

-Yeah, that's the ideal of Kant, from the heart of the enlightenment -- autonomy.

Autonomy was the radical proposal.

Autonomy was what was proposed as the alternative to authority, which was a sort of, "All of the Middle Ages was governed by authority, and we are governed by autonomy."

Yes, that is the flag of modernity.

The problem with it is there's two issues.

One, it's just scientifically false.

So, it's the presumption that, "Well, I believe what I believe because of my reason and my understanding, and that's why I'm X or Y."

And if you look at the research -- by the way, done by atheists, rights?

-- that's not what predicts if somebody's an atheist or religious.

That's not.

What's called "analytic thought" doesn't predict being atheist.

There's weird, in fact, counter cases.

In the UK, having a propensity to greater analytic thought is actually correlated with being more religious.

What predicts what you are, are what are called credible people, people in your life that seem to be seeing more, understanding more in a way that you come to trust.

So you start to imitate them and internalize them.

So, if you have a lot of those credible people in your life that are religious, you'll be religious.

Same thing for being an atheist, right?

So, first of all, we like to pretend that we are sort of autonomous and self-governing, but that's not actually how we work because there's good evolutionary reasons for that.

Look, look at me.

Look at me as an individual animal.

I am pathetic.

I teeter around on two legs, exposing all my vital organs to predators far and wide.

Look at my fierce claws.

Look at my -- I'm useless.

But you get a bunch of us together, and we can coordinate our behavior and cooperate and get some pointy sticks and some dogs, and we can kill everything on the planet.

That's our superpower.

Our superpower is our ability to plug into distributed networks.

Way before the internet released the power of distributed computation, culture released the power of distributed cognition.

That's our superpower.

And to say that, you know, it's a crutch, it's like, "Well, wait, you --" Again, the data is overwhelming.

You and I -- I'm including myself -- we are really pathetically bad at picking up on our own self-deception.

You take individual people, smart, students.

We've been doing this since the 1960s.

You give them a standard reasoning task, the Wason selection task.

90% of them show confirmation bias, motivated reasoning.

You replace that with four people that can talk to each other cooperatively, and the success rate goes from 10% to 84%, reliably.

Is that a crutch?

I don't think having a scientifically validated, powerful, reliable way of overcoming my self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior is a crutch.

That is me being rational.

That is me orienting to what's most real and reliable.

-But to get that value across... -Yes.

-...would mean being willing to say to people, "It's not weakness to need somebody else."

-Right.

And, you know, what price are we paying for the alternative?

The number of close friends that people have is measurably, reliably going down decade by decade.

The UK has set up this Orwellian thing, the Ministry of Loneliness.

It sounds like something out of "1984."

-"Mini-Lone."

-Like, that's the price we're paying.

And loneliness is as destructive of your health as smoking.

-So, it might, for a lot of people, take some strength to admit they need other people.

-You see, these three things -- these three things are circling around each other when we're talking about the love of wisdom.

There's obviously wonder.

There's love.

But bound up with that is humility and reverence.

There's no way to do this in which it doesn't sound performative, but I aspire to really trying to cultivate humility because I have learned how much I am prone to foolish, self-destructive behavior that is like a loose cannon in a China shop -- sorry for the mixed metaphor -- that smashes into other people's lives.

And I don't want to do that anymore.

And experimentally, the people who can hold on to and admit to their failures and be open to correction are the people that actually demonstrate more insight, more creativity, more ability to solve problems.

-You have endorsed as a project -- or as they call it in Canada, "a pro-ject"... -[ Laughs ] -...the idea of enlightenment.

-Yes.

-And in normal discourse, we talk about enlightenment as this big, exalted, hard-to-achieve thing.

How do you get that idea out there that enlightenment can be for everybody, or at least more of everybody than it seems to be for right now?"

-You -- you, all of us -- you have basic cognitive capacities for insight, right?

You've all had it.

"Oh!

Oh!

I thought she was angry, but she's afraid."

And everything shifts, and you get that sense, that "aha," and you connect.

Or you get, oh, "that's how those things are connected."

You get that insight.

We're all capable of that.

And notice -- notice you don't just wait for an insight.

But neither do you manufacture an insight.

You have to prepare yourself and let it take on a life of its own.

You have to resonate with it.

You can get the flow experience.

Across cultures, language groups, gender, socioeconomic status, political orientation, all the things that divide us, people describe being able to get into the flow state.

And they describe it almost exactly the same at the level of detail.

It's a true universal.

And what do they report?

It's both optimal performance and optimal experience.

They're working at their very best.

There's a cottage industry about athletes and musicians trying to figure out how they can make themselves more prone to the flow state.

And it's optimal experience.

My stepson does rock climbing.

Like, rock climbing sounds like something from Greek mythology as a torture, right?

"You!

Climb up that rock face.

You're gonna hurt yourself.

You're gonna be exhausted.

You might fall down and hurt yourself really badly.

And once you're to the top, come back down."

It sounds like the most futile thing.

And we've studied this.

Why do people do that?

-Hero's journey.

-Well, the hero's journey -- -Self-test.

-Yes.

And I'm not disagreeing with that.

That is a narrative we give, but what state is engendering in them?

It's the flow state.

They feel this state of -- and this is the language that's used -- profound "at-one"-ment.

They feel deeply connected.

They are oriented.

They know where to go.

The world seems clear and super salient.

There's a sense of that reciprocal opening happening between them.

Like, if you're a martial artist, like I am, and you're sparring, your hand just goes up and the block is there and you see the opening and you punch.

This is the flow state.

Another way of understanding enlightenment is that meta skill of orienting to reality that best orients what's deepest in you to what's deepest in the world in that reciprocally opening way so you have the ability to zero in on what's relevant or important.

And because everybody can flow and because everybody has insights and they're on a continuum, enlightenment isn't over there.

It's already in you.

The machinery is already there.

-We've talked about loneliness.

We've talked about a crisis of meaning, difficulties in interpersonal relationships.

At scale... can a society be sick?

-Oh, yes.

Most of our problem solving is done by participating -- and I just mentioned participatory knowing -- participating in these complex, self-organizing systems that we belong to.

And there's increasing evidence that there's a collective intelligence for that network that is above and beyond just summing our individual intelligences together.

So, for example -- This is one of Ed Hutchins' famous example.

Well, who steers a ship, an ocean liner?

No one person.

It's a whole bunch of people working dynamically together with a whole bunch of equipment 'cause they're dealing with this really big thing, the ship, on this even really big thing, the ocean.

You need the power of that collective intelligence.

That's who actually navigates the ship.

Well, the ship of state needs to be properly navigated by a collective intelligence.

And democracy was supposed to be the education and the enculturation of that collective intelligence aligned with science.

But we have lost -- we have lost what makes it work, to my mind.

And I'm not just talking about the United States.

I'm talking about the West.

Look, remember what I said earlier.

Democracy and science both work on, "You can catch my bias better than I can, and I can catch your bias better than you can.

And although we'll disagree, we will both agree that, more important than our positions, we have to commit to mutually correcting each other with respect and vulnerability.

You need that opponent processing.

We have replaced it with adversarial processing.

"I have to win because there's a zero-sum amount here.

The only mark of me winning is me destroying you."

Once you put people in that framework, they rapidly tit-for-tat down to the lowest common denominator, towards the most brutal kind of existence."

That is where democracy is heading.

And I'm not talking about any political party here.

I'm Canadian, for Pete's sake.

The point I'm making is, the dynamic, the dynamic that democracy needs, that holy listening that Rosa talked about, about bound up with a commitment to the education, the cultivation of wisdom, both individually and collectively, has been lost.

We are in trouble, and that is not going to be solved by the glorious victory of one side or another because glorious victories are markers of exactly the wrong grammar that we need in order to solve things like this crisis of meaning, the wisdom famine, the fact that we're not properly, deeply orienting people.

People feel adrift.

They feel bound between burnout and boredom.

All of that, we're not gonna be able to address it, let alone the major existential threats that we're facing.

-So, how do we start the long march back to what, at various points in this conversation, it almost sounds like we're both agreeing we used to have the knack and we somehow don't have the knack anymore.

-Um... We don't need a political or economic change.

We need a cultural change.

And you don't change cultures by introducing new legislation.

You don't change cultures by tweaking your market.

So, here's a clear example.

The Roman Empire in late antiquity goes through a major change, a change that's actually gonna preserve at least one half of it against a titanic catastrophe.

It's gonna become the Byzantine Empire, and that's gonna go on for like another -- literally another thousand years.

Well, what was that change?

Well, it was the emergence of Christianity.

I'm not here arguing for Christianity.

Neither am I opposed to it.

But notice what Christianity did.

It created a network of homes long before there was churches.

Christianity is about this new way of being.

It's this idea of that agape.

Agape is this -- it's a different kind of love.

Agape is the love you have for a child.

It's like -- It's the closest we come to, like, a godlike power.

You bring home this being from the hospital.

And if you love them well, you turn them into a person.

It's like, if I could stare at your chair in the right way, I could turn it into a Ferrari or something like that.

It's a power, and what the Christians said is, "Okay, we can create home communities around this, and we can offer this, this way of agape.

Come, everyone, here that the Roman Empire is saying is a non-person.

All the women, even Roman women, all the slaves, all the sick, all the widowed.

The aristocrats leave during the plagues.

The Christians stay.

Imagine that.

Here are these homes that are offering you, "We can turn you from non-persons back into persons living," as Saint Paul called it, "the most excellent way."

They weren't trying to build.

They were awaiting a new world to come.

They didn't perhaps realize that they were actually building a subculture that eventually would become so attractive to so many people that it changed everything.

That's the kind of change we need to make.

And the thing I want to say, Ray, is that's happening.

I have met so many of these emerging communities of practice where people can come and do something analogous of going from, you know, non-persons, people that are drifting or disoriented or struggling.

They want to have more authenticity, all of that.

And they have whole entire ecologies of practices, dialogical practices, reflective practices, mindfulness practices, movement practices.

And they're springing up all over the world.

And they're starting to all talk to each other.

"Try out this way of life and see if you are better living this way."

We're at the stage, I think, where those home churches were at the beginning of what's gonna become the Christian revolution.

And this is a dangerous thing I'm talking about.

We're at a kairos.

That's a Greek word for the turning point in history, and it can go one way or the other.

And kairos moments are important because, in kairos, the structures that have held the world in place are breaking down.

Individuals can make a difference.

But they're also dangerous times because it also means there's a lot of manipulative charlatans and bad players and bad-faith actors out there.

That's why -- That's why this journey can't be undertaken independent from the cultivation of wisdom, individually and collectively, They need each other.

You need to find such a community to cultivate your wisdom and virtue, but you need to be cultivating wisdom and virtue in order to properly find them.

-So, it sounds like, for all the gloomy diagnostics, you still think we have a shot.

-I do.

I think there's something at work.

There's things stirring.

There's cultural possibilities.

I don't think the universe is fating us to go that way.

Our civilization can collapse.

Civilizations have collapsed before.

If that's the case, then I hold out this final last hope.

I want to be kind of like Augustine, like, as the barbarians are literally at the gates, writing "The City of God."

I hope this is not too arrogant.

I don't mean it that way.

But I want to be lighting those candles that could be carried into the -- right?

-- and speed things up for recovering when things perhaps fall apart.

So, this is how I -- This is, at least, the story I tell myself when I put my head on the pillow at night.

-John Vervaeke a great pleasure.

Thanks for joining us.

-Thank you.

Ray.

This was a great pleasure for me.