Ep. 9 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Insight 

We can only hope these blow up as well as the Peterson lectures.

Thanks so much for all the great professors who share their lectures online with people who don’t want to drown in student loan or didn’t have the chance to go to university

This man just scientifically described my spiritual reality.

Powerful work. This year, I am watching one episode per week. I am only on week 9 and I have already decided to re-enroll in university. Finishing my degree in Theatre but going to double Major in Philosophy, and hoping to one day make connections between the Performing Arts, the Shamanistic Traditions, and Western Philosophy. Wish me luck, y'all

Bravo sir! As someone who has had a psychedelic revelatory experience, and has been on a lifelong quest for meaning ever since, your clarity of expression in these talks is resonating right through me. Inspirational.

Dear John. Greetings from Nairobi, Kenya. Thank you for your lectures. I am learning so so much as I have been on the path of searching for meaning in my life esp now that my two children have left the nest. Namaste

I’m watching these in order, and so far, I think what makes John most deserved of making his living as a professor is his ability to sew ideas across lectures, weaving back and forth between concepts without ever compromising his arch of 30+ lecturers.

The best explanation and description of mindfulness that I've ever come across. Thanks again.

Contemplating your t-o/ F-G model in the early morning hours, i had one of the strongest awakenings of my life. 5-10 minutes pure non-duality nothingness & fullness. I saw that i am everything and life will go on forever (pure conciousness can‘t die). There was no fear of death or any fear at all. Thanks man, your teaching is a blessing!

These lectures deserve to be a framework for a social protocol to replace the void of outdated religious paradigms.

John, this is such an incredible series. Thank you sooo much. The depth you provide, all perfectly explained with so much passion. Simply incredible. This gets better and better. Love from Germany

Just astonishingly rich and deep. I've been practising Buddhism for five years but never appreciated all the ways it works as much as I do after watching these last two episodes.

This was such an insightful lecture. This series is blowing my mind. I can feel both anxiety and exhiliration. Thank you, John!

Best one yet

This series is AMAZING. Priceless. Thank god I found you, Mr Vervaeke.

This is the best christmas present I ever got. Thank you, John, you are a mindblowing lecturer!

Wow! We live in an optimized state of flowing relationship between meditation and contemplation. @JohnVervaeke lays out the most powerfully explanatory and insightful description of mindfulness that I have ever encountered. Brilliant work!

Mr. Vervaeke, I am a computer engineer from India. I am also deeply interested in psychology and philosophy. This series is inestimably insightful for me. I am very grateful for your efforts. It is really helping me understand a lot. I have been practicing meditation for last six years and this is the first time that I get an scientific explanation for mindfulness. Thank You very much and keep up the good work.

Thank you so much for doing this John :) I am a former student of yours who has been missing your teaching! All the best

This is one of my favourite lessons yet. Interestingly enough, as a person without any training in and little experience of meditation, I experienced this at-oneness whilst having a deeply profound psychedelic experience in which I was flowing between the perspective of the Universe, my consciousness, and the "world" of natural laws and (sub)atomic particles, led by my breathing. In and out. It was a wonderful experience I still bring with me after all those years, though it can be hard to "remember" that kind of being. The most effective (non-psychedelic) way to remember that state is by getting into a flow of intense physical exercise.

If each of this series' episodes was delivered in a different language, I'd learn all of them.

This one gave me words for something I didn't know I'd been exploring :) thank you

To not just repeat all the praise here about the importance of these talks and how beautifully they are woven together, I wanna point out for a minute the astonishing fact that this is all done with a board, a pen and a cup which makes it even more precious and special

This was the hardest one for me to grasp but after re watching i think its because, its the most abstract. Can't believe how illuminating these are. Amazing job man!

So profound! Thank you Doctor.

god-like teaching

Non Dual Tantrik Yoga ( Hareesh Wallis) brought me here. Effing wonderful . Thank you sir

This, like everything else I've watched or read on the topic, is clear as mud.

As a practitioner of mindfulness and a daily meditator this was right in my wheelhouse. I’ve had a psychedelic mystical experience and that was the last time I did them. The awakening that I had made such an impact that was the last time I partook.

Thank you John for providing a path to wisdom.

I'm grateful this is public. I'm going to have to watch this one a few times. I'm so stoked about a thing I miss some details at the beginning of the next. Thank you so much for everything you've put in to this. It is excellent.

Wowww, thank you John... it "means" a lot

John next to the songs and poetry of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen your talks are the best things to come out of Canada. A BIG THANK YOU JOHN!

Once again, Thank you!

This series is amazing. My university experience has been lacking, to say the least.

This talk was amazing, and I will return to it again and again. Thank you, John (& team) for setting this feast-like table for us to learn.

John, you give lectures in the 'flow state'. And that's what makes the adoption of insights and ideas so receptive and open. Thank you for all your inspiring work!

I AM AWAKE!

So much to learn, to explore, yet only a life time. Truly awakening!

Wow... Gonna do a repeat listen right away!

You magnificent, glorious, super flowing Master. Viva the Ver. Viva!

just returned to this lecture couple of months later. wow! i find it the best of the series so far. the idea of continuum between pure consciousness event and flow is such a revolutionary connection, at least for me. and the relation to meaning. thank you John!

I had a profound realisation when you were talking about how altered states can feel more real than the waking state. It's hard to put into words what that realisation was, as trying to rationalise and conceptualise it is like trying to grab a puff of smoke. What I think is at the heart of these experiences feeling more real than our objective reality is in surrendering the concept of 'self'. Nothing feels more real than the absence of 'self'.

love this episode so much to unpack and you have done a fabulous job of it

This is it. This is what the powers that be do not want the masses to hear.

The more I study these lectures the better they get! Amazing!

John, your lectures are fantastic. I've struggled with nihilsm since my teens and your way of communicating meaning is brilliant.

These explanations are just brilliant. Thank you!

When i was a kid my uncle would give me little challenges like the 9 dots: i think that's what got me solving problems; I leaned it was the think to do.

thank you for this wonderful series. Just by way of clarification, the word that has been commonly translated from Sanskrit/Pali to English as "meditation" is bhāvanā, and does not mean "moving to the center", but cultivating, developing, producing; it is very important to understand the term bhavana when referring to Buddhist systems of "meditation."

What the hell was that! WOAH that was good. I'm speechless...

During my second year of university I had what I can only describe as a psychedelic experience brought about by a shamanic meditation session. To this day, the insights I gained from that session are something I go back to and draw meaning from.

I was practically living this lecture 4 years ago as it was published. It captures my experiences and outcomes of the experiences quite accurately and lends me deeper appreciation for my meaning recovery process. Beautiful

I have no words for this it just hit me straight to my soul. It threw me into an altered state of conciousness. I've heard people calling him Jesus now I see that this is an appropriate comparison. Peterson bridged the gap between science and religion and Vervaeke is leading the path to awakening. These are miraculos times.

To have cracked 'enlightenment' through a scientific lens? Pure genius. I love how many of these concepts resonate with my design training and what I taught pre-architecture students about design principles and design process. Bravo John - already in this episode this series has deepened the understanding of my own path of awakening and gives me precise distinctions that I can employ in the 'coaching' I now do. May we all help each other awaken!!

Absolutely amazing. The most meaningful and insightful lecture i have ever witnessed. It connected so many different dots for me. Thank you so much!

I came to these lectures from Jonathan Pageau's work. I'll be honest, the instant you talked about mystical experiences in breaking down and building up frames, I thought of the Jesus Prayer, and how it combines the two. The moment you mentioned a combination of the two states (divine darkness) was pure synchronicity.

Hooked on these almost as much as the Peterson lectures! Maybe even more! Thank you so much for this brilliant content!

Came across your work from your podcast with Peterson. Cannot thank you enough for the work you do sir, it is so astounding, I can’t turn this series off. Thank you🙏🏼

Today I learned the word “gestalt”. Very cool series btw! I excited to see where you go with all this.

40:30 Bravo! Best sound bite on *actual* Awakening practice I've heard in ages. Similar to Jhana teacher Shaila Catherine's book title, "Wisdom Wide AND Deep"

Man, this is special, so far this series has been like the glue thats making sense of and expanding upon all my thoughts...

So entirely grateful for you, everything you share and the wisdom you so kindly give out. Thank you deeply.

That was exceptional.

SWEET Balm NURTURES MY HEART ❤ SOUL. MUCH APPRECIATED

WOW..that was amazing John! Clear and concise. I have embrace east/west practice through Self Realization fellowship for many years and feeling stuck with the techniques i looked for other ways/language to help me understand. Your lecture was brilliant! It is like i have xray vision with techniques being explained now. I want to watch this one again and look forward to your other sessions! Big thanks from your hometown Hamilton. Well done!

Wow, such clarity, you are a blessing John to share your gift for us all.. Thank you!

Thank you John for these lectures! I grew up in the christian church, and while I'm no longer a christian I absolutely crave these aspects of spirituality, meaning, and philosophical insight :). I've been trying to quit nicotine for four years now and I'm hoping your reflection of transformation will help. Keep up the great work, I'm excited to explore the mine of intellectual wealth you've carved out for us!

The descriptions of awakening are closely aligned with an experience diagnosed as a manic episode. True, it came at the end of 3 continuous 24 hours of non-sleep...This was nearly 30 years ago and today I am floundering in the Meaning Crisis. I can't help but wonder if my trajectory would have changed dramatically if my experience had not been written off as "delusions of god-hood"....It took me many years to appreciate that I did need intervention and I ended up writing off my experience as well. I have trouble meditating. I hope I am not now too old for this shit. Peace out.

To make a mechanistic understanding of attention and insight suddenly makes understanding why psychedelics tend to produce insight very easy. Fascinating lecture.

I wish you had to comment if you dislike a video. Great work, thanks for that Q&A and these seminars.

After some years of practicing meditation, only after watching this lecture I finally realised what I was trying to do. Vervaeke has increased the possibilities of those who practice meditation exponentially with this video. Because from this one on you meditate with insight.

Thank you so much for sharing these lectures on RU-vid! They are so enlightening and enriching. 🙏

These lectures are great-I will now spend the rest of my week looking forward to the next one. Thanks!

“ I am AWAKE” “He moves from talking about an identity he can HAVE to a fundamental way of BEING.” We need this understanding and mentality more then ever. As part of the meaning crisis I see our current culture trying to answer meaning by engaging in an identity crisis. But it is the wrong frame of reference, we should be looking into ourselves and our way of being. Brilliant stuff here.

Man im so grateful for this series!!

I love how this episode makes your meditation course more meaningful, and how your meditation course gives this episode deeper meaning, how it makes it come alive. Makes one almost grateful for the other crisis.

Polymath Park Notes Focal awareness/explicit awareness. Attention is “from-to”. Attention through subsidiary awareness into focal awareness. He gives the example of the tapping experiment, where we tap on a “probe” or object with our eyes closed, shifting our focus from how the object feels, the mental/visual image we create when trying to analyze the object with our finger, to how our finger and hand feels, to how the texture feels, and so on. He says “the spotlight metaphor is missing all of this, the layered, recursive, dynamic structuring that’s going on” I’d like to pause here and acknowledge the accuracy of this statement, but also how important the “spotlight metaphor” is in neuroscience. Neuroscience uses this metaphor to describe what’s occurring when we activate acetylcholine in the brain when we focus. There are various means by which we may narrow our focus, and indeed put a “spotlight” on a certain part of the brain, sending acetylcholine and adrenaline to a specific area to get the most out of our focus. Granted, this type of focus is best for learning and memorizing, and there are various ways that neurobiologist/opthamologist Andrew Huberman talks about on his recent podcast “Huberman Lab” that goes into detail on how to physically narrow one’s peripheral vision, which is quite useful in getting “deep work” done, or retaining focus on writing and reading for extensive periods. A big part of this is acknowledging the ultradian rhythms, learning in 90-minute bouts and taking 20 minute NSDR routines, or “Non-Sleep Deep Rest” protocols, such as meditation/naps. Meditation means “moving towards the center” Much of what we do in life is experiencing the world through our sensations, meditation is looking at our sensations. Meditation emphasizes scaling down, contemplation emphasizes scaling up. . . . . . . . . . Connect the 9 dots with 4 straight lines. We think categorically, so we assume there should be boxes here, or that we can’t go outside the square. This breaks up the gestalt. Literally thinking outside the “box” hehe. A kind of mystical experience afforded by meditation is “non-duality” - “Prajna” This is the state that allows for a comprehensive capacity for insight, allowing to fully examine the “guts of the ‘agent-arena’ relationship” Often people return from psychedelic states of consciousness as “more real than the real world”, whereas when we’re high or drunk, we refer to those states as “not real, not my real self” Samantha Heinzelman has researched these altered states, and their potential for increasing insight. Though this seems quite obvious to me neuroscientifically and through personal experience: the activation of serotonin and oxytocin providing a sense of satiation, satisfaction, and gratitude line up quite well with the experiences reported. LA Paul - Transformative experience book. SUMMARY: Meditation provides Modal insight, agent-arena relationship focus, alleviates existential distress, affordance of enhanced meaning. “Attention involves an ability to engage in a transparency-opacity shift, also breaking down a gestal into features, scaling down, and an ability to scale-up, by looking more deeply into reality. In mindfulness meditation we’re practicing scaling down to break inappropriate framing and scaling up to make better framing, and how engaging the flow-state shows us how to optimize our capacity for much more comprehensive insight. [If we can] integrate [resonant at-onement] we can bring about prajna, a non-duality which would be potentially transformative of the agent-arena relationship.” Higher states of consciousness can bring about these radical kinds of transformative experiences.

Thank You!

I know I'm going to have to re-watch this series once I'm through. This pushes the limits of my thinking, and I'm sure I haven't gotten everything out of this that I can. I'll also have to re-watch some JP lectures.

Sati/ Satie- that's intentional, yes?

Fell on to these a year ago and I'm back again. Just brilliant.

How well and how frequent the initial concepts come back and play in order to create the full picture is really and truly astounding.

Muchísimas Gracias. So far these lectures have been the most thrilling I’ve attended in any way.

Vervaeke's lectures are truly golden!

I feel this is great for the complete integration of so many different topics. Love this and learning more about myself at same time. This is gold .

Great lecture. It reminds me of how the two wings of enlightenment; Wisdom and compassion are cultivated together. The pursuit of wisdom through vipassana helps us cut to the ultimate reality of emptiness and see the interdependence of all phenomena including our primordial purity. As we flow back to the conventional reality we are reminded of our spontaneous presence. We see that we are embodied beings living in a world of karma and we must develop compassion (skillful means) to overcome cyclic existence. Tying these two realities together requires that our mind and heart are equally engaged. This is Dzogchen: the pinnacle of all Buddhist practice. Love to hear your thoughts on Dzogchen practice. Would love to collaborate with you on some of your research. I work in child adolescent psychiatry in NY.

Spirituality saved me from myself. I had severe OCD and depression for about 1.5 years. Then I went to a doctor( general family doctor), he told me he also had OCD and understood my problem really well. He prescribed me prozac( the lowest dose possible) and the main thing that he did was told me to practice mindfulness, get exercise and eat healthy. Mindfulness was a game changer. I took that Prozac for only about like 2-2.5 months, then I stopped. And I could feel that my OCD was receding. This saved me. But I think that people who haven't really suffered enough do not show much interest in it. But people need to do this so that they don't suffer too much when that time actually comes in their life. The work that Prof. Vervaeke is doing is of paramount importance. It is the epitome of helping human kind. Integrating science and spirituality is not an easy task because of spirituality having all its irrational notions.

Contemplation, meditation, *detemplation* ? I lke it!

Hands down the most incredible explanation of meditation I have ever seen.

What is it about Canada? all these enlightened beings from this one place! Many thanks again.🙏🏻

I don't understand why this series isn't more popular.

I absolutely appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄 so much respect for the work you put into this for the whole world

What an utterly brilliant description of meditation.

Fantastic lecture series, makes my Fridays. So thrilled to listen to a cognitive science approach that integrates such a variety of theories of knowledge. From various religions, buddhism, mysticism, and our modern secular attempt to rename these ideas and practices, Mr. Vervaeke is a perfect accompaniment to the public intellectual superstars that are emerging from alternate media ("intellectual dark web"). Such gratitude to Jordan Peterson, Jonathon Haidt, Jonathon Pageau, Eric and Brett Weinstein, and many others for re framing both contemporary and ancient knowledge with such careful attention and integration.

Thank you so much for all of your research and for providing these free and insightful lectures. I became aware of the meaning crisis for the first time after reading Nietzsche and understanding what he meant by the Death of God. My path took me from there to exploring the various forms of Buddhism and also Advaita Vedanta, and yes, I have been fortunate enough to experience the 'states' of consciousness you spoke of in the lecture, and they do make life better and more meaningful. Your lectures have helped me to renew my interest in Platonism - I started reading Arthur Verslius' book Platonic Mysticism today - and I can definitely recommend it to anyone watching this. Your lectures also helped me to a much greater appreciation of Artisotle and Socrates. I realized how much of an Aristotelean I am even though I did not know it. Your lectures are sending me back home to the west now even though I am now living in the east. I am looking forward to the rest of the series. Thanks again!

Wow! This one had me on the edge of my seat!! 🤯 I can't wait to work my way through the rest! I'm actually digging his angry delivery now as well! 😂

Beautiful explanation of meditation. Having spent a couple weeks total in seated meditation, this is one of the greatest intellectual explanations of meditation I have witnessed! Thank you again John for such wonderful work!

Thank you