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Epic indeed. John, please allow me to let you know that your lectures in this series so far are sacred to me.

Thank you for these lectures.

Summary: Sacredness is the place of RR that holds meta-meaning by meta-assimilation, worldview attunment, and home against horror; and meta-accommodation of the numinous which exposes us to horror of our limitation. And the birth of sacredness comes from the connection between mythos (pattern), ritual (enactive anagoge), story (perspectival, participatory knowing), and symbols (participatory inferences that are transjective, transgressive, ecstatic, participatory, integrative-anagogic, and complex). And The Sacred is the experience of the inexhaustibility of reality and the RR that is coupled with it, between the combinatorially explosive nature of reality and your ever-growing RR (both unsignifiable and a no-thingness of framing).

This is one of the best descriptions of Right View from the Noble Eightfold Path that I have ever head / read. Thank you.

Dr John, you deeply DEEPLY resonate some of the defining Jewish atitude to knowing the divine. Especially Kaballistic thought. Endless process of discovery. Nothing you can "grasp" or define or have (which will just be an idol) but being in a living growing journey. As knowing the mystery of the reality itself is an endless process of recriprocal discovery what is 'out there' is not an object, but a subject, g-d. I'm humbled by you lectures. Thank you very much

John, 35 episodes in and each one so rich in insight. That you have been able produce this is a tribute to all the years of exploration that has gone into this. So much of what you are expressing is linking many incomplete threads of my own explorations. I’m so grateful to you for your work. And to those who helped you share it.

REALITY = No thingness. The Framing can never transcend REALITY. That's some deep stuff. Thank you, Professor

The last 6 mins of this is precious. A gentle reprieve from the 'horror' of some of the previous episodes. Thank you for awakening a reframe of my relevance realization macinery. I was nearly a zombie on several participatory levels. I didn't know.

So very grateful fore this lectures. I finde it deaply explanatory and transformativ. In my circles there are a saying that, there are no chemical solution to a spiritual problem. A spiritual experience transformed my life and made my go from addiction and homeless nes to a god life. A have been trying to explain and understand that experience since. This series both helped my to explain it better and deepens the experience. Thank you John

Everyone interested in Vipassana or meditation at all needs to see your tutorial. I like the way you tied together this complex dynamic with the example of the symbol of the cross. It activated my RR ;^)

Excellent as usual, but the last ten minutes were just superb. A lot to think about...

Dear Lord, how do you come up with all this? How do you succeed in formulating AND lecturing it? Now I am in awe... for real.

Boom! Mike drop at the end of this episode. Thank you once again John for these amazing lectures - I am transformed again and again - and waking up from a lot of BS in the process. They feel very sacred. ;-)

John, this is a beautiful and mind awakening lecture! Thank you. Yes I see experiencing sacredness as an ongoing pilgrimage.

John, your explanation for the utility of following the breath during meditation is helping enhance my participation of it. Feels now like I can invite or allow insight. Thank you.

Just after this episode I read the following section in Jung’s “Red Book” from the chapter “Instruction” from “Liber Primus”, in which he discovers transformation through the symbol. Some quotes: “I do not myself become the supreme meaning or the symbol, but the symbol becomes in me such that it has substance and I mine.” “But insofar as it takes place in me, and I am part of the world, it also takes place through me in the world, and no one can hinder it. It doesn’t take place according to the way of my will but in the way of unavoidable effect.” “Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other (…)” What a coincidence to be reading this just now, after watching. Thank you for this amazing frame breaking series. I can’t stop watching, it’s become super salient to me 😊

Wow! This episode was loaded with insight. Plato, relevance realization, mythos, religio, the four P's...everything is really coming together. Thank you for sharing.

Thank you for describing awe and horror in such a practical way. I keep having dreams that I would describe as "true horror" which follows your definition of the demand of an unachievable accommodation. That's exactly what they are.

Thank you thank you Dr Vervaeke!!

Wow. This episode was very powerful. I've been following this series for a while as I had a hunch that there's something special about what John is doing here. As a philosopher with a strong interest in semiotics and the power of symbols and myth, I was deeply moved by the way John envisions sacred symbols as deeply participatory and ways of engaging at a meta-level with the very process of meaning-making itself. I have the feeling that this is a key point in the series and I'm going to be watching this episode again to really absorb it. Thank you John for putting so much work into this series. It's paying off for me at the very least.

I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄

Coming back to this series for the third year in a row, hoping to glean some deeper wisdom. And then towards the end feeling the same way as Vervaeke when he describes Plato.

Right as I was about to comment on the "Essence of Relevance" the professor addressed the issue. This series could not be anymore complete and inclusive.

Thanks John.

"there is no essence to relevance" now entering holons from ken wilbers intergral theory. love the work john.

Thank you so much, John Vervaeke!

15:30 The Breath & Impermanence ( Using the breath as a symbol to see into my Impermanence) 21:00 Using the breath to gain insight 23:00 Symbols are capable of affording Anagoge 28:00 A symbol helps you to stand beyond yourself (Ekstatic)

Symbols: (29:00) "They're integrating you together, they're integrating a new world together, and they're integrating that new world together as they're integrating you together in an integrative fashion."

My friend and I used to have these long conversations, they'd be about various different topics, and often they wouldn't be related in any way, but we would always come to the conclusion that we were "coming to the same conclusion", or we were "talking about the same thing" over and over again. Yet every conversation was novel and infinitely worth having. It was exhilarating and our absolute favorite thing to do. We often compared it to copulation and giving birth. I've been watching these videos and I keep being reminded of those days, and I'm not very good at explaining things well, but I feel that what we were doing had alot to do with what you're talking about. It felt extremely meaningful, and has given my life much of it's purpose to this day. The feeling that we can describe small mundane things and their relation to other things, and see those patterns reverberated in uncountable other "ways", make analogies between things that have no business being analagous, and tearing apart things that seem elemental, to see the mundane in the divine, the divine in the mundane, and everything in between. And the patterns that somehow seem both infinite in number and infinitely important at the same time.

Thank You Very Much!

Thank you so MUCH For releasing this video. It was BEAUTIFUL! And I absolutely needed to hear it right now.

Wow. Excellent end to this episode. The statement ‘Reality transcends your framing’ seems so obvious in hindsight. Rather than searching for reality I should shift my perspective to the process of constant transcendence.

The cartoon heart is generally considered symbolic of the metaphorical, poetic heart, and of feeling and giving love. Attachment science suggests people can only give the kind of love that they have received around some degree, though this can also be healed to some degree-- so feeling loved comes before giving love. Wisdom produces meaning but seems meaningless without feeling sufficiently loved. So it seems feeling loved may be more of a necessity for the production of meaning than wisdom at least on some sufficient or baseline level, and likewise feeling loved to some degree produces wisdom, which produces meaning, by providing the emotional security for the exploration of the potentially harmful unknown where wisdom appears to hide. This video suggests keeping symbols in our consciousness and/or contemplating them has profound effects on our life, with differing effects depending on the symbol. The symbol most associated with feeling loved is the cartoon heart. So this video has convinced me, as a heterosexual adult male, that I need to decorate places or objects I see often with cartoon hearts, like a teenage girl, in order to probabilistically increase my relationship to the metaphorical, poetic heart, to increase the love, wisdom, and meaning in my life. These thoughts alongside the thought that I consider feeling loved to be a deeper expression of flow, mindfulness, and meditation, it presently seems probable, to me, that the cartoon heart and renditions of it might be the symbol that most human beings need most, in their everyday awareness.

It is seeming more evident that this course would exist in a literal equivolent of a "Hogwartian" post-secondary education system. True knowledge that can ideally and hopefully generate wisdom/wizardry.

This lecture was nice and calming 😌

Blown away! One of the best episodes so far!

Wow! Just wow. Thank you for this series. Mind blown.

Although sometimes I don’t understand what you’re saying, I deeply want to follow these series because I find something relevant to me in these sense your work kinda sacred to me .. I know that ( I mean I wish ) in future there’ll be a lots of appreciations for this content

“The symbol is trying to draw you into something epic...also trigger your best machinery.” The symbol is very powerful. It seems to have some sort of agency:-)

Thank you

This is so damn interesting

Wow. Another one of my "favorite" episodes

Thanks.

mind-blowing...

"I get into symbolic resonance with the text. I see through it, and then the world reaches back through it to me." This reminded me of a C.S. Lewis quote: "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." You're talking about Plato rather than the Bible, but otherwise it seems like a very similar thought.

Teological and oceanic wisdom.

What a great lecture in 5do many ways.

Of course, one cannot become more just simply through the use of cognitive machinery. The processing may allow us to conceive a vision of justice and then we must embody it, act it out, in order to see how our concept of justice fits with the reality in which we exist. Then we can see what skills we still need and we can develop those skills so that we can eventually accomplish our vision of justice, but by that time our vision of justice will have grown larger and more beautiful and we will need to develop even more skills to embody the justice that we desire to act out.

Describing the experience of synchronicity.

This is why we meditate on tarot cards and the tree of life in the western mystery tradition.

Very much fits with the ideas introduced in early episodes of infants exploring and retreating repeatedly to the mother, and of agape. I worry that the RR + inexhaustibility pairing is not sufficient for meaning though, since it seems like analytical paralysis would be and is the result. Looking forward to the rest of the series to see where it's going.

I just had that insight he speaks of - Americans who use flag variations - black and blue stripes for example are contributing to the fragmentation of society because they are changing the meaning of the symbol and reinforcing that meaning in others. It seems to me that even they would agree that the problem is people drifting from what the flag symbolized for some many years.

This episode has given me a bit of an existential crisis. A scientific account of the sacred is quite disheartening when your Soul is searching for a higher power in a metaphysical sense.

Dario Argento's Three Mothers trilogy of films really nails the sort of horror you're talking about, particularly the second film, Inferno (plus it has a bitching 1980 soundtrack by Keith Emerson).

Seriously play is a seriously cool concept.

I was kinda blown away and even a little disheartened to hear John's notion that a central God or essence to reality was a mistake, cognitively speaking. Although I'm curious as to how he will rebuke Jung's idea of The Self.

Towards the end, I thought John was talking about Playdoh rather than Plato. Oddly enough, the argument seems to work both ways.

Wow. I thought I am not understanding anything. Then you said that there is no essence to relevance and I realized that I am in the same channel.

conscious pursuit of anything harnesses dopaminergic motivational/reward pathways. Yet the sacred seems to be the inverse of seeking reward in its most “regular network” pathological forms, like addiction. One is hollow and meaningless, each release of the same habit promising an equal pain response in the future; the other is the epitome of meaning making: celebrating the novelty/complexity of the world and ourselves while promising an IMPROVED coupling to the inevitable perception of suffering. The fact that they are codependent is so freakin cool hah! If the sacred represents in a sense the unbounded numinous and our growth through pairing with it, while the motivation systems that allow us to seek it in the first place are evolutionarily tuned to forever seek more, that does suggest there is a jumping off point (or process) where practices/mental states cultivated through primal reward mechanisms collapse as a sort of insight into seeking them for their own intrinsic value. you can’t force it to happen, because you force it using the very tool you want to set down. We conflate “completion” with a temporally linked process and use it like “finished” because we are narrative bound, and narratives are sort of hash checked to specific sequences in space time, but perhaps enlightenment is something like a complete . That process would be RR. Dang professor, you’re a genius. So much clicked rewatching this.

So....maybe, we could say that a symbol is a kind of "Datum Point," a term used in archeology for a long term or permanent identification of a place, a reference point that won't easily disappear over time, such as a large stone. We can focus on that Datum Point to find the place, figure out locations in relevance to that. From that small symbol we can build meaning, and the meaning refers back to that point. A symbol is like a window or portal we can look through or climb through to explore another world, and the meaning in that world can look back at us and also climb through to us.

48:54 "Reality is itself combinatorially explosive." Yup. I innerstand Samsāra ("wandering on") as living from Avijja ("ignorance") of this perspective. Thus the turning point comes with realizing (in a Participatory sense) the 3rd Ennobling Provocation, fundamentally re-vectoring RR away from feeding (Upādāna) the process, at all scales of cognition.

I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated

Dr. Vervaeke, could you please recommend some papers or literature reviews that are about the progress in our understanding and neuroscience of the cerebellum? What you mention around 7:00 is interesting!

9:21 "And you're saying 'This is so... Bahhh.. Really?? Come on...'" JV's Opponent Processing (Mara) coming thru 😂👍

The claim that an absolute horizon of relevance requires that we possess an essence of relevance 45:00 doesn’t follow. John says that the only thing relevance realization is realizing is itself. Yet, in defining the sacred he says the sacred is when mythos works on RR to “enhance its capacities for meta-assimilation and meta-accommodation” 36:40. His use of “enhance” here implies that the sacred helps RR do its job better in a normatively loaded sense. Without a transcendent horizon of ultimacy against which pathways of transforming RR can be seen as enhanced or degraded, there is arguably no coherent meaning to this definition. Any change to the functioning of RR that might be accomplished by mythos would simply be a change, one which could not in principle be judged as enhanced. Coming back to the idea that positing an absolute horizon for relevance (such as the neo-Platonic concept of the The Good), this does not posit an essence of relevance. It would only be an essence if we thought of it as already realized and somehow knowable in advance. That of course, is a category error as John says. But it isn’t a category error to say that the very idea of relevance realization only makes sense if there is (in some sense of is) an absolute ultimacy which RR is responsive to, but which we cannot know apart from progression of RR. This is analogous (crucially, analogous, not the same as) the common sense idea of that our assertions about the world are responsive to an external world of facts (an external world which we cannot know apart from our belief forming processes). Using this same analogical mapping, John’s claim that RR only realizes itself is analogous to pure idealism or solipsism. The final discussion of 49:00 suggests that RR is inexhaustible. I would agree, but I don’t think this contradicts the idea of an Absolute horizon of the sacred. Since we do not possess the Absolute sacred, we are only knowing it in a participatory way through our processes of RR and meta-RR, we can see how that the Absolute sacred can be realized inexhaustibly by finite beings such as ourselves. This notion of the Absolute is well captured by John’s earlier gloss on the Biblical divine name, “I will be as I will be”. Where God is here named as the god of the open future. There are many examples of this kind of meta-name being used to name the highest sacredness. The Taoist line, “The way that can be named is not the true name,” is another example. Having realized the inexhaustibility of the sacred, we name the fact that we will never attain the ultimate horizon of sacredness and in so doing, we name (yet do not attain) the ultimate horizon of sacredness.

Holy shit!

Seems to me that the RR is like a seed in which all the emergent complexity of a plant in all its forms is contained.

9:21 I hear the symbol is literally a balancing force that coordinates sensory and motor loops. 🤔, In the cerebellum?

26:00 45:00 - confusing the products with the process. Constant gnostic myth making as an example

The more I watch these and learn about being in touch with reality, the less I actually feel in touch with reality because no one around me is ceasing to bullshit themselves. What do I do if my reality is different from the reality of those I’m around? I’m still out of touch even though my endeavor is supposed to be more real…I’m losing my capacity to be nonchalant as I develop more sense making capacities.

Can someone tell me what the name of the book is that he mentioned about symbolism? I thought it would be in the derscription of the video so I didn't write it down. Thank you so much :)

I'm very curious what technical terms you were trying to avoid saying half way in this vid.

24:45 it allows to see error in a balancing system. But why do we need so much integration, so greedy for balance that we become rigid from the stiffness. it seems a very egoic metaphysics of the conscience, because it reduces our relationships as mare symbols that we compress and decompress. What's beyond the symbols?

That is a far more just connection to gnosticism than the false link to German National Socialism. Plato's literature contains the keys to unlocking the secrets of the ancient mysteries.

I'm still stuck on the Hegel ep

How is RR instrinsically interested in itself? Thanks!

John I have a question, you just said that music is purely (or mainly) symbolic, does that translate into the rest of the animal kingdom? I honestly haven't looked into it, but are musical patterns used animals that can be translated across species? or is there any research on this area?

Relevance realization became an entity by virtue of interest?

Is this related at all to Jung’s active imagination concept?

Hi John, I have often thought of religio as religious fervor. Is that right? Also, I have made distinction between a cult and a religion as follows: Religion: Empowers the individual, despite or even because of the sacrifices of the leader or group. Cult: Disempowers or sacrifices the individual at the expense of the cult leader or group at large.

Ah! Now, we're at the root of everything... Nothingness! What brings about nothingness? Conflict! Particles and anti-particles slamming into each other! Conflict, the most sacred thing! A person can go their whole life without encountering love... Conflict, on the other hand, finds us all! It permeates all of life! It keeps us moving, as well as puts us in our place! On a side note, y'all have a nice day! :D

Who is the best symbol of a wise person?

Don’t be silly; we love the playfulness!

Who is the author and which work(s) mentioned around 10:58 - 11:05? I heard something like Jonathan Pe...?

Is this understanding of symbols similar to that of Shamanism? "These healing processes involve humans' capacities for hypnotic susceptibility that are extended through our symbolic capacities to enable mythic and cultural processes to evoke physiological changes that produce healing responses."... "Mental processes produce 'downward causation,' eliciting biological and physiological processes (e.g., the use of symbols or intentionality causing variation in biological functioning). (Shamanism, Winkelman)

The "thing" of "religion" can be understood/described/defined in very different ways. What Rudolf Otto wrote about it: it being "tremendum", "augustum", "fascinosum" etc. seems to me one-sided and somehow still too euro-centric (one background: the "Kulturkampf" in Preußen, which also influenced Max Weber). Having read "Das Heilige" I would also say, that Otto´s approach is not "phenomenological in the strong sense", like outlined, not at least, bei the "classics" E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, M. Merleau-Ponty, and A. Schütz, each working on the "bigger matrix" from multiple angles. Just to remember: In the Far East until modernity there was, to my knowledge, no equivalent to "religio", itself being used equivocatively since Roman times. Key-words were in China, e.g., "zong", "jiào", roughly equivalent to (ancestry-)cult and (holistic) teachings (combining "myth", "cult", "religion" - in a wider sense -, and "symbolic forms" as, for example, outlined by Ernst Cassirer in the 1920ies), and "dào" as a kind of symbolic-argumentative "passe-par-tout" or "general-keye". Even more "deep descriptive" (Ricouer, Geertz) interdisciplinary and intercultural studies should be a good thing to "enarge the human discourse-universum", I suppose; or, as Japanese often say to keep up spirits:: "Ganbare!"

Darshan

What is religio again? Anyone?

The question then is: what is the most relevant symbol? 😉

Canadians :D

Not for nothing, but saying that Plato is sacred but there is nothing supernatural about his affect on you is certainly an opinion you are entitled to. But, there is no logical way to defend that. Someone else may look at your experience and say of course that is supernatural because the natural laws of the universe don't act that way. Coming from a point of view that there is no God, of course you must say that.

When did you decide there's a meaning "crisis"? And you're also "solving" for it? Re:interconnectedness. Nonsense. IF people were actually "inter-connected" then my full stomach would solve for your empty belly. Interdependence, otoh, might be a little more believable. But only just so, because human beings CAN live on their own. Not easily, necessarily, but that's not the issue. If you started your crisis quest with the belief all are interconnected, then your primary assertion is already skewed, nevermind you don't indicate by what undeniable proofs exist for this "crisis".

Ugh John you’re letting me down.. Why are you trying to get rid of God? You know you’re doing it, at 48:35 u covered ur face in shame for it. You kind of make a straw man argument out of what religious people would consider an “ultimately relevant thing.” Maybe what they worship is not so simple as you think, and their idea of a supernatural God is far closer to your idea of a PROCESS of anagogic self-transcendence than you’re giving them credit for. But regardless, even if its not, even if they’re “primitively” believing that sacredness inheres in a particular entity or place or whatever, why are you taking away their toy? This exact academic-elitist move is a core driver of the very meaning crisis you’re trying to address. Anyway, dont get me wrong I love this series and appreciate what ur doing, but man that move you made just seems tactless and needlessly alienating. If the conception of God you’re arguing against is able to give religious people’s lives meaning despite having all the apparent disadvantages u mentioned, isn’t it necessarily functioning as something greater than a supernatural superstition?