John Vervaeke has put his finger on an essential source of the troubles facing our society: a crisis of meaning. A professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology, he observes that the epidemics of addiction and depression, the empty consumerism and competition for wealth and power are motivated by a lack of deeper meaning and sense of something Good beyond our selves. His acclaimed YouTube education programs like “Awaken from the Meaning Crisis” and “After Socrates” are part of his response to this crisis.

More recently, he has recognized that there is a growing movement that is trying to renew our sense of the sacred. Only by such an opening to sacredness, he asserts, can we effectively respond to this meaning crisis. In an interview with evolve he says:

“I do not think we can resolve the meaning crisis at the political level. There are political implications of what we're talking about, but the political arena or socioeconomic reform is not the arena in which we can properly address the meaning crisis. Sure, we have to help people that are in poverty, we have to make sure people have health care. But the machinery of those levels is not the machinery that can get to what we're talking about: Sacredness, agape, reverential love, the participation in sacredness, falling in love with the ground of being. That's a cultural project – Cultural, culture, cultus, they are bound together.”

This rediscovery also involves a new approach to practices that bring us in an experiential, participative relationship with the sacred: “I talk about multiple ways in which the practices are linked. Here cognitive science can be a big help. Practices have relative strengths and weaknesses. They need to be put into relations of complementarity. Meditative and contemplative practices, mindfulness practices and active open mindedness practices, practices whereby you're cultivating rationality, they have a complementary relationship.”

In the context of a right relationship to the Sacred, John Vervaeke sees the practice of dialogue particularly important: “there is a meta practice, which is dialogos. The practice is dialectic and it helps afford the emergence of dialogos. You can't do dialogos. But you can practice dialectical practices that afford the self-emergence, the self-organization, the self-development of the logos. … The dialogical gives us a new way, not just of thinking, but of understanding and being in openness that puts us in right relationship with the sacred. The dialogical is a way in which we can enact openness such that we are in right relationship with the sacred. It integrates openness and the sacred properly back together. Openness gives us a way of being in the right relationship with the sacred, and sacredness gives us the depth that grounds the viability and the virtue of the openness.”

In our evolve LIVE dialogue webinar we will explore together with John Vervaeke and the participants how we can rediscover the sacredness in openness together. How can we practice in our own life and together with others to open up spaces for the sacred? The dialogue as one important practice will be the space in which new insights can emerge between us.

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