John Vervaeke

John Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist and philosopher at the University of Toronto, and one of the most original and important thinkers currently working on the questions that matter most to the Relational Frontier. His 50-episode YouTube lecture series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” — freely available and widely watched — is the most rigorous and comprehensive genealogy of our current cultural condition available to a general audience. He has the rare ability to synthesize cognitive science, ancient philosophy, depth psychology, and contemplative wisdom in ways that are both intellectually rigorous and genuinely transformative.

Core Ideas

Vervaeke’s central theoretical contribution is the concept of relevance realization — the cognitive process by which we determine what matters, what to attend to, what counts as signal versus noise. This process is not primarily conscious or deliberate; it operates at a prereflective level, shaping attention and salience before explicit reasoning begins. What makes something meaningful is, in Vervaeke’s framework, precisely that it is genuinely relevant — not arbitrarily or subjectively salient, but calibrated to what is actually real and important. The meaning crisis, in part, is a crisis of relevance realization: the machinery by which we sort the meaningful from the trivial has broken down.

The four orders of knowing are the other conceptual scaffold central to his work. Propositional knowing (knowing-that), procedural knowing (knowing-how), perspectival knowing (knowing what it is like), and participatory knowing (knowing through transformative engagement) are not just different types of knowledge — they require different epistemic relationships to what is known. Participatory knowing is the deepest and most transformative: it is the kind of knowing the Gnostics called gnosis, what Plato described as the philosopher’s ascent toward the Good, what the Zen tradition points at with satori. It is not information about reality but genuine contact with it that changes the knower. The dominance of propositional knowing in modernity and the corresponding atrophy of participatory knowing is, for Vervaeke, a central driver of the meaning crisis.

Vervaeke’s genealogy of the meaning crisis traces a path from Socrates through Neoplatonism, through Christianity (which democratized the transformative practices of the philosophical schools), through the Scientific Revolution (which dissolved the Ptolemaic cosmos in which the soul’s ascent made spatial and imaginative sense), through the Enlightenment (which tried and failed to replace mythos with logos as the vehicle of transformation), to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism. Each stage in this genealogy involves both a genuine advance and a loss — and the loss accumulates until, by the late twentieth century, we have extraordinary cognitive and technological power with very little reliable access to genuine transformation or participation in what is most real.

His response to the meaning crisis is not pessimistic. Vervaeke insists on a “meta-crisis” response: not a return to any particular tradition (which is not available to most modern people without self-deception) but the construction of a “religion that is not a religion” — a set of transformative practices, relational containers, and participatory forms of knowing that can work for secular people while drawing on the genuine wisdom of the contemplative traditions. This is what drives his development, with Christopher Mastropietro and others, of Dialectical into Dialogos (DiD) — a structured philosophical dialogue practice designed to produce genuine insight and self-transcendence through collective inquiry. DiD is not merely discussion; it is designed to move participants through the four orders of knowing in ways that facilitate genuine transformation.

Vervaeke’s framework has particular resonance for practitioners working in relational and somatic traditions — Circling, depth dialogue, embodied encounter — who find in his concept of participatory knowing a philosophical account of what their practices are actually doing. The “religion that is not a religion” he calls for is, in many ways, already being built in these spaces, often without the theoretical scaffolding his work provides.

Vervaeke’s engagement with Neoplatonism is deep and multivectored — running through his genealogy of the meaning crisis, his reading of Plotinus and the Neoplatonic tradition, and his conversations with figures like Zak Stein (on education and metatherapy) and Brendan Graham Dempsey (on the developmental arc of human consciousness). These conversations mark a growing intellectual community working on the same set of problems from adjacent angles.

Key Works

• “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” (YouTube, 2019-2020, 50 episodes) — The essential resource. Free, publicly available, and genuinely transformative for many viewers. Start at episode 1; the genealogy is cumulative.
• Zombies in Western Culture (with Christopher Mastropietro & Filip Miscevic, 2017) — A short book applying the framework to popular culture; good accessible entry point.
• Various interviews and lectures on YouTube — Vervaeke is a prolific speaker and many conversations are available; interviews with Jordan Peterson, Iain McGilchrist, and others are particularly rich.
• Vervaeke’s course materials at University of Toronto — Some are available online; his courses on Buddhism and cognitive science, and on wisdom and self-transcendence, are directly relevant.

Connections

• Meaning Crisis — The concept with which Vervaeke is most associated; the center of his intellectual project.
• Relational Ground — Vervaeke’s participatory knowing is the epistemological expression of relational ground.
• The Imaginal — Vervaeke engages with Corbin’s imaginal tradition as part of the broader recovery of participatory knowing.
• Phenomenology — Vervaeke draws on phenomenological concepts, particularly perspectival knowing and being-in-the-world.
• Hartmut Rosa — Working the same territory from a sociological direction; their convergence is illuminating.

Quotes

“Self-transcendence is an essential need for human beings. It performs core functions for our cognition.” — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Ch. 1

“We cannot deal with the Meaning Crisis by pursuing pseudo-religious ideologies or political advocacy. If traditional religious worldviews are no longer viable, secular ideologies are dangerous, and the scientific enterprise cannot provide the connection to sacredness and a spiritual life, we face a cultural aporia.” — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Ch. 29

“Your participatory knowing is the seat of this transformation. It is your cognitive functioning and your sense of connectedness to what is real, the skills, sensibilities, and sensitivities of your significance landscaping that transform your existential mode and worldview.” — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Ch. 14