Where Do You Go for Wisdom? John Vervaeke on the Meaning Crisis

When Lex Fridman asks what people are hunting when they hunt for meaning, John Vervaeke draws a line he will defend for the rest of the conversation. He is talking about *meaning in life*, not *the meaning of life*. The first is a cluster of measurable factors that make people rate their lives as more worth living, more worth the suffering they have to endure. Study those factors, he says, and they point to connectedness: to yourself, to other people, and to the world.

The connection has to be of a particular kind. You want to be bound to things whose value and existence are independent of your egocentric preferences. That is why having a child is so often rated as deeply meaningful: you are linking yourself to a life that will have worth of its own. People reach for the metaphor of being connected to something larger than themselves, but they do not mean it literally. Turn someone into a mountain, Vervaeke jokes, and they will not suddenly call their life fulfilled.

He offers a diagnostic. Tell me what you would like to continue existing even if you were no longer around, how you are connected to it, and how you matter to it. Plenty of beautiful things might deserve to survive you without being a source of meaning for you. Only when you are connected, you care, and you make some difference does the true, the good, or the beautiful become a wellspring of meaning in *your* life. That, he argues, is what is at risk, and why its absence so often slides into depression, addiction, and self-destruction.

Fridman wonders whether the search for meaning is really an attempt to escape mortality, in the spirit of Ernest Becker's *The Denial of Death*. Vervaeke takes the worry seriously and then tries to relocate it. Mortality, he says, is not a far-flung event. The root of *fatal* is fate: the universe does not care about your personal narrative. You can have just met the love of your life, the culmination of your whole project for happiness, step into the street, and be hit by a truck. That indifference is present in every plan you make. You live through many little deaths whenever the universe simply rolls over a project.

Terror-management research, he notes, looks different depending on how death is primed. Give people a word list salted with *coffin* and *funeral* and they typically become more rigid, more identified with their worldview, less cognitively flexible. Ask them instead to imagine, in the first person, that they are dying with people they love beside them, and the pattern reverses: flexibility and openness go up. Vervaeke's suggestion is that we may have put the cart before the horse. The issue may not be death per se so much as whether meaning is present or absent in dying. People can treat some deaths as meaningful and others as pointless, and there is abundant evidence that they will sacrifice biological life for a death they consider meaningful.

Asked whether he fears his own death, he says no, at least not at the level of longing. Buddhist practice, he notes, is designed to make you feel both the horror of mortality and the horror of immortality; living forever strikes him as actually horrific. Fridman reaches for a middle option, the snooze button, fifteen more minutes with a loved one or a book. Vervaeke's Stoic answer is not to stretch duration but to deepen the moments you have until death does not arrive as a calamity. Somewhere in your thirties or forties, he adds, the temporal horizon flips: you stop living from your birth and start living toward your death. After that, mind and life go away completely. The last instrument is put down and the song is over. That does not mean the song was not beautiful, complex, or a contribution to the universe. It just ended.

Does some aspect of mind persist before and after a human life, perhaps as panpsychism? Vervaeke takes the proposal seriously and still doubts it, because he thinks it has insoluble problems, as does any picture of mind as an ultimately immaterial substance. Participation in distributed cognition does not rescue immortality either. Most of our problem-solving, he says, is done in groups, not by lone individuals, and he has published on that. Researchers who study those systems typically hold that collective intelligence exists and collective consciousness does not. They even have a name for the gap: zombie agency. No one person runs an airline, yet that collective intelligence does not thereby support a mind.

Fridman presses the hierarchy: we are villages of organisms all the way down, so why should consciousness stop at the individual human? Vervaeke will grant bacteria a kind of agency and sense-making, not the self-aware introspective consciousness we mean by the word. In principle he sees no barrier to a group mind. If some Frankensteinean neural link ever delivered the right bandwidth, density, and speed of information transfer, a group consciousness could take shape. Those contingent facts do not yet exist, so he finds consciousness at the level of collective intelligence implausible.

That leads him to treat the nature of consciousness and its function as one problem, not two. Qualia are mysterious, but so is the fact that we need them: you already convert the noises coming out of a face into ideas without any awareness of how. Cognitive science, as he practices it, takes the design stance — could we build a machine that not only simulates the phenomenon but explains it? His scientific bet is on artificial general intelligence, independent of AI's already obvious technological power. A human being is still a general problem-solver in a way even the best machines are not, and that general ability is what he wants a theory of.

The amount of information in the room that you could attend to is combinatorially explosive, as is the information in long-term memory, the possibilities you could consider, and the sequences of behavior you could generate. Somehow the right memories come up, the right actions open, and you pay attention to the right thing — not infallibly, but reliably enough that what you should interact with often feels obvious. That ability is still poorly understood in AGI research. Vervaeke puts it as a Zen koan: what makes you intelligent is your ability to ignore so much information, in a way that sits between arbitrary guessing and algorithmic search.

The same machinery that makes us adaptively intelligent makes us perennially susceptible to self-deceptive, self-destructive framing. Intelligence is what you use to solve problems. Rationality is how you use intelligence to overcome the self-deception that appears while you solve them. Because there are multiple kinds of knowing, there are multiple rationalities, and wisdom is coordinating those rationalities so they optimally constrain and afford each other — rationally self-transcending rationality. Framing, on this view, is not a stack of propositional assumptions. It is salience landscaping: a dynamic tapestry of what stands out, shaped well before beliefs get involved. Representations already presuppose relevance realization. You pick out a subset of a cup's explosive properties and bind them as relevant for some use; the object could have been a hat, a letter V, or the ten-billionth object made in North America.

He compares the process to evolution. Fittedness is not in the organism or the environment but in a dynamical relation of variation and selection that constantly evolves your sensory-motor loop. The sympathetic system is biased to read the world as threat or opportunity, the parasympathetic as safety and rest; there is no homunculus calculating arousal, only opponent processing. Attention works the same way: the default-mode network pushes you to wander, the task network selects what survives. The result, borrowing Merleau-Ponty's term, is an optimal grip on the world. A mammal goes by and most people say *dog*, not German Shepherd, mammal, or living organism. Eleanor Rosch called that the basic level: the best overall balance between similarity within a category and difference between categories. It is not *correct*. It is optimal.

Salience is what grabs attention bottom-up, or what you make stand out top-down by directing attention, as when he slaps his hands or tells you to feel your left big toe. He argues that a great deal of unconscious relevance realization becomes the thing we call salience once it is recursively processed through working memory, globally accessible and globally broadcast. His University of Toronto colleague Lynn Hasher treats working memory as a higher-order relevance filter, which is why chunking lets more through: the chunk already contains condensed relevance realization. You need that conscious landscaping when the situation is highly novel, complex, and ill-defined.

A wise person walks into messy, ill-defined, novel situations, zeros in on what really matters, and shapes their salience landscape to intervene. Knowledge overcomes ignorance; wisdom overcomes foolishness, if foolishness means self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. Recursive relevance realization is the engine: you use intelligence to improve the use of intelligence, then rationality to improve the use of rationality. Fridman hears *self-deception* as intentional lying. Vervaeke belongs to the camp that thinks the model of lying to oneself ultimately makes no sense. To lie to you, he would have to know something you do not and depend on your commitment to the truth. That is not what we do to ourselves.

What we do, following Harry Frankfurt's famous essay, is bullshit. The liar depends on your commitment to the truth. The bullshitter wants you to become indifferent to the question of truth and to change your behavior by making things salient and catchy. A liquor commercial is the prototype: gorgeous people laughing in a bar, clear-eyed, holding a particular bottle. You know it is not true, they know you know, and you do not care, because the images grab you. You still buy the product. You cannot lie to yourself that way, but salience can catch attention and attention can drive salience. By repeatedly paying attention to something you make it more likely to catch you again. That is the mechanism of self-bullshit: getting caught up in salience independent of whether it tracks reality.

He illustrates empty catchiness with a *Simpsons* stump speech: we must move forward not backward, upward not forward, twirling twirling toward freedom. People cheer. A lot of political speech, he says, is satire of that kind, even if a perfect vacuum of content is hard to reach. Fridman objects that political speech is still grounded in some sense of truth. Vervaeke's point is not that every broadcast is pure nonsense, but that a machine designed to trigger salience without triggering reflective truth-seeking is already doing the work of bullshit — and we can run that machine on ourselves.

What, then, is truth? Vervaeke sides with Spinoza: truth is known only by its own standard, which sounds circular and is not meant that way. We know the truth retrospectively, after a process of self-transcendence, when we move from a frame to a more encompassing one and can see the earlier frame's distortions. Insight is that move. You re-realize what is relevant: she was not aggressive and angry, she was afraid. You had misframed the scene. Those aha moments never deliver an absolute view from nowhere. Drew Hyland's phrase is finite transcendence: we are creatures who can raise the question of truth, goodness, and beauty, but we cannot become a god who takes in all information as a comprehensive whole.

That does not make truth valueless. A better word, he thinks, is *real*. Real and illusory are comparative: you only know something is an illusion by taking something else to be real. We are always in that comparative task. Knowing that an independent reality exists is not the same as knowing what it is. He accepts a conformity theory of the deepest knowing — contact between the embodied mind and reality — but he pushes back on Ayn Rand by insisting that partial, personal knowledge is still knowledge. Without it you fall into Meno's paradox: if you do not know P you cannot recognize it when you find it, and if you already know P you need not search. Learning is possible only because you can know something enough to be guided toward what you do not yet possess.

Donald Hoffman's claim that everyday reality is a complete illusion gets a similar reply. Saying everything is an illusion is like saying everything is tall; the word is comparative. Hoffman's arguments also seem to privilege evolution and mathematics as really existing while demoting ordinary experience, which Vervaeke hears as a replay of Descartes: the senses are untrustworthy, the math gets us to reality. Shift the worry into an existential key — maybe we live in a simulation — and he offers two possibilities. Either the illusion is undiscoverable, in which case it is irrational to attend to it, or it is discoverable, in which case science is still his best bet. Either way he keeps doing the science. Knowledge, he adds, is not Lego. Geology, genetics, microscopes, rulers, and English are an interwoven whole; you cannot isolate one truth-claim and declare the rest a charade.

Fridman still wants to ask about the meaning of life. Vervaeke says it is like asking what is north of the North Pole, or what time it is on the sun: it sounds like a question and is not, because the presupposition is flawed. People usually mean that the universe itself has some feature they must discover and enter into a relationship with, a plan. That is a heavy metaphysical claim, once legitimated by a worldview in which God runs the cosmos and cares. Meaning, as he understands it, is more like the graspability of a cup. It is not in you and not in the cup. A fly cannot grasp the cup; you cannot grasp Africa. Graspability is a real fittedness. He coins transjective for that binding relation between subjective and objective. Romanticism parks meaning inside the self; a certain empiricism parks it in the object. He thinks both miss the relation.

They are not as far apart as the disagreement sounds. Fridman hears the big question as a way of reaching for the relevance realization that runs from the Big Bang to the feeling of love, and as a rude interruption of the hamster wheel of schedules, school runs, raises, and bigger houses. Vervaeke grants the interruption its use: it can force you to ask how much meaning is in the whole of your life and how much of that is connected to reality. He just thinks you then have to come back to meaning *in* life and to the pursuit of wisdom. He illustrates the hunger for the real with a classroom exercise. Of the students in satisfying romantic relationships, about 95 percent say they would want to know if their partner were cheating even if it destroyed the relationship. Why? Because, they say, it would not be real. We have loaded onto romance the role that God, religion, history, and culture used to play, he warns, which is one reason those relationships break.

The meaning crisis, on his account, is the collision of perennial threats with a historical loss of tools. Human beings are always vulnerable to despair, absurdity, and existential anxiety; Ecclesiastes already knew that. Across cultures they answered with ecologies of practices that reduce self-deception and enhance the fittedness at the core of meaning. That is prototypically what we call wisdom. He regularly asks students where they go for information; they hold up a phone. Where for knowledge? After a pause, science, the university. Where for wisdom? Silence. Wisdom is not optional, yet we no longer have homes for ecologies of practice that fit a scientific-technological worldview and still count as legitimate. The fastest-growing demographic is the *nones*: no religious allegiance, not primarily atheistic, most often *spiritual but not religious*. They want the connectedness and do not want the legacy institutions. Research by one of his RAs found that people cultivating wisdom inside religious traditions outperform purely secular paths on many scientific wisdom measures — and that there is no significant difference *between* those religious paths. The creeds are not the active ingredient. The functionality is.

What is the functionality we lost when we threw out the propositional dogma? Vervaeke calls that the golden question. His answer requires stepping before Descartes and admitting several kinds of knowing, now prominent in 4E cognitive science. Propositional knowing is knowing *that* — cats are mammals — stored in semantic memory, tested by coherence and correspondence. It currently enjoys a nearly tyrannical status. Procedural knowing is knowing *how*: skills are not theories and are not true or false; they engage the world or they do not, and they live in a different memory system. That is why someone with Alzheimer's can lose facts and still play the piano flawlessly.

Perspectival knowing is knowing what it is like to be you, here, now, in this salience landscape. It has its own memory, episodic memory, and its own criterion of realness. People in VR say they want to *really be in the game*; they do not mean visual similitude. Tetris can deliver that presence; a high-fidelity game can fail to. Participatory knowing is deeper still: you and the world co-participate so that real affordances exist. Gravity shapes you and the room, so walking becomes available; culture shapes you and the cup, so you had to learn to treat it as a cup. The memory storehouse for all those agent-arena relationships, all the roles you can take and assign, is what we call the self. When that knowing is missing you feel lonely, homesick, or culture-shocked.

Religions transform people largely at those non-propositional levels, which are also the levels more tightly bound to meaning-making, because propositions are representational and depend on non-representational connectedness. Nietzsche's madman, Vervaeke notes, is talking to the atheists in the marketplace: wiping away the sky is not the same project as replacing the functionality. His own proposal is the religion that is not a religion — using the best cognitive science, and a respectful extraction from religious and philosophical traditions, to recover the function without buying the legacy creeds. Stoicism is a precedent. It arose in the Hellenistic period after Alexander's empire broke up, when people lived far from home among strangers who did not share language or cult, a kind of *domicide*, the killing of home. Because it was built for a meaning crisis, its present revival is no coincidence. In late July he went to Washington State for Rafe Kelly's Evolve Move Play retreat, a mix of parkour, nature, martial arts, mindfulness, and dialogue aimed at those non-propositional kinds of knowing. At the end he asked the group: none of you are religious, right? They agreed. What you just did was a religious act, wasn't it? They agreed again.

Is an atheist closer to truth than a believer? Vervaeke calls himself a nontheist, a stance already present in several religious traditions. Theist and atheist, in their modern versions, share presuppositions he thinks should be rejected: that sacredness is a personal Supreme Being, and that the right relationship to it is a correct set of beliefs. The most troublesome knot, for him, is the idea that the ground of being is some kind of being. A cup is a being, a table is a being, a human is a being; when you ask how they all *are*, you cannot answer by naming another item of the same sort. Being is not a being. It is the ability for things to be. That is why mystical traditions converge on no-thingness — usually pronounced *nothingness* until you put the hyphen back. Misconstruing ultimate reality as a Supreme Being is a category mistake, and treating sacredness as belief misunderstands meaning, which sits deeper than propositions.

Is meaning created or discovered? He reaches for the Latin *inventio*, which does not split those verbs. You participate. An insight arrives from elsewhere and you are still involved; you cannot simply command one into being. Fridman asks where this leaves Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau, with whom Vervaeke had recently recorded a conversation. He was challenging their attempt to build a theistic model from a nontheistic side. His reading of Peterson is cautious: Peterson is complex and hard to pin, but he seems to see the power of the Supreme Being presupposition as a source of meaning without necessarily asserting it as a metaphysical fact. Pageau is another matter. A Christian steeped in icon carving, Maximus the Confessor, and Eastern Orthodoxy, he will say God does not exist the way the cup exists, and will emphasize the no-thingness of God. Classical theism looks a lot more like nontheism than like modern theism.

On myth, the three of them are closer. Myths are not stories about irrelevant deep-past events. They are stories about perennial patterns that need to be brought into awareness, especially at non-propositional levels. Vervaeke prefers the Greek *mythos* because English has turned *myth* into a synonym for a popular falsehood. Even church fathers, he notes without advocating Christianity, treated the literal reading as the weakest; you move through the allegorical, moral, and mystical toward the question, how is this pattern true in your life now? Some myths are about particular patterns such as heroism, which Greek stories of hubris also counterbalance. Deeper myths are about *religio* itself, the binding, the way relevance realization connects us. Those, he thinks, are genuinely profound.

If aliens watched humans, would they notice individual puzzle-solving first, or the thing people do with their mouths together? Vervaeke thinks most problem-solving is distributed. You did not make the recording equipment, build the room, or invent the language. The Wason selection task, given for decades to highly educated psychology students worldwide, is solved by only about 10 percent of individuals; put four people in a group and let them talk, and success jumps to about 80 percent. Beyond that experimental snapshot he cares about a rarer event, which he calls *dialogos*. Conversations sometimes take on a life of their own, carry both people somewhere neither planned, and afford insights neither could have had alone. You need not even agree. You feel how a shared flow state opened a deeper relation to yourself, the other person, and possibly the world. That basin, more than any particular narrative, is where myths and rituals are generated. A myth is like a public dream; it depends on people enacting it together.

Podcasts, Fridman notes, smuggle a third person into that flow. Vervaeke sees a new medium for distributed cognition: the dynamics of living speech with the permanency of writing, collapsing old walls between private and public, oral and written. He has tried to lecture in a Socratic key, thinking aloud, interrupting himself, sharing the learning rather than pronouncing commandments — jazz, not tablets. From there he turns to mindfulness, which he has practiced since 1991 and claims to have been the first to lecture on academically at the University of Toronto. Standard slogans such as nonjudgmental present-moment awareness strike him as flawed, and equating mindfulness with meditation is a primary mistake. You need an ecology: a dynamical system of checks and balances, not a panacea practice.

He holds his glasses. The frame holds a lens; you see through it in both senses, beyond and by means of it, and right now the glasses are transparent. Meditation is taking them off and looking *at* the lenses for distortion. Contemplation — the word has *temple* in it, from Latin looking up at the sky, translating Greek *theoria* — is putting them back on to see whether the world is clearer. English treats the two as synonyms, which he calls a deep mistake. Mindfulness includes both: breaking an inappropriate frame and making a new one, which is exactly what happens in insight. Do only contemplation and you risk inflation and projective fantasy. Do only meditation and you risk withdrawal and spiritual bypassing. They need to cycle, the way sympathetic and parasympathetic systems already do.

Practically he tells people to do at least three things together, the combination he lucked into on one street: a meditative practice such as vipassana, a contemplative practice such as metta or the Stoic view from above, and a moving practice conducive to flow, such as tai chi. In vipassana you look at sensations rather than through them, following the abdomen's expansion and contraction. When the mind leaps to laundry or a noise, you do not wrestle with the content; you label the process with an *-ing* word — listening, imagining, planning — and return. The jumping mind is the Buddhist monkey; Jack Kornfield's image is a puppy. Yell at it and you train fear. Indulge it and it never learns to stay. Neither fight it nor feed it. Befriend it. For contemplation he teaches an existential reading of metta, awakening to how you constantly assume and assign identities, and the view from above: imagine lifting stepwise from the room to Austin, Texas, the country, the Earth. You have to really imagine it, and you have to take the steps; jumping ruins it. As the scale widens, what you find relevant changes. During Covid he put daily courses on meditation, contemplation, and movement on YouTube for free.

To flow wisely you have to know what flow is. Vervaeke speaks with regret about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who had died the previous year and whom both men had hoped to get on the podcast. People usually cite only one set of conditions: the demand of the situation slightly beyond your skills, so you apply everything you have and stretch. That yields optimal experience in two senses, among the best of your life and among your best performances, which is why people do bizarre things like rock climbing. There is a second set, the information conditions. The information must be clear, not vague; a climber who cannot read the holds is in trouble. Feedback between action and environment must be tightly coupled, with no long lag. And failure has to matter. Error carries anxiety because it is real.

In the state itself, people report oneness with the environment, the silencing of the narrative inner critic, vivid salience, ongoing discovery, and a sense of grace: the block is already up, the hockey glove already where the puck is. It sits on the boundary of the secular and the sacred. Description is not explanation. In an article for *The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought*, Vervaeke and colleagues proposed two interlocking mechanisms. First, an insight cascade: the climber continually restructures how the rock face is seen, each aha priming the next, an extended flash that accounts for the vividness and the feeling of gift. Second, implicit learning, replicated since Reber's work in the 1960s. People can pick up complex letter-and-number patterns outside focal awareness; tell them to figure out the rule explicitly and performance drops. Robin Hogarth's point is that intuition is the result of that implicit learning. The same engine does not care whether a pattern is causal or merely correlational. When we like the result we call it intuition; when we do not we call it prejudice.

You cannot replace implicit learning with explicit learning without throwing away its adaptiveness. What you can do is tend the environment in which it happens. The environments we built to distinguish causation from correlation are experiments: variables clear, no confounds, tight coupling of independent and dependent measures, hypotheses falsifiable, error that matters. Those three legs are exactly the conditions of flow. So flow is not only an insight cascade. It is a marker that you are cultivating the intuitions that best fit the causal structure of the environment. Climbers feel the activity as very real because if they are not conforming to rock and body, they fall. Getting into flow more often predicts well-being and a meaningful life — with a caveat. Designers have learned to hijack the mechanism. The WHO now treats it as real that people can flow in a video-game world to the detriment of flowing in the real one. Depression has been called anti-flow. Social media may add illusory social comparison: Instagram stages a life, viewers take it as real, and the downward comparisons arrive moment by moment rather than once or twice a week. Fridman pushes back that digital natives may transfer better and laugh the artifice off. Vervaeke's reply is that you can laugh at a shampoo commercial and still buy the shampoo. Transfer failure is a real possibility. By contrast, after years of tai chi his graduate-school friends told him he had become more balanced and flexible in ordinary conversation. That kind of percolation through a life is what he means by flowing wisely.

Where does the mind go on psychedelics? Vervaeke starts with neural networks, which, like human implicit learning, are superb at complex patterns and therefore prone to overfitting — picking up structure in the sample that is not in the population. Dropout, or injected noise, blocks that overfitting and improves generalization. He thinks psychedelics do something strongly analogous: large constraint reduction, so regions that do not usually talk begin to, dominant networks such as the default-mode network down-regulate, and the system is jolted out of a too-tight fit. Even literal static on a screen can trigger insight on a puzzle. Neural nets turn dropout off and go back to work; humans are messier. They need practices that help them explore the newly opened state space. Beyond Leary's set and setting he wants a third S: sacred. Psychedelics belong inside a sapiential framework, where people are already training against self-deception, for insight and self-regulation — overwhelmingly how indigenous cultures have used them. Taken as commodities for a phenomenological ride, they run real risks.

The Griffiths lab gave people psilocybin after teaching them the marks of a mystical experience; only some crossed from a psychedelic state into a mystical one, and those people showed a measurable, lasting rise in openness, a Big Five trait that usually falls with age. Openness without discernment can be trouble. Higher states of consciousness fascinate him because they tend to turn a mystical episode into a transformative one. People come back from an ineffable state and say *that* was really real, and this ordinary world is less so. Normally, returning from a dream, we say it does not fit consensus intelligibility, therefore it was unreal. They do the opposite, and the felt demand to change a life is what bridges the gap. Early measures, taken with caution, suggest that people who undergo that transformation see improvements in relationships, sense of self, anxiety, and depression.

Fridman asks him to explain Marxism and Nazism as mass formations. Vervaeke's sketch is that Hegel is to Protestantism what Aquinas is to Catholicism: a genius who gave Christianity's core mythos — a narrative structure to reality, real progress, co-creation of a better future — the air of philosophical respectability. Marx relocates the dialectic from ideas to classes and socioeconomic forces, but keeps the story: history is teleological, it can move toward utopia, you can further it or thwart it. You get the intoxication of religious utopia plus the seeming legitimacy of a science of history and economics. Hegel's great critics, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, were pointing at what the system left out, the non-propositional; Kierkegaard's jab was that Hegel made a system and then sat down beside it. Why the hold in Russia? It offered what religions offer, the hope of a new human being, to people crushed by a locked system. The failure, for Vervaeke, is a Promethean spirit: the hubris of thinking we understand human nature and history well enough to run a plan, licensed by ends that justify any means, which you can believe only if you believe in utopia. Nazism shares that spirit, twisted through Gnostic themes that surge in a meaning crisis. The Weimar Republic was, in his phrase, a meaning crisis gone crazy, a wholesale *domicide*. A political-science professor once told him that if you understand Nazism as merely a political movement you have misunderstood it; it is much more a religious phenomenon, complete with a charismatic center, rituals, a master-race mythos, and the swastika as a religious symbol. Push people into meaning scarcity and they fall back on mythological thinking.

He does not avoid the word *evil*. Sin, for him, is broader than immorality: a failure to love wisely, ending in idolatry, taking as ultimate what is not. That failure can constellate what he calls hyperagents inside distributed cognition, whose power to wreck the world is not just the sum of many banal immoral choices. Hannah Arendt on Eichmann came close and slightly missed: adding up ordinary wrongs does not capture a parasitic process inside massive distributed cognition. From Heidegger he takes the critique of onto-theology, the attempt to understand being as a Supreme Being, which disconnects us from the ground and leaves us loving particular things rather than that from which they spring. From Paul Tillich, faith as ultimate concern rather than a set of asserted propositions: what are you ultimately concerned with, and is it ultimate? He is on Jung's team rather than Freud's. Freud writes better; Jung's organic model of a living psyche doing opponent processing and self-transcendence is closer to where cognitive science is heading than Freud's hydraulic steam engine. Both men, though, described only the psychodynamic unconscious, a sliver of the unconscious that turns noise into ideas and retrieves memories. Plato is his first philosopher, Jung his first psychologist; he rejects a single-centered mind. We have multiple motivational centers, and a human task is to get them into an inner culture of cooperation. His advice to the young is to find an ecology of practices and a community that supports them without requiring beliefs that contravene our best science, and to treat wisdom and virtue in relationships as primary. He is working with others, including Rafe Kelly, on a self-correcting fellowship of such ecologies that can resist gurification. The darkness in his own life came after leaving fundamentalist Christianity, when he became a hard-bitten atheist but had not dealt with the non-propositional habits, identities, and trauma still in his body. For four or five years he called it the black burning: a taste for the transcendent still in his mouth, food that had soured in his stomach. It felt irresolvable, lonely, absurd. Teaching, tai chi, meditation, and Socratic philosophy changed the story when he saw his students' eyes light up and realized the crisis was shared. Love, he says at the end, is central even to reason. Spinoza wrote the *Ethics* like Euclid and still named it for the blessed life, because love is what pulls rationality out of the gravity well of egocentrism. Iris Murdoch put it with a pain he wants to keep: love is when you painfully realize that something other than yourself is real.