Over the holidays I’d like to step back from the main objective of this newsletter series and share a meta-perspective on how I prepare and develop the content, starting with source material from John Vervaeke’s original 50-episode lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which is available for free on YouTube.
As I’m constantly revisiting episodes and jumping back and forth between videos on the hunt for the best quotes and insightful clips, I’ve started to mentally divide all 50 episodes into eight larger blocks or sections, which have emerged out of my understanding of the content. I find these blocks helpful navigating the series, and they also provide some guiding context. Perhaps it can be useful to you, if you decide to watch it yourself?
Here is how I see the course’s larger structure:
History & science
As Vervaeke says in the very beginning, the whole series can be cut in two equal halves, each spanning 25 episodes:
- The first half is a historic review.
- The second half is a (cognitive) scientific review.
Of course, there is a lot of cognitive science in the first half, and there is a lot in the second half that is referring back to the history. Unsurprisingly, everything is densely interwoven — a hallmark property of significant works, unlike the typical non-fiction business bestseller these days that can be summarized in just a few pages because the book has been artificially inflated with lots of filler and padding.
I find it useful to think of the first half as a guided tour through how humanity historically over millennia managed to understand enough of the world to build up an integrated worldview that combines the best of science, therapy, and spirituality, and then systematically dismantles and destroys it within the last few centuries.
At first I dismissed the importance of the narrative of how we got to where we are now, and I didn’t take any notes while watching the first 25 episodes, thinking it’s “just historic context”. Well, now I get that to fully understand something, it’s not enough to just look at the present situation, but to become familiar with how it came to be like this (this should sound familiar and make sense, if you’ve been following along).
The second half then builds on that history and cognitive scientifically covers the latest research of central mechanisms and processes that provide the foundation for understanding and ultimately tackling the meaning crisis. This is mostly a detailed explanation of John Vervaeke’s own scientific theory of Relevance Realization.
I quickly realized how interconnected the science is with all the history, and what a mistake it was to not take any notes for the first half. Later on, when I re-watched the whole series for a second time, it was astonishing to see how much I already had forgotten or not even fully grasped the first time. To this day that keeps happening, re-watching some parts of it for the 20th time. This is another hallmark property of significant works: you learn something new each time you revisit it. There’s always more to discover. It’s inexhaustible.
Zooming in
Gradually zooming in a little more, splitting each half into four blocks, and giving these blocks descriptive names seems even more helpful to make sense of the whole series. It’s all about the connections we are able to make as we are engaging with the content. A little bit of context can go a long way to foster such connections, and these blocks work almost like chapters with an underlying theme (I’ll have a lot more to say about that, once I get to talk more about tools for thought).
I have no idea if that works as well for you, as I can’t go back to a Beginner’s Mind and ignore all that I have learned, so please get in touch and let me know how useful you find this.
In my mind I divide each of the halves into these four smaller blocks each:
Part 1 — Historic review
01-07 Making sense of the world: nomological order (7 episodes)
08-13 Making sense of the self: consciousness and self-transformation (6 episodes)
14-18 Formulating a worldview that integrates science, therapy, and spirituality (5 episodes)
19-25 Destroying the integrated worldview separating science and spirituality (7 episodes)
Part 2 — Cognitive science
26-32 Relevance realization (7 episodes)
33-39 Modern spirituality (7 episodes)
40-45 Wisdom and rationality (6 episodes)
46-50 Prophets of the meaning crisis (5 episodes)
Although I didn’t set out to make each block roughly the same size, the way the content flows, and where I consider natural breaks to appear, it neatly works out to blocks of 5-7 episodes each. This makes each block almost its own little module, and thinking of the whole course as eight 5-7 episode sub-modules makes each of them a little more approachable. Perhaps this is a good strategy to not miss the forest for the trees, while you go through it.
Go, give it a try. Replace a season or two of mindless Netflix entertainment with Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It’ll be worth it. And, no, you’ve not been reading a summary of it here that makes watching it obsolete. I’m taking one of many paths through some of the ideas presented, highlighting some things, ignoring others — this journey is different than the one you’ll be on with John Vervaeke himself. And it doesn’t hurt to be well-travelled.
Thanks for following along so far! Have a great transition into 2023 and I’ll see you next year.
—Stefan
If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness