Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. John Vareke is a lecturer at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, Buddhist psychology and cognitive science.

He's the author of a 50-part lecture series called

awakening from the meaning crisis and he joins me today to discuss that meaning

crisis and why it is that we might be living through one as well as death, why people might be afraid of it and what we can do in the face of its inevitability.

With that said, I hope you enjoy the following conversation with John Bavakey.

John Bavakey, thanks for being here. My pleasure. Thank you Alex. I want to ask you a

question that I don't think anybody has ever asked you before and that is what is the meaning crisis and why

are we living through it? The irony is is is is is welcome thank you so So of course there's a long answer to that and so any

answer I give is going to be simplified, hopefully not oversimplified.

The main, there's two sort of main dimensions. One is what is it, like, what am I referring to with this and then the other is how is it showing up.

The first one goes something along the following lines.

The very processes that make us intelligently adaptive make us sort of perennially prone to self-disceptive, self-destructive behavior.

And across cultures and historical epochs people have found what I call ecologies of practices. I don't mean that just a set of practices. I mean practices that have like a dynamic relationship to them like a prototypical example is the eightfold path of Buddhism right in order to try to ameliorate

The self-deception without of course hamstringing the adaptivity and

getting that which takes nuance and complexity and you know adaptive fit to a variety of

environments and trying to enhance the way our cognitive of been called wisdom or you know the cognate terms and one way of

understanding the meaning crisis is that those ecologies of practices have to be

situated in some kind of homing environment, you know, a temple or a dojo,

and that has to, that homing environment and its tradition typically have to be

legitimated by a worldview.

Now I want to make something very clear and I make it repeatedly clear I'm not

here advocating any kind of nostalgia. I've said put on you can put on my tombstone neither nostalgia nor utopia

...