Name: John Vervaeke's Eneroth lecture
Start: 2026-06-01T15:00:00+02:00
Location: Albanovägen, SE-114 19 Stockholm, Sverige

Welcome to John Vervaeke's Eneroth lecture, Albano, house 4, 3rd floor, hörsal 6
Religio: how can humanity reconnect to deep life while
entrapped in the Meaning crisis?

By
John Vervaeke

This talk will argue that we have a fundamental need for connection. That need has three dimensions: the way we are connected to ourselves in our agency, the way we are connected to each other for collective agency, and the way both those forms of agency are connected to reality. The talk will then argue that this connectedness follows from the fact that we are beings constituted by our ability for anticipatory attunement in relevance realization. Anticipatory attuning relevance realization is in no way optional for us - it is binding on us and binds us to ourselves, each other and the world. This religio expresses itself as the two meta-desires Plato discussed, viz., our desire for inner peace and our desire to be in contact with reality. We do not experience this binding as compulsion but as the voluntary necessity we feel calling us in love, beauty, flow, and reason. This is the sense of meaning that has been undermined in the meaning crisis and our sense of entrapment is the loss of meaning’s attendant sense of appealing to us - calling us. We face a kind of existential inertia as we try to break free and a sense of existential ignorance about the transformation needed. Once we understand this functionality and phenomenology of meaning this talk will argue that we need non-propositional kinds of knowing structured into an ecology of practices with dimensions of dialogical practice, imaginal practice, mindfulness practices and embodied practice to recover meaning. Additionally, this ecology must be educated by a meta-practice of pilgrimage that properly orients us to responding to the meaning crisis and affords an advent of the sacred that takes seriously the participatory nature of meaning.