Dr. John Vervaeke

What happens when a society possesses extraordinary technological power but lacks a shared sense of what that power is for?
John Vervaeke, Jordan Hall, Guy Sengstock, and Christopher Mastropietro reunite for a sustained inquiry into normativity: the structures by which human beings perceive direction, value, responsibility, and the difference between better and worse action. The question becomes urgent in the context of artificial intelligence, where increasingly consequential decisions are being made inside a culture that struggles to articulate a coherent basis for judgment.
The conversation begins with Guy's encounters with the AI community and the fear that humanity may soon make decisions it cannot reverse. From there, the group investigates modernity's technological understanding of being, the reduction of creation to artifacts, and the modern self's attachment to sole authorship. John and Jordan propose that meaning is participatory: intelligibility is not manufactured by isolated selves but emerges through shared authorship with other people, traditions, practices, and reality itself.
The dialogue then turns toward virtue. If the problem is not simply ignorance but malformed attention and desire, knowing what should be done is insufficient. The deeper difficulty is how people become capable of wanting, perceiving, and participating in what is good. Socratic aporia, vulnerability, kenosis, embodied practice, pilgrimage, and dialogue are explored as ways of undergoing reorientation rather than merely acquiring information.
In the final movement, the speakers discuss bad-faith dialogue, leisure, lingering, tourism, linguistic lostness, and doomscrolling. These apparently different subjects converge on one insight: when people remain sealed inside environments engineered around their existing capacities and preferences, they lose access to the forms of friction, surprise, and participation that can transform them.
Key Insights
Normativity is the directional structure through which actions appear better, worse, appropriate, or necessary.
The AI crisis exposes a deeper cultural inability to answer what technology should serve.
Modernity often confuses participation in creation with ownership of the resulting artifact.
Meaning and intelligibility require shared authorship rather than sovereign individual control.
Virtue cannot be transmitted as information alone; it requires transformed attention and participation.
Embodied practices can reorganize abstractions because higher cognition remains rooted in sensorimotor life.
Pilgrimage, leisure, and dialogos help people cross boundaries between worlds rather than consuming only familiar inputs.
Doomscrolling is an efficient example of technology feeding hypertrophied capacities while narrowing participation in reality.
Timestamps
00:00 - The group reunites
01:10 - Normativity as the central concern
02:40 - Guy's San Francisco radio work
05:20 - Inside an AI thought-leader conference
08:30 - The danger of irreversible technological decisions
13:50 - Intrinsic normativity and attention
16:00 - Liminal navigation and the limits of simulation
20:30 - Art, creation, and artifacts
23:00 - Heidegger's technological understanding of being
25:40 - Participation and shared authorship
28:30 - Modernity's reinforcing attractor
31:00 - Socratic aporia
33:20 - Finding the right orientation
37:50 - Exposure, vulnerability, and displacement
40:10 - Sole authorship and identity
42:20 - Kenosis and the emptying of privilege
44:20 - Reconstitution and commitment to truth
49:10 - Virtue and its opposites
51:40 - AI and humanity's final decision
54:10 - Knowing what to do versus becoming able to do it
56:10 - Can virtue be taught?
58:20 - Remediating participation in ordinary life
01:00:20 - Pilgrimage and unfamiliar worlds
01:02:30 - Embodied cognition and reorientation
01:04:30 - Rilke and self-emptying
01:09:20 - Sacred directionality
01:11:20 - Crossing the threshold into action
01:13:50 - Bad faith and dialogical boundaries
01:18:40 - Leisure and time
01:21:20 - Lingering beneath atomized time
01:23:30 - Tourist and pilgrim
01:25:50 - Modernization and tourism
01:30:10 - Being linguistically lost
01:33:00 - Situation and participation
01:35:10 - Doomscrolling as narrowed reality
01:37:30 - Returning from pilgrimage
Resources
Plato and Socratic aporia
Charles Taylor
Martin Heidegger
Rainer Maria Rilke
Christian concepts of kenosis, theosis, and synergy
Embodied cognitive science
Pilgrimage
Dialogos
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What if pilgrimage is not primarily about reaching a destination, but about learning how to be addressed by reality again?
In this episode of Lectern Dialogues, John Vervaeke speaks with Ish Peregrino, a practitioner, facilitator, and pilgrim whose very chosen name carries the meaning of pilgrimage. John met Ish during his own pilgrimage in Spain, and their conversation returns to the question of what pilgrimage makes possible: spiritually, psychologically, relationally, and culturally.
Ish begins by describing his background in contemplative practice, community work, Latin American and Asian contexts, and his long apprenticeship under a teacher who exposed him to Hindu, Buddhist, Zen, ecological, and indigenous traditions. This opens into a discussion of the "beyond human": the sacred, the more-than-human world, distributed intelligence in community, and the goodness that calls a person toward transformation.
The heart of the conversation is pilgrimage. John proposes pilgrimage as a meta-practice: a living practice that places one's whole ecology of practices under a kind of positive stress test. Ish extends this by describing how pilgrimage changes one's environment, identity, pace, attention, and relationship to grief. It is not merely a practice added to life, but a passage that can reshape the life to which one returns.
The conversation then contrasts the pilgrim with the tourist and the explorer. Tourism seeks experience and pleasure; exploration seeks conquest, achievement, and control. Pilgrimage, by contrast, is marked by participation, willingness, availability, receptivity, reverence, and deep listening. It is not just movement through space, but a transformation in the way the world is allowed to speak.
Toward the end, John and Ish explore pilgrimage's relationship to God, sacredness, memory, dreams, community, and integration. Ish offers one of the conversation's most memorable images: after pilgrimage, the path was still walking him in his dreams. The episode closes with the claim that pilgrimage is not only for the Camino or other famous routes. It is a way of relating differently to what is already around us: with attention, reverence, openness, and love.
Key Insights
Pilgrimage can function as a meta-practice that renews and tests an ecology of practices.
Transformative experiences require humility, discernment, grounding, community, and integration.
Tourism, exploration, and pilgrimage represent different forms of attention and agency.
The pilgrim is moved less by will than by willingness, availability, and receptivity.
Pilgrimage can awaken a deeper relationship to God, sacredness, land, grief, and community.
The return from pilgrimage is not an afterthought; integration is central to whether revelation becomes transformation.
Pilgrimage can be practiced locally through reverence, attention, threshold-crossing, and renewed relationship.
Timestamps
00:00 - John introduces Ish Peregrino
03:20 - Ish's chosen name and the meaning of "pilgrim"
06:30 - The beyond-human, sacredness, and mystery
10:00 - The danger of trying to grasp sacred experience
13:50 - Why pivotal experiences need grounding
18:50 - Pilgrimage as a meta-practice
21:10 - Hearing the call and entering a new environment
25:10 - The pilgrim, the tourist, and the explorer
29:00 - Curiosity versus wonder
33:00 - The explorer, conquest, and modernity
38:20 - Participation beyond pleasure and power
39:30 - Willingness, availability, and receptivity
44:10 - Metanoia and voluntary self-emptying
49:10 - Archetypes encountered on pilgrimage
54:20 - Pilgrimage and the relationship to God
56:50 - Seeing one face of God
01:03:50 - Dreams, memory, and the path walking the pilgrim
01:05:20 - Hospicing modernity and the crisis of relationship
01:09:40 - Loving wisely and calibrating care
01:12:10 - Courtesy, ceremony, and reverence
01:13:20 - Encounters with strangers on the path
01:15:00 - Revelation, integration, and covenant
01:17:50 - Making the near world sacred again
Resources
Camino de Santiago
Shikoku pilgrimage
David Abram
Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
David Whyte, "Everything Is Waiting for You"
Christos Yannaras
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity
Thich Nhat Hanh
Hartmut Rosa, Why Democracy Needs Religion
Iain McGilchrist
William Desmond
About Ish Peregrino
Ish Peregrino, also known as Mauricio-Ishwara González G., is the creator of Modo Peregrino, a living space of inquiry, accompaniment, and public reflection where the inner journey and the outer crisis of meaning meet. His work accompanies leaders, organizations, and communities through cultural transformation and regeneration, weaving applied complexity, transformative learning, deep dialogue, and contemplative practice into long-term, context-rooted processes.
He is co-founder and Academic Director of DeUmbrales: Experiencias de Transición and a tutor-facilitator in Ronald Sistek's international Organizational Regeneration program. For more than 22 years, he has worked across Latin America, the United States, Spain, and Greece in universities, executive programs, organizations, and liminal spaces where real transformation tends to happen.
Ish's links:
Modo Peregrino: https://ishperegrino.com/
DeUmbrales: https://deumbrales.com/
Letters: https://nosuneelmedio.substack.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ModoPeregrino
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ish_peregrino/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ish-peregrino/
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Can transcendence still make philosophical sense after modernity?
John Vervaeke speaks with philosopher William Desmond about Platonism as a living tradition, the meaning of strong transcendence, and Desmond's philosophy of the metaxu: the between. The conversation builds from John's proposal that relevance realization and transjectivity are philosophically grounded in Desmond's ontological account of the between.
John begins by distinguishing modern psychological accounts of transcendence from the ancient and Platonic sense of strong transcendence. In this stronger sense, transcendence is not merely a better state of mind. It discloses truths that are otherwise unavailable and changes the knower's relation to reality. That claim challenges modern assumptions about flat ontology, the buffered self, representational cognition, and the fact-value split.
Desmond responds through Plato. He presents Plato not as a dry theorist of two worlds, but as a philosophical artist of the between: a thinker of mimesis, eros, mania, dialogue, singularity, and participatory transformation. Plato's dialogues are not ornamental containers for arguments; their drama, characters, and dialogical movement are part of the philosophy itself.
The later conversation opens into deep memory, imagination, eternity, possibility, God, Daoism, intercultural philosophy, pilgrimage, and the life-world. Desmond and Vervaeke converge on the need to move beyond the view from nowhere and return philosophy to transformative practice, embodied dwelling, and a richer contact with the sources of intelligibility.
Key Insights
Strong transcendence has epistemological and ontological significance, not only psychological benefit.
The metaxu, or between, names a porous relation before, beneath, between, and beyond modern dichotomies.
Modernity's fact-value split risks producing default atheism or default nihilism.
Participatory knowing offers an alternative to treating cognition as internal representation of an external world.
Plato's dialogical form is integral to his philosophy; the drama cannot simply be stripped away to extract arguments.
Mimesis involves relation between image and original without collapsing their difference.
Eros and mania point to two directions of transcendence: from below upward and from above downward.
Deep memory is a source of imagination and ontological depth, not merely storage of past facts.
Possibility should not be reduced to logical possibility; living possibility points toward enabling power.
Pilgrimage and theoria are linked: philosophical transformation requires being on the way, not merely observing from nowhere.
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome and setup
01:00 Relevance realization and the philosophy of the between
02:00 Platonism as living tradition
02:40 The need for strong transcendence
03:50 Transcendence after modernity
04:40 William Desmond introduces his work
05:00 Between system and poetics
06:00 The Western tradition as conversation partner
08:00 John's paper on strong transcendence
09:20 Psychological transcendence in modern thought
10:00 Truths disclosed through transcendence
11:00 Flat ontology and layered reality
12:30 The buffered self
14:00 Fact-value dichotomy and default atheism
15:10 Contact epistemology and participatory relation
17:20 Being realized as you realize
18:20 Anagoge and the cave
18:40 Interior, exterior, and superior transcendence
20:10 Autonomy, heteronomy, theonomy, and theosis
21:30 Desmond responds
22:00 Plato's philosophical art and the Sophist
22:30 Art, origins, and otherness
23:40 Originality, creativity, and modern art
25:20 Mimesis and the difference between image and original
28:20 Plato as thinker of the metaxu
29:00 Eros and self-transcendence
30:00 Mania and divine inspiration
31:30 Inspiration as transmission
33:20 Metaxology and Hegel
34:40 The Sophist and participatory knowing
36:40 The who of the sophist
38:10 Periagoge and the turning of the soul
39:40 Philosophy as a way of life
40:30 Exiting modernity's frame
43:20 The dialogue form is not ornamental
45:30 Socrates as an image of courage
46:20 Dialogos and method
48:00 Diaphanous logos
49:00 Singular incarnation and witness
51:10 Theoria as contemplation and pilgrimage
52:00 John's dialectic-in-dialogos practice
53:20 Anamnesis in practice
54:20 The logos beyond the participants
55:20 Deep memory and imagination
57:00 Muses, memory, and hidden springs
58:20 AI and outsourced memory
59:00 Memory as ontological depth
01:00:30 Eternity and the other to time
01:02:40 Inward otherness and ultimate otherness
01:04:50 Plato's sun and enabling light
01:06:20 Porosity and the buffered self
01:07:00 Living possibility
01:09:00 Possibility, transcendence, and God
01:10:40 What makes intelligibility intelligible?
01:11:40 Eastern and Western approaches to possibility
01:13:30 Coming to be and becoming
01:15:40 Nicholas of Cusa
01:17:00 Wu wei and giving way
01:18:20 Daoist practice and Socratic midwifery
01:20:20 Philosophical Silk Road
01:22:10 The intimate universal
01:23:20 Against philosophical tourism
01:25:30 Elemental porosity
01:26:00 Pilgrimage and practice
01:27:40 Being underway
01:29:30 Theoria as metanoetic passage
01:30:10 Symphonic language
01:34:00 The life-world
01:35:40 Rejecting the view from nowhere
01:36:20 Closing
Resources
William Desmond, Being and the Between
William Desmond, Ethics and the Between
William Desmond, God and the Between
William Desmond, Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Philosophy and Art
Plato, Symposium, Ion, Sophist, Republic, and Laches
Plotinus and Proclus
Hegel
Charles Taylor
Catherine Pickstock, Aspects of Truth
Paul Tillich
Thomas Aquinas
Nicholas of Cusa
Pierre Hadot
Henry Corbin
Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson, The Blind Spot
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Why is the modern world making us lose our "taste for the real," and can ancient practices like animal tracking and Socratic dialogue actually save our personhood from the "virtual matrix" of AI?
John Vervaeke, Guy Sengstock, and Kyle Koch announce their second "Reconnecting to the Real" retreat and outline what each will teach: Kyle offers nature-connection practices such as tracking and bird language to cultivate belonging; Guy brings Circling Method relational practices to deepen listening, communication, and group connection; John brings reconstructed Socratic practices including dialogos, dialectic, imaginal reflection, and a two-hour Socratic salon for questions. They describe the retreat as a non-vacation "pilgrimage" meant to transfer skills back into everyday life amid increasing virtual mediation and AI-driven risks of losing the "taste for the real." Logistics: Aug 31–Sept 4 in Whistler, British Columbia at Brû Creek Lodge, with lodging and meals included, costing $3,995 USD, and limited spots remaining with many returning participants.
 
Guy Sengstock
Co-founder of The Circling Method: He has spent 30 years developing this relational practice to transform peer-to-peer communication into a profound "asana" of listening and presence. Relational "Maestro": He uses spontaneous inquiry and formal circling to help groups move beyond intellectual concepts into direct contact with "the real".
Personal Blog/Website
LinkedIn
 
Kyle Koch
Nature Connection Expert: He bridges the gap between philosophical concepts and embodied reality through tracking, bird language, and nature-based core routines. Embodiment Practitioner: Coming from a background in Evolve Move Play, he focuses on reclaiming our innate sense of belonging to the natural world
EARTHKIN WILD - Kyle's Website
 
Reconnecting to the Real
The Circling Method
Evolve Move Play
Nature Connection Mentoring with Kyle
Rewild your Week-7 day nervous system reset

Timecodes:
00:00 Welcome to the Lectern
01:00 Kyle nature connection
02:30 Guy circling practice
06:00 John socratic practices
09:30 Whistler logistics
14:00 Why reconnecting real
16:00 Guy ear for real
20:00 John true good beautiful
30:00 Kyle beyond virtual
33:00 Tracking as truthing
35:30 Primordial skills return
38:00 Biases and feedback
40:00 Games reveal patterns
43:00 Beauty as practice
46:30 Pilgrimage not vacation
49:00 Screens and ai mediation
53:19 " The real is becoming option, like optional in some strange way."
53:30 Losing taste for real
58:00 Bring it back home
 
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What if the question is not simply whether life has meaning, but how our capacity for meaning develops?
In this Lectern conversation, Ethan Hsieh speaks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about his upcoming course, Matters Over Time: How the Sacred and Significant Evolve in Self and Society. Brendan introduces the course through his own experience of a meaning crisis, which led him to ask how meaning-making frames are constructed, lost, reconstructed, and developed.
The conversation begins at the personal level. Brendan explains why studying meaning-making can help us understand our own minds, other people's worlds, and the recurring patterns by which human beings organize significance. Ethan presses him from two sides: the person who feels life is already meaningful enough, and the person who has searched for meaning for years without finding it. Brendan's answer is careful: the course is not meant to force existential confrontation, but to invite a wider and deeper participation in reality.
From there, the discussion turns toward relativism, nihilism, and pluralism. Brendan argues that once an inherited worldview breaks open, people often either double down on a single frame or collapse into the idea that all meaning is merely private. His work tries to find an order beyond that pluralistic chaos by looking at developmental patterns in meaning-making across individual lives, cultures, and history.
The final movement of the conversation brings the course into its largest register: the sacred. Brendan frames meaning as a kind of knowledge that links us to reality in a viability-enhancing way, and he interprets the sacred as that which deepens flourishing, widens participation, and draws us into awe, wonder, and transformation. The course becomes not only a theory of meaning, but an invitation to see ourselves as participants in a much larger learning process.
Key Insights
Meaning-making can be studied as a developmental process rather than treated as a private feeling or arbitrary construction.
Brendan's work is shaped by his own meaning crisis and by John Vervaeke's account of the cultural meaning crisis.
Complexification does not mean abandoning what already matters; it means situating it within a wider and deeper horizon.
Ethical growth requires widening meaning beyond the self and becoming more responsive to other people, cultures, and perspectives.
Faith Development Theory and interview-based research offer ways to study how people answer questions about purpose and significance.
Relativism can be an advance beyond rigid absolutism, but it can also become chaotic and disorienting.
The course links individual development to cultural evolution and the history of human meaning-making.
Brendan resists both triumphalist progress stories and simple decline stories.
The sacred is presented as evolving through human history as our relationship to ultimate concern becomes more complex.
The course is meant to be dialogical and exploratory, not a closed system.
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome and introduction
01:30 Brendan's background and research focus
02:00 Personal meaning crisis and meaning-making
03:30 John Vervaeke's influence
04:00 Course frame: sacred and significant in self and society
06:00 Why study meaning if life already feels fine?
08:20 Patterns and structures in meaning-making
09:30 Learning as meta-meaningful
11:40 Does growth threaten existing meaning?
12:30 Expanding the meaning horizon
13:20 Ethical widening beyond the self
14:40 Widening and deepening
17:30 Searching for meaning and fearing interior work
18:40 Growth, effort, and challenge
21:10 Comfort, hollowness, and the "so what?" question
22:40 How do I know my life is meaningful?
23:00 Faith Development Theory and lived interview data
24:50 Different answers to meaning
28:40 Is meaning merely private?
29:20 Absolutism, worldviews, and the bursting of the bubble
32:30 Relativism and pluralistic chaos
34:10 Ordering different meaning-making frames
36:40 Recovering from nihilism
39:40 Understanding our 2026 epoch
40:50 Individual meaning and cultural evolution
41:40 Similar patterns across life and history
44:00 The cosmic scale of meaning-making
46:20 Already connected to something larger
48:10 From abstract framework to embodied worldview
50:20 The cosmic fluke story
52:40 Human meaning-making and cosmic complexification
54:00 Responsibility and the call toward wisdom
57:40 Meaning-making and the sacred
59:40 The sacred, viability, and flourishing
01:00:30 Awe, wonder, and reality beyond our current frame
01:02:10 Sacred symbols and tradition
01:03:10 Updating the sacred through prophets and sages
01:04:00 From tribe to common humanity
01:05:40 The sacred as evolving
01:06:10 God and cultural evolution
01:09:30 The course as contemplation
01:10:20 Seeing oneself as part of the process
01:12:30 Re-homing modern people in relation to the sacred
01:14:40 Participating in a new movement of the sacred
01:18:10 Epistemic humility and dialogos
01:20:20 Closing
Resources
Matters Over Time: How the Sacred and Significant Evolve in Self and Society 
Brendan Graham Dempsey
Institute of Applied Metatheory
Sky Meadow Institute
John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
John Vervaeke, Seeing God Again for the First Time
James Fowler, Faith Development Theory
Friedrich Nietzsche
Joseph Campbell
John Thatamanil
Meister Eckhart
Paul Tillich
The Silver Road
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