Dr. John Vervaeke

What does it mean to "see God again" after modernity has taught us to look for the sacred in all the wrong ways?
In this special Lectern conversation, John Vervaeke is joined by Guy Sengstock for a deep reflection on John's three-part course trilogy, Seeing God Again for the First Time. John invited Guy to watch the courses and respond not only to their arguments, but to the way the courses enact a philosophical, phenomenological, and spiritual exercise. Guy begins from his own background as co-founder of Circling, describing how relational practice opened a mystery that psychological language could not fully hold, eventually leading him into Heidegger, phenomenology, and philosophy as contemplation. From there, he draws out the personal and pedagogical arc of John's work: teaching as encounter, as vulnerability, and as a way of revealing what students are already confronted with.
John describes the course as an attempt to integrate rigorous argument, phenomenological exploration, and spiritual exercise in the spirit of Socrates, Plotinus, and Pierre Hadot. Rather than define religion or God and then argue for or against them, John sets out to deconstruct the modern grammar that blocks our ability to encounter sacredness at all: the fact/value, is/ought, subjective/objective, theory/data, and meaning/measurement dichotomies. The conversation moves through Paul Tillich, William Desmond, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Catherine Pickstock, Janet Soskice, D.C. Schindler, and 4E cognitive science, showing how analytic philosophy, continental phenomenology, and cognitive science converge in undermining modernity's inherited picture.
Guy and John explore sacredness as ultimately real, ultimately orienting, ultimately transformative, and ultimately resonant; naming as relational participation rather than possession; wonder as calling self and world into question; and aletheia as truth that discloses beauty, goodness, and intelligibility. The conversation closes with the contemporary stakes of this recovery: AI, consciousness, personhood, the meaning crisis, and the alignment problem. John argues that we can no longer treat philosophy and sacredness as academic luxuries when our technologies are reshaping cognition, identity, and agency. If we are creating new kinds of intelligence, the question is not merely how to bind them to us, but how to orient them - and ourselves - toward truth, goodness, beauty, intelligibility, and the sacred.
Guy Sengstock is a co-founder of Circling and a longtime teacher of relational, dialogical, and contemplative practice. His work bridges phenomenology, philosophy, facilitation, and the lived mystery of interpersonal encounter.
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About The Lectern
The Lectern is dedicated to wisdom cultivation through dialogue, inquiry, and transformative practices. Through courses, live events, and community conversations, we seek not merely to discuss ideas, but to explore how they can shape the way we live.
00:00 Welcome to The Lectern
01:00 Why Guy is reflecting on Seeing God Again
02:00 Guy introduces his background in Circling and philosophy
04:00 Circling, mystery, and the limits of psychological language
06:00 Heidegger, Being and Time, and philosophy as contemplation
09:00 John's Socratic and Plotinian aspirations
10:30 Argument, phenomenology, and spiritual exercise
12:00 Seeing God Again, pilgrimage, and the Philosophical Silk Road
13:00 John the person, scientist, philosopher, and teacher
15:00 Teaching as existential confrontation
17:00 The manner of teaching as part of the teaching
18:00 Modernity, the meaning crisis, and sacredness
20:00 When teaching became encounter
21:00 Paul Tillich, cognitive science, and teaching virtue
23:00 William Desmond and philosophy as spiritual exercise
25:00 Teaching toward a philosophical-spiritual end
26:00 Involving the whole self without becoming self-involved
29:00 Revealing what students are already confronted with
31:00 Teaching, social phobia, and vulnerability
33:00 The sacred as deep teaching
35:00 Idealization, temptation, and participation
38:00 Naming God and the loss of relational naming
41:00 The four dichotomies of modernity
42:00 Out-rigoring the rigor
44:00 Deconstructing the grammar that blocks sacredness
45:00 Mystical traditions as phenomenological exemplars
47:00 Modernity's vertical and horizontal dichotomies
49:00 Recovering sight beyond modernity's glasses
50:00 Sacredness as ultimately real, orienting, transformative, and resonant
52:00 Why John uses atheist scholarship before apologetics
53:00 Counter-modern thought and the limits of postmodernism
55:00 Why these dichotomies matter beyond academia
57:00 Everything Everywhere All at Once, nihilism, and value
01:01:00 Philosophy outside the ivory tower
01:02:00 Postmodernity and living in the ruins
01:04:00 Recovery and asking "Where are we?"
01:05:00 Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and recovering meaning
01:07:00 Modernity as icon rather than representation
01:08:00 Truth, goodness, beauty, and intelligibility
01:12:00 Wonder vs. curiosity
01:15:00 Aletheia, beauty, liberation, and onto-normativity
01:18:00 Seeing God Again as pilgrimage
01:19:00 Theoria as theory, contemplation, and pilgrimage
01:21:00 AI, analytic philosophy, and consciousness
01:24:00 Meaning, relevance, and the limits of computation
01:26:00 AI personhood and disembodied embodiment
01:30:00 Why philosophy matters for technologies shaping us
01:32:00 AI agents, personhood, and the coming ontological crisis
01:35:00 The meaning crisis and the loss of sacred orientation
01:37:00 Personhood, ontology, and responsibility
01:39:00 The alignment problem and binding intelligence to the sacred
01:40:00 Why the course must be taken as a course
01:41:00 Teacher assistance, Socratic process, and future retreats
01:42:00 Socratic Salon and participatory practice
01:43:00 Closing reflections on retreat and relationship
Thank you for listening!

What is applied metatheory - and why might it matter for ordinary people trying to make sense of reality, meaning, spirituality, and complexity?
In this live Q&A from The Lectern, Ethan Hsieh speaks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about metatheory, meaning-making, complexity, and the spiritual task of learning to feel at home in the universe. Brendan introduces his work as Director of Research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory and Director at Sky Meadow Institute, where he explores developmental models, metamodern thought, complexity science, worldview, value, and the sacred. The conversation begins by demystifying "meta" itself: not as abstract ivory-tower speculation, but as the human effort to build better maps of reality from an overwhelming abundance of knowledge. Ethan and Brendan examine how we are always philosophizing - asking what is true, who to trust, what matters, and how different domains of meaning relate to each other. They discuss the pitfalls of complexity, including conspiracy thinking, premature certainty, and the difficulty of staying with learning when one does not yet understand. The conversation moves through AI, mentorship, spiritual development, metaphor, phenomenology, and the challenge of describing transformative experience without over-reifying inherited symbols. Brendan frames metatheory as a way of relating different "data" of human experience - from mystical encounter to neuroscience to integral theory - without collapsing them into chaos or dogma. The episode closes with a question about perennialism, where Brendan makes a case for dynamic spirituality, interpretive humility, and pluralism not as a failure to answer, but perhaps as part of the answer itself.
Brendan Graham Dempsey is Director of Research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory and Director at Sky Meadow Institute in Vermont. He is the host of the Metamodern Meaning podcast and author of the multi-volume series The Evolution of Meaning. His upcoming Lectern course, Matters Over Time, explores meaning, complexity, development, and the sacred.
00:00 Welcome and live Q&A format
01:30 Introducing Brendan Graham Dempsey
01:50 Institute of Applied Metatheory, Sky Meadow Institute, and Metamodern Meaning
02:50 The Evolution of Meaning and Matters Over Time
03:30 Why "applied metatheory" can sound intimidating
04:20 What is applied metatheory?
05:00 Big-picture thinking across human history
06:00 The impossibility of "reading everything" today
07:00 Making sense of reality from specialized knowledge
07:40 Metatheory as a way to feel at home in the universe
09:30 Why useful maps matter
09:50 We are always philosophizing
11:30 Meaning as reality continually disclosing itself
12:10 Development, wisdom, and the expanding horizon of thought
13:00 Epistemology, truth, and learning to hold complexity
14:50 Demystifying "meta"
15:20 Pitfalls in approaching complexity
16:00 Conspiracy theories and seeking complexity in the wrong places
17:40 AI, wisdom, and the demands of complex conversations
18:30 Learning, discomfort, mentors, and staying on the path
20:00 Rabbit holes vs. deeper engagement with reality
27:00 Complexity, integrity, and discernment
35:00 Metatheory, spirituality, and meaning-making frameworks
45:00 How symbols and metaphors point beyond themselves
55:00 Spiritual experience, interpretation, and inherited maps
01:06:40 The finger pointing at the moon
01:07:00 Bird watching as spiritual exercise
01:08:00 "Things happen. That was something."
01:08:50 Getting closer to lived experience
01:09:30 Phenomenology, Layman Pascal, and expanding spiritual vocabulary
01:10:30 The divine as doorway into experience
01:11:00 Mapping spiritual data without collapsing into chaos
01:12:10 Would Brendan consider himself a perennialist?
01:13:20 Dynamic spirituality, emergence, novelty, and evolution
01:15:00 Naturalizing perennial claims and studying causal dynamics
01:17:20 Near-death experience and interpretive humility
01:19:00 Ontological claims as proposals, not closures
01:20:00 Integrity, skepticism, and not being sold a worldview
01:22:40 Pluralism as part of the answer
01:24:50 Brendan's course Matters Over Time
01:25:20 Closing thanks
Explore Brendan's course and other offerings:
https://lectern.teachable.com
About The Lectern
The Lectern is dedicated to wisdom cultivation through dialogue, inquiry, and transformative practices. Through courses, live events, and community conversations, we seek not merely to discuss ideas, but to explore how they can shape the way we live.
Thank you for listening!

What happens when wonder is reduced to curiosity, and curiosity becomes a drive to master everything?
In this second conversation with William Desmond, John Vervaeke returns to the question of astonishment: not as a passing emotional state, but as a deeper opening of the mind to reality. Desmond frames scientism as a philosophical interpretation of science that tries to make all essential questions answerable through determinate method, precision, and control. Science remains valuable, but scientism forgets the more original wonder from which inquiry arises.
The conversation distinguishes astonishment, perplexity, and curiosity. Curiosity seeks determinate answers, while astonishment opens us to what exceeds our mastery. Vervaeke connects this with his own distinction between the having mode and the being mode, arguing that genuine wonder is bound up with transformation rather than mere information.
From there, the dialogue turns to Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, logical positivism, AI, computation, relevance realization, and insight. Desmond and Vervaeke ask whether intelligibility can be reduced to determination, or whether the most important forms of understanding depend on a living act of insight that formal systems cannot generate on their own.
The final movement turns toward spiritual practice, Socrates, Jesus, the Buddha, religion, trust, and forgiveness. If modern culture suffers from a dearth of astonishment, then the recovery of meaning may require more than better arguments. It may require practices, communities, and forms of dialogue that reawaken porosity, reverence, and an openness to the sacred.
Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction and the Desmond conversation so far
03:00 - Science, scientism, and the desire to make everything univocal
06:30 - Astonishment, perplexity, and curiosity
14:00 - Plato, Aristotle, and the purpose of philosophical wonder
16:30 - Having, being, mystery, and transformation
22:20 - Whether knowledge dissolves wonder
26:10 - Logical positivism and the failure of total certainty
31:30 - The four kinds of knowing and propositional tyranny
34:00 - Insight, inference, and logical systems
41:40 - Relevance realization, computation, and AI
46:30 - What intelligibility means beyond determination
50:40 - Inexhaustibility and the hyper-intelligible
58:20 - Dialectic, dialogos, and the practice of astonishment
01:03:40 - Porosity, the buffered self, and vulnerability
01:07:00 - Meaninglessness, spiritual practice, and cultural homelessness
01:12:30 - Reawakening astonishment without commodifying experience
01:14:10 - Ancient dialogue as a response to skepticism
01:17:30 - Socrates, Jesus, the Buddha, and embodied wisdom
01:22:00 - Religion, the sacred, and suspicion of God
01:27:30 - Trust, forgiveness, and cultural metanoia
01:30:20 - Closing thoughts and the next conversation
Key Insights
Scientism totalizes science by treating scientific method as the answer to every essential question.
Astonishment is more original than curiosity because it opens inquiry rather than merely directing it toward control.
Perplexity matters because some mysteries are not failures of explanation but enduring features of the human condition.
Insight depends on living participation in intelligibility, not only inference or computation.
AI and formal systems can imitate aspects of thought, but they do not resolve the deeper question of living noetic activity.
Modern meaninglessness is intensified when institutions, practices, and role models no longer help people recover reverence and connectedness.
Religion must be discussed at the level of human vulnerability, longing, trust, failure, and mystery, not only at the level of institutional critique.
Resources
Astonishments and Science: Engagements with William Desmond - edited by Paul Tyson
William Desmond, "The Dearth of Astonishment: On Curiosity, Scientism and Thinking as Negativity"
William Desmond, God and the Between
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having
Bernard Lonergan, Insight
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
Augustine's Cassiciacum dialogues
About William Desmond
William Desmond is a philosopher whose work engages metaphysics, religion, art, science, and transcendence. In this conversation, he and John Vervaeke continue their exploration of astonishment, scientism, the between, and philosophical practice.
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Thanks for listening!

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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