Lost Psycho-Technologies: When Our Minds Were At Their Best | John Vervaeke

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In this conversation, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke joins Hans Busstra to examine the historical roots of the modern meaning crisis through the lens of psychotechnologies: culturally developed mental tools and practices that transform how human beings think, perceive and make sense of reality.

Vervaeke describes how psychotechnologies such as shamanism, Socratic dialogue and the Christian notion of agape profoundly shaped Western thought.

More information about John Vervaeke’s and his work:
https://johnvervaeke.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@johnvervaeke
https://x.com/DrJohnVervaeke

Thanks to the OPEN Foundation for facilitating this interview and their recording of Vervaeke’s presentation at ICPR ’26
https://www.open-foundation.org/
https://icpr-conference.com

PART I: Psychotechnologies

0:00 Introduction
3:46 What are psychotechnologies?
6:22 Shamanism: humanity’s first psychotechnology
11:52 Soul flight: wisdom through altered states
15:42 From animism to the axial revolution
20:25 Why humanity invented two worlds
27:03 Socrates, Pythagoras and the birth of philosophy
30:35 How knowledge becomes wisdom
33:31 Jesus, covenant and the transformation of God
42:05 What happened during Jesus’ lost years?
45:09 Agape: the love that creates persons
48:59 Paul and the birth of the divided self
54:20 Paul’s divided self vs eastern awakening
59:58 Being vs becoming: Christianity and the East
1:06:23 When was meaning at its peak?
1:09:39 Plotinus: the Einstein of wisdom
1:16:02 The One, Brahman and the meaning of ‘good’
1:21:05 Is Neoplatonism a form of idealism?

PART II: Mathematics is not reality

1:26:11 How rationality and spirituality split apart
1:31:25 Descartes and the birth of modern rationality
1:32:12 Nominalism: how we became trapped in the mind
1:37:14 The Kantian trap: imprisoned in the mind
1:48:13 Computation: modernity’s psychotechnology
1:53:32 The observer missing from physics
1:55:11 Why cognition is not computation
1:59:06 How do we solve the meaning crisis?
2:07:41 Psychedelics, flow and rebuilding reality
2:17:36 Does Vervaeke practice what he teaches?

PART III: Vervaeke’s Lecture at ICPR

2:21:30 Lecture: from flow to mystical experience
2:22:01 The cognitive continuum
2:23:23 The nine-dot problem and sudden insight
2:26:12 Entropy and the aha moment
2:27:28 Why fluency feels like truth
2:29:55 Relevance realization: finding what matters
2:32:38 Flow states as cascades of insight
2:35:07 Optimal gripping and cognitive trade-offs
2:38:36 Mystical experience as worldview-level flow
2:40:39 Sensibility transcendence and wonder
2:43:51 Audience Q&A
2:47:02 When insight becomes psychosis

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Written by Essentia Foundation