John Vervaeke

John Vervaeke is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and is the director of their Cognitive Science Program. He is also a YouTuber who is recognized for his series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It has been said that his work is similar to that of Jordan Peterson, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and Peter Limberg. He is the first author of the book Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis, along with Filip Miscevic and Christopher Mastropietro. He is a practitioner of martial arts and meditation.
==Early Life==
John Vervaeke grew up in a highly fundamental Christian household. "I was traumatized by that religion," he said in an interview with Elizabeth Oldfield. But then goes on to say, "That religion, for all of its toxic effects, and also because my mom, to give her credit, encouraged me to think and to learn and grow, it left me with a hunger for the transcendent."
After leaving his household, he took on a kind of violent atheism, with god as his antagonist. Eventually, all this changed, and he was left longing for the divine. He went to university to try and find an answer to his own meaning crisis. He says that he "started to pursue Asian philosophies – Daoism, Buddhism, a bit of Vedanta." He was the first person to take this search for mindfulness to the University of Toronto. He says that he got very encouraging feedback from his students and has never looked back.
==Occupation==
At the University of Toronto, John Vervaeke began teaching a class on Buddhism after being recommended by a fellow and good friend of his, Evan Thompson.
When he was teaching a course on Higher Cognitive Processes, a student of his, a professional videographer, came to him and suggested that they do a video series. That became Awakening From The Meaning Crisis.
John is a founder and board member of the Vervaeke Foundation, a nonprofit organization with the goal of continuing to address the Meaning Crisis.
==Awakening from the Meaning Crisis==
Vervaeke's work on relevance realization and enlightenment has been widely discussed and debated in both academic and popular circles. In an effort to make his ideas more accessible to a wider audience, he has released a 50-part video series on YouTube called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. In this series, Vervaeke explores the challenges of meaning-making in the modern world and draws on insights from philosophy, psychology, and spirituality to offer a path forward.
Vervaeke states that we are in the midst of many mental crises, and all of these flow from the Meaning Crisis. Vervaeke said that his goal is "to empower people to…awaken." He describes awakening as a process of deep individual transformation. As a cognitive scientist, he says that his work is to understand his field and bridge between fields. He describes his search as a search for a higher meta-meaning system that bridges and encompasses multidisciplinary fields such as neuroscience, and cognitive psychology.
==After Socrates==
Vervaeke also made a twenty-four-part series called After Socrates. He says that the series is about "how to create the theory, the practice, and the ecology of practices such that we can live and grow and develop through a Socratic way of life." In discovering Socrates, he says that he found his life's purpose, the pursuit of wisdom, and wisdom as an antidote to the Meaning Crisis.
Category:Professors
Category:University of Toronto alumni
Category:Canadian people