The Cognitive Science of Ritual - with John Vervaeke

John Vervaeke and I discuss the cognitive science of ritual: the many different aspects of ritual and its importance even in the pursuit of reason, among sacred and secular spaces, to mark time and identity, to establish transformation, and more! John is truly making headway in giving us the concepts and vocabulary to understand symbolic and ritual participation across different participatory levels. Enjoy!

Timestamps:
00:00 - Coming up
00:51 - Intro music
01:17 - Introduction to Cognitive Science
04:16 - Ritual and an advent of the sacred
06:18 - Meaningful ritual
08:23 - Why work against ritual?
14:07 - Replace religious with civic
15:47 - Hermeneutics of suspicion
18:24 - Progressive rituals
23:23 - Transformation
27:51 - Marking identity
36:17 - Ritual as space

My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson.

[hermionegreen]

What an interesting conversation thank you <3

[machinotaur]

15:04 I was on a plane last year, a night flight after Christmas, and I prayed with my prayer rope for about 30 minutes after takeoff. I stopped when the lights came up and they began the cabin service, and the woman next to me turned and said that she'd been meditating: she said I had a powerful, serene aura around me, and that it had made her meditation unusually deep. She asked if I'd been meditating too, saying I clearly had a rich practice, do I use a mantra, etc; and I said no, I was praying, and I held up my prayer rope. Her eyes lit up, and she said "Oh, you're Buddhist" and went on about her Buddhist friend; and when she'd finished, I said no, I'm a Christian, that prayer ropes have a long history in Christian prayer life. She said "Oh", turned away, and didn't talk to me again for the remaining 2½ hours of the flight 😂 What happened to my powerful aura, lady?

[HWHY]

This conversation is neither diminishing nor desanctifying "The Divine, " it's empowering people to discover and employ it.

The point is that beyond simply relying on the words and experiences of our predecessors in order to condense a cargo cult, we can actually come to know The Water ourselves by learning to swim in it.

The key to The Kingdom is within YOU, not within some book nor church nor doctrine.

We are delivered and we arrive not by literal technicality but through direct experience.

[TheApprentice]

I love the synodal spirit you embody, Jonathan, with your bold interfaith conversations!

[jrettetsohyt]

An image is worth 1000 words, accordingly, ritual action is worth 1000 images.

[iliya]

Idk - sometimes it seems like our modern culture way overthinks things. If we began to lose our way with overthinking in the scholastic renaissance, will we find our way back through more rational deductive abstractions to explain why rationalism doesn’t work and what ritual is (via cognitive science, et al)? If anything I suppose it exposes the limits of all this heady stuff, but that also necessarily means we need to let it go, or at least, subject it to the nous, in its proper place in the hierarchy. To not offer “strange incense” but to offer the good incense of right belief and right worship. There is “boots on the ground” wisdom in the simple babushka saying her prayers but not in the complex jargon of intellectualism.

[billtimmons]

Yep. I signed up and took the first lesson of the course. I'm liking it so far. Ostension, pointing, staring ... pretty intriguing material. Moses and the bronze serpent to heal. Totem poles to preserve family story. Renaming high points like Mt McKinley to rewrite narrative. Eiffel tower to point out culture. Wherever we look, we re-imagine, and we then write a more relevant story. This discussion is so necessary in this really weird time we're in. Nobody agrees with anything because we are trapped in propositional knowledge. Cog scientist and an icon artist ... very good convo.

[CaesarReb]

This is great! I totally would have taken that 4th year seminar. TY.

[jacobmacdonald]

Interesting discussion ! Always appreciate you two !

[JohnWiedenhoeft]

I dont quite get this: why would realizing an aspiration require ritual? Usually we emulate people we look up to as a role model (including for rationality), without going through some ritual practices. Or am I misunderstanding that point?

[christopherbagley]

Enjoyed listening to this conversation, but would really love some better audio.

[ThomasSimmons-ux]

"You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Lotta weathermen out there...

[chriswalth]

Can someone explain to me in simple terms how they turned the Rover on Mars into a totem? 40:35

[andrewrackliff]

Is there a glossary or terms? Lol, so many that I don't understand. Where do I go to get a definition?

[maggen_me]

Every artist knows his ritual, - you have to orient yourself in relation to t"he idea" to a stage of finish "ness"

[SempreGumby]

Ritual is a way of conveying information from the past to the present.
Elimination of Ritual is a way of forced forgetting.

[jrettetsohyt]

Rationality actually involves ritual, and ritual involves rationality.
Rationality is simply the mental manipulation of ideas, abiding by the single law of not creating a contradiction.
The only difference between religious and secular rituals is the difference in the respective set of ideas/beliefs that they rationally manipulate in their mind.

The difference in their respective sets of ideas/beliefs, is not necessarily an issue of rationality (though both groups can be mistakenly irrational), but is certainly due to their willingness to accept or reject different modes of knowing/knowledge acquisition.

And note that the secular person may try to judge a religious person’s acceptance of revelation as an irrational mode of knowledge acquisition, but the secular person‘s judgment here is actually Irrational, since they cannot really know whether the revelation is true or not.

Properly and precisely, a religious person can’t say they acquired true knowledge through revelation, only that the revelation’s ideas, as they understand them currently, seem to be true, are rationally possible (that is, are not contradictory to any other data of their experience and knowledge) and that they are willing to risk trust/faith that those ideas are true and live accordingly.

Also properly and precisely, a secular person cannot look down on a religious person or label them irrational because they accept revelation as a mode of knowledge acquisition, since the secular person themself cannot be any more sure that their own senses are revealing to them true knowledge. Eg, Is everything a super computer hologram, or are we brains in vats?

Ultimately, we are all in the same boat and we use the same test for whether our beliefs sufficiently map onto true knowledge or not:
Do our beliefs serve the purpose of helping us get what we want or not? Do our beliefs work or not?

Reality itself, whatever it really is, is kind enough to help us know which beliefs are close enough to truth: The further your beliefs are from the truth, the farther you are from real satisfaction and peace of the soul, and from survival, especially over the long term and at least for most of the people in the believing group.

[alexforget]

I usualy have a hard time to follow John unlike JBP or Jonathan.
I think it's a mix of too low density of information and words that are not anchored in my mind. In this conversation it was clearer with examples and connection to the way Jonathan speak about it.
I think a few drawings would help a lot. I now see our intelect or ideas or propositional knowing as a tiny part of our "knowing" almost like coat of paint on furniture, usefull, visible, but a tiny part of the whole thing.

[endlessendeavor]

Hey, what does “ritual” mean in this context? When you guys refer to ritual do you mean: traditions, or do you mean religion — and spirituality? (Or maybe even both.)

[pricklypear]

The care that goes into the choice of words by John Vervaeke is incredibly humbling to someone like myself with a loose tongue.