First off, I want to echo what others have said Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and After Socrates have been truly impactful for me as well. Vervaeke’s ability to weave cognitive science, ancient philosophy, and practical psychotechnologies into a coherent response to modern disorientation is rare and genuinely valuable. His work has clarified and deepened some intuitions I’ve held for years but couldn’t quite name. I’m deeply grateful for the intellectual generosity he models. At the same time, as I watch and reflect, a number of questions and tensions come up, not from a place of opposition, but from curiosity and a desire to expand the conversation. Here are a few thoughts I’ve been sitting with, offered as part of the dialogical space Vervaeke himself invites.
1. On the Framing of the Crisis
The idea of a “meaning crisis” feels deeply true in many modern Western contexts. The breakdown of inherited narratives, the disintegration of communities, and the rise of instrumental rationality have left many feeling unmoored. But I wonder if this framing is more culturally specific than it’s sometimes presented.
Across the Global South, and within Indigenous, Islamic, and other non-Western traditions, the sense of meaning is often still grounded in community, ritual, and spiritual cosmologies; despite the pressures of globalization. For many, the crisis isn’t an internal vacuum, but an externally imposed dislocation. Colonialism, extractive capitalism, and cultural erasure have disrupted older meaning systems, yes, but these are not the same crisis Vervaeke describes.
That doesn’t invalidate his project. But it does raise the question: Is this a universal human predicament, or a culturally situated crisis within the Western intellectual lineage? And if the latter, how might deeper engagement with other ontologies (beyond Buddhism and Neoplatonism) enrich or challenge the framing?
2. On Rationalism and the Expansion of Reason
Vervaeke critiques Enlightenment rationalism as a driver of fragmentation, and I think that’s fair. But I also believe rationality doesn’t have to be reductive. What we may need is not less reason, but a wider and more integrated rationality: one that includes the body, intuition, emotion, and aesthetic insight. A rationality that listens, that feels, that transforms.
In that light, his discussion of relevance realization is especially powerful. It captures how cognition is not about passively representing the world, but about discerning what matters; what stands out, what guides action. Yet even here, I’d invite a broader comparative lens. Much of what’s framed as cutting-edge cognitive science resonates strongly with older spiritual traditions… not only from the East, but from places often omitted from these dialogues.
Sufi epistemologies, for instance, have long engaged with attention, salience, and embodied knowing through practices like muraqabah (watchful presence), dhikr (remembrance), and tafakkur (contemplative reflection). These aren’t just devotional acts, they’re systematic psychotechnologies of cognitive transformation. And yet, they’re almost entirely absent from this series.
It raises the question: Why do certain traditions (e.g. Zen, Stoicism) get academic and cognitive validation, while others remain “too religious” or culturally distant to be included?
3. On Ancient Practices and Modern Appropriation
One of the most valuable parts of the series is the call to recover ancient psychotechnologies; practices designed not to give us information, but to cultivate wisdom. I agree this is crucial. But I’m also cautious about how these tools are being revived in the broader culture.
When mindfulness becomes a productivity hack, or Stoicism gets filtered through YouTube hustle culture, something essential is lost. And when these practices are lifted from traditions without context (flattened, rebranded, and marketed) they risk becoming simulations of transformation, rather than its vehicle.
I also think there’s a blind spot in which traditions get mined for these tools. There’s a well-worn trail between ancient Greece, Buddhism, and modern neuroscience, but what about West African divination systems, Andean cosmologies, or Islamic mysticism? Not just as cultural references, but as full systems of embodied wisdom?
Reviving ancient practices in modern life is powerful, but it must be done with attention to lineage, context, and epistemic responsibility. Otherwise, we risk turning sacred technologies into lifestyle accessories.
4. On Awakening and the Language of Consciousness
The language of “awakening” carries deep resonance, and Vervaeke uses it to point toward a kind of lived transformation, a shift in the way one perceives and participates in the world. I appreciate that. But I also notice how easily this framing can slip into hierarchy: the awakened and the asleep, the conscious and the lost.
While I don’t think this is his intent, I do think any such model has to be careful. Awakening, if it means anything, has to remain plural, contextual, and grounded not only in self-insight, but in ethical relationship and social transformation. Otherwise, it risks becoming a kind of spiritual meritocracy, a ladder of enlightenment that too easily maps onto existing cultural privilege.
Ultimately, I’m moved by Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It’s a serious, generous, and needed intervention in our cultural moment. None of these reflections are meant to diminish the immense value of it, quite the opposite: they are offered in the spirit of appreciation and inquiry. Vervaeke has opened a rare and vital space in the contemporary landscape, a space that bridges science and spirit, cognition and care, philosophy and practice. But perhaps the next step is not only deeper integration across disciplines, but across cultures and histories.
If meaning is to be reawakened, it cannot be only through recovering what we have lost but also through listening, receiving, and building relationship with wisdoms that were never lost in the first place. Many of these traditions are still alive, sometimes marginalized, sometimes endangered, but carrying insights, technologies, and ways of seeing the world that are essential to any serious project of cultural renewal.
In that spirit, I offer this reflection not as a conclusion, but as a question:
What would it look like to make Awakening from the Meaning Crisis not just a Western intellectual journey, but a truly global, intercultural, and reciprocal dialogue; one in which many wisdoms, many lineages, and many ways of knowing are invited to co-create the path ahead?