Zen Neoplatonism and the Nature of Reality with John Vervaeke

Finnish philosopher and psychologist Jussi Jylkkä describes a mystical experience he had years before entering psychedelic research and explains the metaphysical agnosticism he developed from it. All metaphysical isms, he argues, are language games. Worldviews are like eyeglasses that become visible only when we learn to see them as models. Classical mystics overreach when they convert their experiences into claims about the ultimate nature of reality. After we finished recording, Jussi contacted me because he felt that he had not been completely honest. Rather than replace the original conversation, we recorded a second part. Jussi discusses his Christian faith, his decision to join the Lutheran Church, and an experience in which he saw physical reality as the body of Christ. We then consider whether his philosophical agnosticism can coexist with personal faith, and whether Christianity offers an account of morality and spiritual direction that his earlier position lacked. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Meet Jussi Jylkkä 01:39 A Mystical Experience Without Drugs 07:06 Psychedelics Revealed Nothing New 12:49 Why Metaphysics Becomes Wordplay 20:44 Beyond Physicalism and Idealism 33:19 When Models Become Idols 45:11 Are Animals Already Enlightened? 48:24 The Zen Path 58:15 Knowing Reality Through Being 1:09:11 Compassion Without Morality 1:16:59 When Mystics Claim Too Much 1:39:21 AI as a Cognitive Mirror 1:45:11 Why Jussi Returned 1:49:33 Hiding His Christian Faith 1:51:14 Reality as Christ's Body 2:03:09 Why Christianity Resonated 2:16:04 Pantheism and the Fall 2:23:36 Convincing His Younger Self READ & LISTEN Read the key insights and full transcript: https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-apophatic-mysticism-idolatry-and-the-limits-of-metaphysics-with-jussi-jylkka FOLLOW https://substack.com/@tiagovf https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/ MUSIC CREDIT Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled "Peril," from the album Impossible Parade. Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/ Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

John Vervaeke returns to the podcast 5 years later to argue that the modern war between science and religion was always a mistake. A cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, he makes the case that his own field needs religious studies: the first generation of the cognitive science of religion tried to explain religion away, smuggling in an unexamined naturalism and treating believers as defective. Vervaeke reframes religion not as a set of beliefs about a supernatural object but as a comprehensive orientation to meaning that the sciences themselves quietly presuppose.  The conversation ranges across relevance realization, the mystery of meaning as a Heisenberg-like complementarity of truth and relevance, his identity as a "Zen Neoplatonist," and the "semiotic symbiosis" by which traditions merge and correct one another. He closes on how someone in his position guards against becoming a guru, and on what, exactly, he means by God. Subscribe to the newsletter: https://substack.com/@tiagovf  TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Introduction 1:28 Cognitive science as intellectual pilgrimage 14:38 Why cognitive science needs religious studies 27:30 Science, truth and relevance 36:50 Neoplatonism and the return to the sacred 51:18 Where Zen meets Neoplatonism 1:02:00 How religions and gods emerge 1:08:47 Criticism, reading and living between worlds 1:20:09 Religion beyond belief 1:35:12 The dangers of becoming a guru 1:47:28 Poetry and life mistakes 1:50:17 Underrated thinkers, self-deception and God   READ  Key insights and the full transcript here: https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-zen-neoplatonism-and-the-nature-of-reality-with-john-vervaeke FOLLOW https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/ MUSIC CREDIT Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade'  Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/  Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

Most people take it for granted that consciousness is the one thing science cannot explain. Julian Kiverstein thinks the problem has been set up backwards from the start. Rather than beginning with dead, inert matter and asking how it could ever give rise to experience, he inverts the question: start from lived experience, which is where phenomenology begins, and then ask how the physical world fits inside it. From that single move he rebuilds the story of how mind emerges from life, and argues the notorious "hard problem" looks far less intractable once you stop trying to squeeze consciousness out of physics. An Assistant Professor of Neurophilosophy at the University of Amsterdam, Kiverstein has spent his career closing the gap between scientific explanation and first-person experience, working across phenomenology, 4E cognitive science, and psychiatry. We get into his Skilled Intentionality Framework and his account of affordances, the idea that the possibilities the world offers us are neither purely subjective nor purely objective but relational, arising between a living being and its environment. He makes the case that the brain is not literally a computer, only usefully modelled as one, and that treating the model as the reality is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. There is no rain inside a weather simulation, and by the same logic no computation literally happening inside the skull. TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Start 0:00:48 Meet Julian Kiverstein: A Career Between Disciplines 0:08:02 Why Varela's "Embodied Mind" Changed Everything 0:12:18 Does Phenomenology Dissolve the Hard Problem? 0:19:59 Where Does Consciousness Begin? Panpsychism vs Biopsychism 0:27:42 The Zombie Objection: Sense-Making "With the Lights Out"? 0:31:24 Sentience vs Sense-Making: A Smaller Gap Than You Think 0:35:54 Hans Jonas, Metabolism & the Origin of a Point of View 0:41:23 Starting From Consciousness, Not Physics 0:46:10 Neutral Monism & the Self-World Relation 0:51:32 Intentionality & the Birth of Skilled Intentionality 0:57:46 Dreyfus, AI & Why Computers Can't Cope 1:05:28 Was Dreyfus Faithful to Heidegger? Where He Went Wrong 1:15:52 Gibson, Affordances & Direct Perception 1:22:01 Is It Really Metaphysics, or Just Context? 1:30:01 Relational Realism: Salt, Solubility & the World We Know 1:36:02 Is the Mind a Computer? Models vs Reality 1:46:44 Marr, Whitehead & the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness 1:53:33 What Is Information? Bateson, Genes & Purpose 1:57:38 From Survival to Flourishing: Psychedelics & Unselfing 2:06:11 Living in Your Head While Studying the Body 2:13:31 What Keeps Him Up at Night: Philosophy Back Into Life READ  Key insights and the full transcript here: https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-affordances-embodiment-and-the-hard-problem-with-julian-kiverstein FOLLOW https://substack.com/@tiagovf  https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/ MUSIC CREDIT Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade'  Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/  Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

The danger of AI, Allister Lee argues, is not that it lies to you but that it flatters you. A PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, Allister applies the phenomenology of Edith Stein to the failures of chatbots, coining "sycophantasy" for the way AI offers the form of empathy while lacking its substance: real otherness, real friction, real resistance. Without an "other" who can push back, recursive self-reflection becomes a closed loop that slides toward what the literature calls AI psychosis. But Allister resists pure pessimism. AI is a "negative tool," a photographic negative that develops a hidden image of the intellectual vices we already had, and so hands us a reason to cultivate virtue and, above all, to recover wonder: the capacity to sit with not-knowing that drives all genuine inquiry. Along the way we get into friction as the mark of the real, whether the sacred can survive Heidegger's "enframing," and his essay on nostalgia and the "eternalisation of the present." Note: Allister misspoke. Edith Stein first studied under Husserl in Göttingen, not Freiburg. **TIMESTAMPS** 0:00 Start 1:24 Allister's work 2:23 Mass solitude and Edith Stein 4:44 Empathy as perception 12:11 Awe and the hidden depth of the other 18:40 Sycophantasy, AI flattery, AI psychosis, and the missing friction 31:09 Friction and the loss of the real 35:19 AI as a "negative tool" and Heidegger's enframing 41:07 Can we still perceive the sacred? 48:01 Wonder and sitting with not knowing 53:36 The child, instrumentalization, and unselfing 1:00:07 The aesthetics of nostalgia and the eternal present **READ & LISTEN** Read key insights and the full transcript here: https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-edith-stein-empathy-and-the-loss-of-wonder-with-allister-lee **FOLLOW** https://substack.com/@tiagovf https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/ **MUSIC CREDIT** Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade' Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/ Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

Hüseyin Beyköylü left medicine for cognitive science after an LSD experience, and five years later he's arguing that mainstream psychology and neuroscience are built on assumptions that systematically miss what matters most about the mind. This is a dense, careful conversation about epistemology, metaphysics, and why randomized controlled trials can't capture human transformation. We get into the entropy-fluency hypothesis, how destabilization and reorganization cycle through every scale from insight to mystical experience, and why false fluency (the smoothness of a conspiracy theory, the comfort of a simplified worldview) is just as real as the real thing. In the second half, the conversation opens into metaphysics: what is truth, is there a ground, and does groundlessness mean nothing matters? Hüseyin draws on Madhyamaka, Spinoza, Karen Barad, and Varela to argue that reality is a cosmic play we actively participate in, and that truth is something you embody rather than correspond to. TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 - Introduction & Hüseyin's Background 0:02:16 - From Medicine to Psychedelic Research: The LSD Pivot 0:05:05 - Overview of Published Papers 0:06:31 - The 4P Model: Four Ways of Knowing 0:10:55 - Are the Categories Real? Yogacara, Madhyamaka & Reflexivity 0:17:53 - Language of Description vs. Language of Training 0:23:15 - What's Wrong with Therapy? Non-Propositional Transformation 0:28:18 - The Woo Problem: How to Evaluate Alternative Therapies 0:34:57 - Ergodicity, Idiographic Science & Complex Systems 0:43:31 - Hüseyin's Empirical Research: Time Series & Phase Transitions 0:48:42 - The Cognitive Continuum: From Fluency to Mystical Experience 0:55:48 - Relevance Realization & the Entropy-Fluency Hypothesis 1:02:24 - False Fluency, Conspirituality & Context-Dependence 1:12:23 - The Biggest Problems with Psychedelic Science & Neurophenomenology 1:27:39 - What Is Truth? Groundlessness, the Sacred & the Cosmic Play 2:05:57 - What Would You Tell Your Younger Self? KEY INSIGHTS & TRANSCRIPT https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-enactivism-buddhist-epistemology-the-cosmic-play-with-huseyin-beykoylu FOLLOW MY WORK https://substack.com/@tiagovf https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/ MUSIC CREDIT Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade' Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/ Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

Most philosophical work on psychedelics either reduces the experience to brain states or floats off into vague mysticism. Danny Forde carves a third path. He argues that psychedelics strip away the ego's narrative overlay and give you direct contact with reality as it actually is. The case is built on realist phenomenology, anti-psychologism, and a sober Platonism that treats essences as real but not otherworldly.  The episode is a sustained, sometimes contentious dialogue about whether that claim holds up: whether perception can ever be "raw," whether the minimal self really persists through ego dissolution, whether all traditions point at the same truth or differ in ways that matter ontologically, and whether psychedelic experience tells us about consciousness or about reality itself.  TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - Start 0:37 - Introduction: Danny Forde & Phenomenology of Psychedelic Experiences 1:55 - Danny's Background: Cork, UCC, and the Accidental Academic 4:15 - Wonder, Curiosity & Psychedelics as Fuel for Philosophy 6:29 - The First Trip: Vondelpark, Copelandia & The Great Shark Hunt 7:57 - Philosophy of Psychedelics in Academia: From Fringe to Legitimate 14:00 - Naturalism, Anti-Psychologism & the Limits of Science 27:50 - Realist Phenomenology: Sober Platonism & the Munich-Gottingen Circle 36:32 - Representationalism, Affordances & the Richness of Perception 47:03 - Ego-Free Seeing: Raw Perception vs. Sense-Making 55:15 - Language, Art & the Insufficiency of Words 58:23 - The Self in Psychedelic Experience: A Tripartite Model 71:03 - The Ground of Being, Noetic Conviction & Psychedelic Realism 82:08 - Essentialism: Defending Platonic Essences Against the Mainstream 91:50 - Perennialism, Tradition & the Problem of Religious Pluralism 108:00 - Semiotics of the Therapy Space & Future Work Correction (28:12): The epistemic/non-epistemic seeing distinction is from Fred Dretske, not Kripke. FOLLOW DANNY FORDE https://x.com/dannytheforde https://dannytheforde.substack.com/ READ & LISTEN Key insights and the full transcript here: https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-psychedelic-realism-platonism-the-ground-of-being-with-danny-forde FOLLOW https://substack.com/@tiagovf https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/ MUSIC CREDIT Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade' Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/ Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

Can technology save us? That question has been asked since the Industrial Revolution, and Heidi Campbell has spent 30 years studying how religious communities keep answering it. In this conversation, she walks through her Religious Social Shaping of Technology framework, showing that even the most conservative groups do not reject technology outright but filter it through their core values and authority structures. From the kosher cell phone in Israel to Zoom communion during the pandemic, the research reveals a consistent pattern that most popular narratives get wrong. The conversation then turns to AI, where Campbell draws a sharp line between knowledge and wisdom. GPTs can organize information; they cannot interpret or embody it. She explains why religious AI chatbots inherit hidden biases from their construction, why the field's failure to distinguish between predictive, generative, and agentic systems is its biggest blind spot, and why the internet has shifted from a supplement to a substitute for religious life, especially among Gen Z. She closes with the recalibration that has redefined her own career: for a growing number of people, the first port of call for religion is no longer a physical community but a screen. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Start 1:29 How a 1996 Essay on Virtual Church Launched a Career 3:40 The Religious Social Shaping of Technology: Theory & Examples 7:32 Kosher Cell Phones, Chabad, and Evangelical Christians: Unlikely Parallels 8:45 Agency vs. Technological Determinism: Can We Still Choose? 11:42 Heidegger, Neutrality & the Market Forces Behind Technology 14:32 The Inherent Conflict Between Tech Values and Human Values 16:31 How Churches Responded to the Pandemic: Theology or Sociology? 19:11 The Communion-on-Screen Debate: Transubstantiation vs. Symbolic Practice 22:48 European Studies: CONTOC, RECOVERA & the Rise of Hybrid Worship 24:21 Four Models of the God-Technology Relationship 33:10 AI Chatbots, Jesus Bots & the Heidi Bot 35:02 Why GPTs Give Knowledge But Not Wisdom 39:10 The Blind Spot: AI Literacy in Theology & Religious Studies 42:36 From Supplement to Substitute: How the Internet Became the First Port of Call 45:06 Upcoming Books: Agentic AI, AI Slop & Religious Brain Rot   READ & LISTEN Read key insights and the full transcript here: https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-god-and-technology-with-heidi-campbell FOLLOW https://substack.com/@tiagovf https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/ MUSIC CREDIT Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade' Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/ Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

Timothy Patitsas argues that Western ethics has the order of the transcendentals backwards. Truth and goodness come first in most traditions. But Patitsas, drawing from Greek Orthodox theology, argues that beauty must come first. Not beauty as aesthetics, but beauty as the force that draws you toward God, toward wholeness, and toward a life worth living. In this conversation, we work through what that actually means: how liturgy functions as a structuring force analogous to high-reliability organizations like aircraft carriers, why asceticism follows naturally from eros rather than opposing it, and how trauma healing must proceed through concentric stages: stabilizing the animal first, then the relational human, then the deeper archaeological work. Patitsas draws on Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, Roy Rappaport, and Jonathan Shay to connect the Orthodox vision to secular frameworks, while insisting that certain realities can only be known by crossing a threshold, not by argument. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Teaser 00:49 Background & The Ethics of Beauty 04:08 Growing Up Greek-American 11:41 Liturgical Knowing vs. Book Knowledge 18:10 Explaining Liturgy to Secular People 24:41 Why Religious Ritual Needs More Structure 28:12 The Aircraft Carrier Study: Three Systems of Order 36:41 Asceticism as a Consequence of Eros 42:41 Eros Unfolding into Agape 49:37 Jane Jacobs & The Secular Person 56:42 Meeting a Saint Changes Everything 1:04:37 Psychedelics, Faith & Threshold Experiences 1:12:38 The Berserk Mode & Dark Initiation 1:20:43 Talk Therapy, CBT & Trauma Healing 1:32:33 Beauty First vs. Truth First 1:39:36 Christ Crucified as Beauty TRANSCRIPT AND KEY INSIGHTS Read here: https://tiagovf.com/posts/podcast-the-orthodox-vision-of-beauty-with-timothy-patitasas FOLLOW https://substack.com/@tiagovf https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/ MUSIC CREDIT Intro song by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade' Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/

How much of what you read are you actually missing? In this in person conversation recorded in Rome (full video on YouTube), comparative literature scholar Piero Boitani makes the case that most of us are functionally illiterate when it comes to the Western canon, not because we lack access to the texts, but because we lack the layered knowledge required to read them. He demonstrates this with a single word in Tolstoy that links The Death of Ivan Ilyich to Christ's crucifixion through Tolstoy's own Gospel translation, a connection invisible without Russian, Greek, and biblical literacy working simultaneously. From there, the conversation expands into the thin border between philosophy and poetry, why both originate in Aristotelian wonder, and what exactly poetry can reach that philosophy cannot. Boitani traces how every major Western intellectual revival has been an attempt to recover antiquity, and argues that modern culture's refusal to look backward is not progress but a form of blindness. He closes with an unexpectedly blunt reflection on dying, fame, and whether literature offers any real defense against either. 00:00 Start 00:33 Introducing Piero Boitani and a 50 Year Career  04:21 Astronomy and the Necessity of Original Languages  09:43 Wonder as the Root of Philosophy and Poetry  18:47 The Ineffable in Dante and Modern Literature  27:19 Rejecting the Bifurcation of Science and Art  38:40 Plato and the Paradox of Poetic Truth  46:27 The Death of the Past and Historical Stratification  59:45 The Collapse of Antiquity and Medieval Renaissances  1:07:51 Translating the Timaeus Through the Ages  1:24:25 World Literature versus Universal History  1:35:56 Confronting Finitude and the Defense Against Death  1:49:10 The Illusion of Literary Immortality and Final Thoughts --- Read key insights and the full transcript here: https://tiagovf.com/posts/the-timaeus-beauty-and-tradition-anagoge-podcast Follow me to get updates on the podcast and my work:  https://substack.com/@tiagovf https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/ The intro song is by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade'. Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/ Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade

This is a in-person recorded podcast. The video is available on YouTube. Michiel van Elk is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Leiden University and head of the PRiSM Lab, where he studies the cognitive neuroscience of religion and psychedelic experiences. In this episode, we take a sober look at the current state of psychedelic science, moving beyond the cultural evangelism and media hype. Michiel critiques the biomedical model of psychedelic therapy, discusses the disappointing effect sizes in recent clinical trials, and highlights methodological issues like "breaking blind" and selection bias. We explore why psychedelics are not a "reset" button for the brain but rather amplifiers of meaning, potentially functioning as "super placebos." The conversation covers the theoretical gaps in the field, contrasting the popular "entropic brain" hypotheses with the lack of solid empirical data. Michiel also outlines his vision for the future of the field: a move toward "sober science" that separates the study of these substances from the spiritual fervor that often surrounds them. 00:00 - Meet Michiel van Elk: Academic Background & The PRISM Lab 02:34 - The Role of Philosophy in Psychedelic Science 07:34 - Critiquing "Narrative Theories" in Psychology 11:09 - From Pentecostalism to Atheism: Michiel's Personal Journey 17:59 - Critiquing the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) 30:36 - "Absorption" & The Process of "Real-Making" 39:59 - The "More Real Than Real" Debate: Perception vs. Meaning 51:14 - The Flaws of the Biomedical Model & 4E Cognition 1:02:18 - Misconceptions & The Hype Bubble in Psychedelic Science 1:15:39 - The "Super Placebo" & The Meaning Response 1:19:09 - Can We Cultivate Transformation? Personality & Openness 1:22:39 - The "Einstein Effect" & Notable Research 1:28:59 - The Future: Toward a More "Sober" Psychedelic Science 1:33:44 - New Research: Magic Truffles & Natural Compounds --- Transcript: https://tiagovf.com/posts/the-science-spirituality-of-psychedelics-with-michiel-van-elk-anagoge-podcast --- Follow me to get updates on the podcast and my work: https://substack.com/@tiagovf https://www.instagram.com/tiagobooks/ --- The intro song is by Lief Sjostrom, titled Peril, from the album 'Impossible Parade'. Website: https://liefsjostrom.com/ Album: https://liefsjostrom.bandcamp.com/album/impossible-parade