Such an impressive piece of work here! I can't believe there are 39 more lessons on the way...and no tuition necessary!

"It is like the salience of reality is finally capable of eclipsing the narcissistic glow of our own ego." I need this written on a mug or something. So profound.

Dear John, I'm a writer & movement practitioner based out of India. These lectures are re-invigorating my interest in the arts, and reminding me what brought me to it in the first place. I feel like that child again exploring these practises in a more playful & participative way. If only I could talk to you someday about how all this complements a lot of the influences I draw on for my movement practise from Lecoq's dramaturgy of Mimesis, to Gestalt Therapy, to even Rupert Sheldrake's idea of morphogenetic fields. You truly have added wind to my artistic sails.

I can feel my life getting better after watching each one of these ... fantastic ...

I wish that I had seen these videos so many years ago, when I would spend hours and hours walking down roads and hiking trails. I remember having one of those mystical, higher consciousness experiences once in particular. I was walking at night between corn fields, the moon was full and just barely illuminating the hills in the distance. Everything was so quiet and still, and I had this deep sensation that the world is so profoundly mystical and beautiful, that its incredible that all of this exists. Again, like you said, it was an ineffable experience, difficult to put into words. That marked one of the better periods of my life, where I was improving myself and my relationships with others, a period that I've since lost and I've fallen back into meaninglessness, depression and foolishness. Perhaps if I had seen these videos then I would have better understood the significance of that experience. John, I just want to say thank you making this talk available publicly, making this vocabulary of wisdom and self-actualization out there for myself and others to hear, I confidently believe that this will truly help people. I will endeavor to watch this series in its entirety and take notes, hoping that I can recapture this experience again and recognize its significance and power when it does come. Again, thank you.

Is this the most signifiant KZfaq video yet? I mean - I've never seen anything so lucid!

This series is incredible. And we all get it for FREE. No paying any university. Vervaeke is amazing man.

素敵な映像ありがとうございました✨✨✨ これからもよろしくお願い致します🙏

How one man can be this knowledgeable on any subject is nothing short of a miracle. I mean it. There's nothing in this world that I know as well as this man knows awareness.

44:00 "What if what you were getting into a Flow state about was your ability to *Optimally Grip* the World?" This is the best scientific summary of the Awakened experience I have yet heard. Bravo, John!

I like to imagine that when John is gesticulating, he is actually petting invisible dogs that only he can see in front of him :P

This series has really helped me ground myself. Having experienced these higher states, while they are transformative, can have you feeling like you are crazy when nobody in your circle can relate. Wish I knew how to help others achieve these states. Or even make them curious about it.

“If you get enhanced meaning in life coupled to an enhanced sense of understanding and it actually does guide you towards improving your life that is going to build a tremendous amount of confidence that you have found a path towards self transcendence and wisdom”. Good stuff. These lectures are 100% improving my understanding of the things that have provided meaning and transformation in life.

This lecture series is my favorite disruptive strategy right now

Every single time these lectures ends I'm left wanting more.

Your greatest gift is a true self. Blessings to the Wisdom traditions reawakenings. Namaste

After every episode I think that what I’ve just watched is the most transformative anything I’ve seen …. And then I watch the next one!

Dear Dr. John Vervake, thank you for offering this intellectually engaging and life changing education to people around the globe. I am a student of psychology myself and your course has not only been beneficial in my academic endeavors but also helped me in connecting my “soul” to a religious and deeply connected sense with the world without being lost in the confusion decomposed soul (or mind) that one can fall pray to while studying the cognitive sciences. I pray that your endeavors shall not go unrewarded and I sincerely want to thank you for your efforts and passion for truth.

"It's like the salience of reality is finally capable of eclipsing the narcissistic glow of our own ego." Money.

I keep coming back to these wonderful lectures. And it's one of those rare comment sections full of curious, growing, intelligent and compassionate people. Keep up the good work, brothers and sisters! See you at another time and place in the process.

I very much appreciate these lectures, thank you. I wish I knew people with whom I could discuss these matters.

John Vervaeke - I appreciate all that you do - I understand more of myself and relation to the world - Namaste!!!!!

May I always be oriented to the salience of reality. Thank you.

A timeless collection of video's. I can see these blowing up and continuing to spread throughout the universe for a very long time. You're a gem, John.

I think the image experiment deeply resonates with dr. Peterson's notion of cleaning up the room. Because a nice & tidy environment which you spend a great deal of your time in can start increase your sense of meaning. And your room is something that you encounter regularly, so you can start finding meaning in your life by doing a sensible arrangement in your immediate space. I think something similar might be at zhe core of feng shui.

Thank you very much for your time, John.

Perhaps the biggest problem in this society is we have a large contingent of the population who make money by reinforcing the error making processes of their peers. There lives get better by teaching their fellow how to misapprehend reality.

John I just love it when you bang on the whiteboard.

Thanks John. Just wanna add that, while I find academia is not the best way to get an optimal grip, insight and meaning, it is nonetheless a meaningful way both to exist and to interact effectively with your arena that is humanity, culture, technology and the environment. Your work is a great help in reaching many who are unaware of the essence of this series. To gain the kinda insights you talk about throughout your series, however, most is reached through the practice. All those hours of study, experimentation, re-analysing, etc. don't even reach what one can do in far less time by simply engaging fluidly with the world, meditating and reflecting creatively. Having said that, we are all standing on shoulders. I look forward to seeing how your work helps translate into more intuitive activity, in academia, in society's system and in your life as a learner of self-growth.

Awesome!

I hope the whole world gravitates here, thank you for sharing with us 🙏🏻

I have so much work to do but this feels way more important

One more reason for looking forward to Fridays

Imagine this as a part of high school curriculum, how many lives would be saved, enriched, and inspired. Thank you, John, for this life-affirming work. Right on time 🙏

This series is so thought provoking - I'm desperate to bring this to more peoples' attention. I'm astonished at the level of detailed work here, John. I can't wait to learn more.

I must agree that this series of explanations has been very digestible. I have heard this multiple ways but the communication of it is very modern. Which I believe has to be continually re-explained and expanded upon with each generation. That is passing wisdom along. It is a collective well that is added to with each century.

When John enunciates beautiful, I sense an etymology conversation coming up!

This series is so great already. I hope that after you’re done with it you’ll record a Tai Chi dvd that incorporates the traditional elements with Western science and philosophy. I’m currently reading the Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi. The book is only 6 years old. Attitudes seem to be changing, the time may be right to put something out. All the best.

Imagine if tuition was made obsolete by open access classes like this, made financially viable by the youtube and internet gods. Shit, Id even sit through obnoxious ads to get this premium sauce right here.

Is it me or is Professor Vervaeke one of the most fluent speakers out there? He seems very calm when he speaks and embodies the words too. Him meditating probably has something to do with it.

“…if you get enhanced Meaning in life coupled to an enhanced sense of understanding and that ACTUALLY does guide you in improving your life, that is going to build a tremendous amount of confidence in you, that you've found a path towards self-transcendence and wisdom.” This is so important! I listened to this over and over again to try and get this point to really sink in.

Thank You! მადლობა - Madloba!

See the world in a grain of sand! Omg what a punch line but the potential outcome of acting to this course. Thank you for these insights Mr Vervaeke!

Thank you John for this wonderful lesson

These lectures are ridiculously good. So much so I feel quite humbled

so clearing and transformative, thank you

John, one can access flow through holistic movement & grounding postures. A balance between expansion & contraction energy. Like your example of rock climbing. If one moves in a natural manner, e.g crawling and squatting, we enter the now moment. I think that ultimately the practices of meditation & contemplation (forms of expansion & contraction) should be in addition to physical movement. Through holistic movement we can enter the higher state of consciousness you spoke of.

I agree with Tim Fuego...I am beginning to feel better...John's explanations are helping me make sense of my spiritual journey

Everyone who studies martial arts will eventually find a way of letting you know they study martial arts. In all the years I’ve studied martial arts I’ve found this to be true.

It's funny just how synchronisitically coincidental my life can be. These lessons were like a siren call for me. I'm coming to it a bit late in life after spending a lot of time "partying," and yes, achieving higher states of consciousness following the Grateful Dead throughout the '80s, but I've pulled myself out of a behavioral tail-spin, and now I am stoking the fires of my intellect with all manner of psychology and philosophy, and these lectures are by far my favorite discovery out there. Not only do they delve into some of the wisdom offered in the Michael Sugrue lectures, but they tie the information into a neat little package that can be of true utility for us in our everyday lives. I actually transcribed the first ten episodes because it was such an onslaught of challenging new material for me, and I'm still reviewing those, and condensing them down as best I can, but in so doing I'm gaining a deep familiarity with the material which is just what I'd wanted. However, my original point - the synchronicity - is the irony of the Erik Satie soundtrack. Throughout the first ten episodes I was haunted by "where have I heard that before?!?!?!" Yes, we all know the piece, but I knew there was somewhere in my past where it had played a very meaningful part. And you know how your mind just can't let something like that go. I had a deep and intimate familiarity with it that I just couldn't put my finger on. Then one night last week as I was getting into bed it clicked!! I raced downstairs, and threw the DVD of My Dinner With Andre into the player, and sure enough - there it was!!! I was kind of overwhelmed with emotion because I originally saw that movie at the theater with my parents, both of whom are now deceased. But the real irony is that that movie was my unwitting first exposure to philosophical thought, and I was fascinated by it. I got sidetracked for a few decades, but I'm back now living my best life as a coherent, empathetic, genuine, and intellectually curious person, and I am infinitely grateful for your generosity in sharing such a vast wealth of life lessons with us. Thank You!!!!

I'm enjoying these talks. Fascinating! - For a bit of humor; "How close should you stand to somebody?" 2020/2021 gave us an answer: 2 meters (6 feet). lol!

"O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be! What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power. Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud- Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud- We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light." Coleridge, "Dejection: an Ode"

Enjoying the série immensely I'm beginning to get "a grip" on it

Thank you for these illuminating talks. I have a simple theory about how meditation, yoga, hallucinatory drugs, flow states open us to higher states of consciousness. Something as simple as counting your breathes, for example, subverts or takes "off line" what you might call the "fear response" which limits thinking to survival or defense. Personality and/or ego seem to be based on this same response, carried out, I imagine, by the sympathetic nervous system and stress hormone, which I call "the deathly glue." (In bodywork, you can actually experience the accumulation of stress hormone around fixations break down.) Compulsive thinking tends to be about resentment or worry. What a miracle to break its hold by counting your breaths. Fear, which limits consciousness to the material factors that threaten us, also blinds us to a wider sense of existence in which we are not just contenders but participants. It seems the sympathetic nervous system controls our reality until we can see through it in a process of psychological development which you describe: character grows in its capacity to account for reality beyond our material interests. The child becomes adult.

It's terrific

I think some of these ideas and viewpoints are going to be relevant for thousands of years to come, maybe even forever, maybe even if we've all become almost divine artificial consciousness.

This is what master teaching can be like. Rare!

I really appreciate your lecture series. Im starting to go back and watch all your content.

John talks about being in flow while giving lectures which in conjunction with his expertise in Tai Chi produces a magnificent effect. The way he gestures with his hands grasps your attention immediately and draws you in to focus harder. It's amazing.

This is the best! thank you!!!!

The whole episode is excellent, but particularly the last 15 minutes... powerful stuff! 👏

You're the reason why i will start a cognitive science degress in october ! what you do is so impressive

10 minutes-ish: "Peace" has a strong sense of reassurance; joy seem like a lightness that comes when anxiety drops away.

Fantastic.... thank you

47:50 introducing entropy That’s like playing a scrabble app and you press the button to scramble the tiles so that you can see the letters a new way, to increase the chance of “seeing” a word.

Thanks for this great talk.

Thanks John.

I love the ballet in the box during the closing credits :)

So important. I hope it gets a lot more views.

Improved Access to Reality

Awesome VID once again👍

Thank you - not having a formal background in this stuff, but having learned just a little very much haphazardly in the past,I am learning a lot. This one is the first where I am not quite aligned with all the message but I hope very much to reconcile that in later episodes. The difference is that I would think of this episode as being about the contents of the conscious mind rather than the consciousness of it - a rather different definition of consciousness which takes us back to the hard problem. Treated like this I can quite easily see AI getting very good at the contents of mind but it is a very different thing to contemplate if AI will ever be aware of, that is what I think we really mean by consciousness

I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄

As far as epistemology goes: one is rationally justified to believe in that which they clearly perceive. The experiences he describes in these videos are readily available to me as a practicing Christian. These lectures are where science meets the spiritual in a powerful way! Great stuff!

Beautiful lecture, John. Thank you! I loved how you brought the deep analysis back to larger message during the final moments! Thanks again

loved the noticing in-variance heuristic. a more general case of what happens in the 2-4-8 problem where people try to confirm their hypothesis instead of falsifying it which blocks them from finding the right answer

This is a real research on display 🙏🏼✊🏼

July 2021 , 33k views. Feel incredibly fortunate to have stumbled upon this series..thank you

I think I just realized more of who you are, you are genuinely quite clever, I see that now. I am grateful for what you are doing.

That was a beautiful description of a mystical/“higher” state in the first fifteen minutes. Thanks for sharing, and thanks for all the hours of work you’ve put into this series! 🙂

I was reading about the Tao last night. And now I see this technical explanation. Flow was generated!

Amazing insights, I grew up in a dysfunctional childhood learning about some of these wisdom traditions, now I'm revisiting and increasing through your series.... a connectedness to a deeper reality than where humanity is now, without thinking I'm just deluded :)) 😂❤😂❤

I do cold therapy, it helps me break frame and it puts me in a altered state of consciousness. Under this state I get insights into my life which hit me strong and give me relief that there are solutions to my life problems. Funny enough if I start to rationalise them, they stop and it breaks this flow state. I incorporate a mindfulness approach and become a witness(participatory knowledge) to them.

Hey John I'm so grateful to you for producing such amazing content.Please if you get the time I would like you to cover vedanta too please

I am afraid my optimal grip is to listen to KZfaq videos at 2x :D

Dr. John Vervaeke I appreciate your efforts. Your videos enable me to unzip the tent in which I've been living. I'm out of the tent, I'm seeing a whole new world that always has been existing somewhere in my mind. I wouldn't say that I'm learning new information. But it's more like the vast range of my innate potential is being activated. Let's say I believe in reincarnation(Even though I would say that I don't know) I've been dying and reincarnated for an infinite amount of time. On every single reincarnation, my realization from my previous life was deactivated. Your words activate those realizations. Thank you doctor from South Korea.

“I can get into the flow state slacking off, because I have been doing it for 40 years”

These need to be in podcast form

The sentiment of enabling higher consciousness as disruptive to cognition is a funny way to think of it. It's like saying riding an airplane from Boston to San Francisco is disruptive to going to the supermarket. Yea, you're not going to make it to the supermarket, but you weren't planning on going grocery shopping when you got on the plane in the first place.

Since this is a two parter, this is the lower stage of the higher states of consciousness, in other words, the weed and alcohol level.

Your description of "optimal grip", and I thought it was interesting you used Tai chi as an example, but I would take it a level deeper and say conceptually that your optimal grip on your surroundings or the world at large is Tai Chi, which uses the yin yang as a visual metaphor, and translates as "grand ultimate". That's not even addressing the connection between the gestalt overview/micro detail trade off and the breathing related to opening/closing in most Yang style positions. Sidenote: I used to do a lot of long distance barefoot running and one of my physiological responses was a heightened state of consciousness where my ability to process information/recognize patterns became almost mentat-like. My analysis of where it came from was the oxygen saturation of my blood + elevated heartbeat meant that highly oxygenated blood was being forced into all the tiny thread-like extremities in the brain that during normal daily activity probably doesn't get as much volume of blood circulation, and what it does get isn't nearly as oxygen-rich. So that's my theory on hyper consciousness to use a phrase from Herbert's Destination: Void.

I feel like I can't take the terminology "optimal grip" seriously 😂. These lectures are awesome, though. Every episode in of itself has been a cascade of insights.

43:20 "How close should you stand to someone?" At least 2m lol

MOAR PLS

The power of the sun in the palm of my hand. Doc ock

Hi John, I think ths series are really good, they are helping me a lot. By the way, if you see this message, maybe I can help to add captions in Spanish to the videos, I am Argentinian so that is my native language, and I think much more people could access the videos in that way. Thanks a lot for the classes

Thank you John, such depth to a life long all consuming hobby of mine! :) I've stopped by to share a multi-mind explosion that has hit me over the last few episodes; What are we!? To have developed from single cell organisms to this!? Or is this another story to try and explain what we are? :) Back to this episode and beyond! 🍿

Not just anagoge but also the emanations from the One. The fundamental one-ness you speak of is a rejection of dualism in my opinion. And I agree I think it must be rejected.

Authentically Meaningful Deepened Reality Awakening Experiences = Deep Transformation Tremendous sense of clarity Glory, bright, things are shining Flow experience - vivid, bright, intense Expansion of vision Break frame and make frame Increased sense of making sense of things The world is beautiful, deeply beautiful The world is very alive, pregnant with energy and significance Notion of underlying oneness Deep and profound integration Profound sense of peace Greatest sense of peace they’ve ever experienced in their life Enhanced sense of connectedness with Reality Profound joy Joy - deep connection to what is good Fundamental change in their sense of self

Jesus Christ. Who even are you? This stuff is absurdly good.