A New Pilgrimage: Finding Practices That Build Meaning

John Vervaeke argues that the meaning crisis isn’t a personal problem or a cultural preference. It’s a civilisational crisis — rooted in how the West, beginning with the Reformation and accelerating through the Scientific Revolution, has progressively severed itself from the forms of wisdom that once made life feel real, connected, and sacred. In this conversation with Rufus Pollock, he turns from diagnosis toward something harder and more important: what we can actually do.

What’s needed is an ecology of practices — a coherent set of complementary disciplines that together cultivate meaning, wisdom, and genuine contact with reality. Not a single technique or belief system. Something more like what Buddhism or Neoplatonism built at their best: interwoven practices that correct and support each other, held within communities, and embodied in people worth emulating.

“What we have to do is fall in love with wisdom and fall in love with reality — the way we have been talking about here.”

Vervaeke introduces a new kind of pilgrimage, a contemporary form that preserves what made the ancient practice genuinely transformative. He describes his own recent Neoplatonic pilgrimage across Europe, visiting places connected to thinkers and traditions that shaped his inner life — the equivalent, he suggests, of what medieval pilgrims were really doing when they walked toward what they most deeply revered. It’s not about the destination. It’s about what the journey does to your senses: sharpening insight, renewing contact with reality, and opening you to what he calls voluntary necessity — the felt pull of something worth orienting your life around.

We’re exploring this territory as fellow travellers. We don’t have the full map of what a Second Renaissance ecology of practices looks like — nobody does yet. But conversations like this one feel like genuine steps toward it: rigorous enough to trust, open enough to surprise us.

“Put on my tombstone: neither nostalgia nor utopia. We can’t go back before the scientific revolution and we can’t go back from global awareness.”

We’ll be diving deeper into pilgrimage as a meta-practice to break out of our fixed framings and renew our spiritual senses in another John Vervaeke podcast episode coming soon. Stay in touch, fellow travellers.

Chapters

• 00:00Introduction
• 01:43John Vervaeke’s Journey to Wisdom
• 06:48The Role of Socrates and Personal Inquiry
• 11:10Understanding the Meaning Crisis
• 22:29The Genealogy of the Meaning Crisis
• 34:34Cultivating Wisdom and the Sacred
• 41:37The Nature of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
• 42:04The Interplay of Subjective and Objective Realities
• 48:39Revisiting Historical Philosophical Errors
• 56:47Practices for Cultivating Wisdom
• 58:41Dialogical Practices and the Search for Meaning
• 1:05:26The Quest for Certainty and Self-Correction
• 1:11:17Ecology of Practices and Role Models
• 1:12:13Pilgrimage as a Meta-Practice
• 1:19:49The Return of the Sacred and the Really Real
• 1:26:42Religion Beyond Religion: Structures for the Sacred

Speakers