The Cognitive Science of Ritual
Presented by John Vervaeke
The Cognitive Science of Ritual
Presented by John Vervaeke
Enter the Mind of Ritual
Exclusive Discount to Symbolic World VIP Patrons
RITUAL13545
Course Overview
In this 6-week, 12-hour online course, renowned psychologist and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke will explore the question of ritual via the discipline of cognitive science. Students will come to understand how ritual works in all of us and how we use it to cultivate wisdom. The first five weeks will follow a blended lecture and discussion format. For the final week of the class, Jonathan Pageau will join John Vervaeke for an exclusive discussion about the themes presented in the course, followed by a Q&A.
Live class dates: Mondays, October 7th - November 25th, 2024
Time: 2 - 4 pm EST
Classes are hosted and livestreamed on our Symbolic World Circle community platform. Please go to the Community tab on thesymbolicworld.com website and sign up on our Circle platform. This is where class is hosted and you need to create a profile in order to see your purchase and participate.
All class video recordings are made available to participants with downloadable audio.
Course Details
Live Course Schedule
1. Monday, October 7th, 2024
(No class on October 14th)
2. Monday, October 21st, 2024
(No class on October 28th)
3. Monday, November 4th, 2024
4. Monday, November 11th, 2024
5. Monday, November 18th, 2024
6. Monday, November 25th, 2024
Course Outline
- Lesson 1: October 7th, 2024 - Relevance realization: How ritual is related to perception and engagement with what’s relevant around us. We will learn about transjectivity, that is, how we co-create our experience within the world, how ritual affects the interweaving of facts with value, how it’s related to orientation and ostension, and how we join ourselves to the stories we participate in through narrative coupling.
- Lesson 2: October 21st, 2024 - Transformation and the imaginal: Ritual as transformative experience and serious play. We will look at the imaginal, which is the relationship of images and symbols which precede thinking and is the predictive processing of relevance realization. We will look at how the imaginal augments serious play, and how humans recapture and recast implicit metaphors and gesture by recycling and re-symbolizing them into ritual.
- Lesson 3: November 4th, 2024 - Interweaving of the imaginal and the rational (Part 1): The imaginal is needed for central components of rationality such as meta-cognition, that is being aware of one’s own cognition, and aspiration, that is projecting ourselves into future states. The imaginal bridges between kinds of knowing, affords re-orientation and re-ostension, and the cultivation of wisdom. (Monday, Oct 14th, 2024)
- Lesson 4: November 11th, 2024 - The Interweaving of the imaginal and the rational (Part 2): The rationality within ritual knowing (cognition): systematic transfer and systemic transformation. Theories of ritual knowing and ritual metaphysics.
- Lesson 5: November 18th, 2024 - Ritual as the interface between individual and distributed cognition: Ritual as the cultivation and coordination of collective intelligence, for example a way to participate in group identities and common goals. Ritual to grok, participate and merge into hyper-processes within the social and biological environments.
- Lesson 6: November 25th, 2024 - Dialogue with Jonathan Pageau
Associated Courses
Related Content
Presenters
John Vervaeke
John Vervaeke, Ph.D. is an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto.
