The Same Machinery

The rest of this Map works from a wager: that the traditions agree because they are all looking at the same thing. This teaching is the best-argued alternative, and it belongs on the Map for exactly that reason.

John Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. His account starts with the mind, not the sacred. The mind’s basic job is working out what matters, out of everything it could notice at any moment. The capacity that lets it focus also lets it fixate. The capacity that builds a self also lets that self harden. He names the faults that result: self-deceptive loops he calls parasitic processing, the confusion of having with being, anxiety, absurdity, alienation, and the feeling of being trapped in one’s own life. Every human mind is built the same way, so every culture meets the same faults. Every culture also builds practices to repair them: meditation, prayer, ritual, contemplation, the dropping of the self.

Read the Map this way and much of it lines up. Epictetus separates what is up to you from what is not. Krishna tells Arjuna to act without grasping at the fruit. Lao Tzu drops something every day. On this account those are three repair manuals written for one engine, and they agree because the engine breaks in the same places. No Ground is required. About the Tao itself, Vervaeke says the sacred it names is not, in his view, supernatural or absolute.

That account is strong, and the site takes it seriously rather than answering it. It explains why the methods converge and why the obstacles converge. It may explain most of what is on the Map.

Then notice what it leaves open. It explains the instrument, and it cannot say, from inside the instrument, what the instrument is pointed at. Vervaeke doesn’t claim it can. His account keeps something it still calls sacred, and the contemplatives would add that they distrusted the instrument first. Two teachings can stand side by side here. One explains how the seeing works. The other, the eye through which I see God, refuses the line between the seer and the seen. Neither can settle the question for the other.