Essay: The Redemption of the Meaning Crisis (Part I)
Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2025 9:16 pm
"Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth..." (John 15:15)
Living Into the Meaning Crisis
Our modern lives are characterized by extreme isolation and alienation from the inner experience of other living souls (human, animal, or otherwise), on the one hand, and a frantic search for ways to rekindle that experience, on the other. Modern thinkers have dubbed this the ‘meaning crisis’. There are many obvious outer symptoms of this crisis, ranging from psychic epidemics of depression, anxiety, and neurotic conditions to widespread violence and war. However, perhaps the most dangerous manifestation of the meaning crisis is the souls who remain unaware that they are in the midst of it. We can easily point toward other institutions and people who are deprived of meaning, but we often imagine ourselves to be immune to this crisis. The following essay intends to trace the roots of this crisis, not to something happening ‘out there’, but to the dynamics within our intimate cognitive experience. Only by becoming more sensitive to the meaning crisis within the life of our soul can we properly orient toward the outer expressions of the crisis in the wider World and trace the path of its redemption.
If I were to ask you to think about the rich experience of a song, for example, ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’, how would you go about it? Assuming they are not readily familiar with the song, most people would simply start thinking about musical experience in general. They may feel like: “I don’t know that song, but it sounds like an older song with religious significance. I can approximate it by thinking about how songs unfold in measures, phrases, melodies, lyrics, and so on. Then I can imagine how those things could be combined, and the lyrics of the song title would be present too.” That is somewhat analogous to modern abstract thinking about the ‘meaning crisis’. We try to approximate it by spawning thoughts about ancient souls that lived in a sacred flow with the Cosmos, how souls have now lost touch with that sacred flow, how they now experience many forms of psychological degeneration as a result, and so on. We place a hypothetical ‘sacred flow’ on one end of the scale and weigh it against ‘modern life’ on the other hand, and judge the scale to be out of balance.
On the other hand, now you are presented with the song experience:
Once this concrete encounter happens and you allow your imaginative activity to flow with the layered movements and articulations of the song, then the song title and your subsequent thoughts about the song become a living testimony to that rich and holistic inner experience. Likewise, the meaning of the ‘meaning crisis’ is deepened if our thoughts about it become testimonial, i.e., the thoughts point to concrete inner experiences that distinguish our ordinary imaginative life from a potential form of inner activity that is entangled in a more sacral meaningful flow. We can then feel that we are living out the meaning crisis and, in some mysterious way, this intimate knowledge of its inner dynamics also helps us participate in its redemption. As a more condensed example of the above, we can consider the difference between (a) imagining a picture of a clenched fist, and (b) physically clenching our fist before remembering the physical experience in our imagination. What this illustrates is that we lack the deeper meaning of something only so long as our thoughts about it feel disconnected from experiences we have lived through.
To live through the meaning crisis, we can first explore the thinking process by which the meaning of our experience is always explored. Just as the clenched fist is a finished fact, our ordinary thoughts about the ‘meaning crisis’ (or any similar existential topics) reflect a fully crystallized set of abstract observations. In other words, these thoughts can only reflect upon manifestations of the crisis that have already happened and fail to grasp the deeper ‘gravity wells’ of potential that are attracting its unfolding states. Our inner meaning-seeking process, on the other hand, is in a state of continual becoming and points our attention toward the domain of potential storylines that can unfold, depending on how we orient or fail to orient to the crisis within. It points us toward what the Lord doeth within the depths of our soul, instead of what is already done (the manifest world of finished facts). In this respect, Owen Barfield has provided a nice metaphorical image for us to contemplate:
Thus, we need to bring our thinking consciousness into the growth processes of our imaginative life, i.e., the living forces through which its memory images continually integrate and provide the opportunity to traverse novel states of meaningful experience. We first stimulate those living forces, bringing them into our ‘aperture’ of consciousness, by closely introspecting the ordinary movements of our imaginative life. Although we symbolically speak of ‘forces’, ‘growth processes’, and so on, it should be kept in mind that these symbols only anchor our first-person experience of inner activity, experiential states, and their transformations. There are no separate ‘forces’ or ‘mechanisms’ that act upon that first-person experience from an orthogonal space, as we usually imagine. In other words, the process of unleashing these living forces in our consciousness is identical to the process of becoming more conscious of how our first-person stream of experience is always shaped and constrained in its transformations.
Our Constrained Life of Symbolic Replicas
The most proximate constraint on this stream is our finished mental pictures (hair clippings), by which we orient to the lawful flow of experience. These pictures feel ghostly and confined within a tiny parcel in our heads. Through this narrow aperture, we contemplate the existential flow (the growing hair) as if through a glass darkly. This contemplation generally takes the form of picturing certain phenomena and complementing them with pictures of other related phenomena until the interrelations between them provisionally feel to ‘make sense’. When we build these mental puzzles out of our memory pictures, however, we don’t feel like the ‘laws’, ‘principles’, ‘rules’, etc. that we derive from their logical patterns are the reality that explains the phenomenal appearances and dynamics. Even many materialist reductionists still feel like the ‘frequency wavelengths’ of colors, for example, are only symbols for some other reality that explains the color manifestations.
In that sense, what exactly the World essence is becomes a question of our preferred mental pictures, i.e., what kind of reality we desire to be ‘running the show’ that we passively observe and contemplate. Some people prefer a benevolent and omnipotent God to whom we can surrender our agency and on whom we can rest our salvation. Others desire mindless mechanisms to which there is no accountability and on which we can blame our suffering. In the end, however, these all remain speculative and ghostly mental pictures plastered on our ‘soul wall’ that we periodically gaze at when we are feeling inquisitive or despondent. They bring us a certain sense of satisfaction, or a sense of temporary relief from the pain and anguish of not knowing (with diminishing returns). Yet, with this wall of mental pictures, we practically remain as the person thinking hypothetically about the melody and lyrics of a song we have not yet concretely experienced.
Many people may feel like the above is an overstatement and that they have concrete experience and knowledge of the wider World in which their lives unfold (even if others don't). We need to engage in a healthy dose of introspection before we can disabuse ourselves of this feeling. We need something to compare our normal state with. For example, we can notice that whenever we contemplate the wider World of past events that we experienced (or anticipate experiencing), we don’t have a living impression of those experiences. The immediate qualities of such events have rapidly receded into a domain of memory pictures that compress the rich meaning of temporally extended experience into point-like imaginative replicas. These rich qualities feel like they have been stripped from the images, and all that remains are dim sensory qualities and thoughts we habitually associate with such qualities, sometimes accompanied by vague hints of feeling. Whenever we want to contemplate the vast expanses of space or the temporal flow of events, we can only do so through these stripped-down imaginative replicas.
For example, we can consider a summer vacation we took with many interesting and rewarding experiences. If we could remember our two-week vacation last summer only in real-time, it would take us two full weeks of concentration to do so. Instead, we grasp our overall intuition for the past period, and we can anchor it in a verbal symbol, ‘my summer vacation last year’, which is a replica of real-time bodily speech. Now we can intuitively move through the landscape of the vacation memories and condense more concrete images of the actual happenings, which in the end are also instances of real-time bodily experiences (fragments of what we saw, heard, felt, etc.). We do something similar when we make a plan for our next summer vacation. We should get a really vivid feel for this dynamic. Our verbal thinking can only flow at the ‘ticking’ pace of our physical speech and is a replica of that speech, yet the words continuously focus intuitions that span greater or lesser, future or past, time spans.
As another example, when we look at a calendar, we behold a real-time visual perception, yet we grasp it as a compressed symbol of our intuition for all the days in the year. When we think about faster processes – for example, the flapping of a bee's wings – we need to imagine them slowed down. Our real-time imagination looks like the physical perception of waving condor wings, but we grasp that as a scaled-up image for our intuition of the rapid process. Today, we also use technological aids to produce these compressed or expanded replicas. For example, we could hardly perceive the transformation of clouds before time-lapse photography, nor the flapping of bee wings before slow-motion video. With such examples, it should now be clearer how much we are reliant on such compressed and expanded replicas to interface with the ‘concrete world’ of spatiotemporal happenings. The whole wider World we imagine to be ‘out there’ is only known insofar as it is mediated by such symbolic tokens.
Moreover, we feel forced to spawn such images whenever we want to think through the meaning of our experiential states. It is something that just happens to us, whether we like it or not. A quick exercise to become more sensitive to this constraint is to first think of the alphabet. In the concept ‘alphabet’, we experience the intuition of the auditory, visual, and gestural ‘palette’ that can be used to clothe our ideas in linguistic symbols and reflect on or communicate their meaning. If we try to concentrate on this concept, we can feel the whole alphabet as a holistic ‘wavefunction’, as if all the letters and their potential meaningful combinations are superimposed. Now we can take our hand or our foot and try to trace out the letters of the alphabet and feel the meaningful intuition of the gestures. The task is to perform these gestures and live in their meaning without voicing them in our mind, not even as a subtle whisper. We should feel like our concentrated activity is fully present in the experience of tracing the letters and is resisting ‘standing back’ from that experience to comment on it.
Not so easy, right? Perhaps it even feels practically impossible to refrain from replicating the gestures verbally as we trace them out. Such exercises provide us a window into the default conditioning of our imaginative life, which is always present. When a melody or lyrics get ‘stuck in our head’, it simply means we have temporarily become more sensitive to this habitual inner process that normally unfolds in the subconscious background. Another simple exercise is to contemplate the trees outside and immerse our inner activity in the meaningful gesture of ‘lush greenness’. We should try to live in that meaning without any intellectual commentary, neither about the trees nor about what we are doing. Often, in such exercises, we will subtly spawn verbal images that comment about ‘living in the meaning of lush greenness’ and confuse that subtle commentary for the real-time experience of living in the meaning. Thus, we need to remain vigilant of this tendency if we want to become more sensitive to the inner constraints at play in our imaginative life.
What exactly are we missing when the holistic meaning of experience is immediately and automatically compressed into these point-like replicas, like the sounds of our inner voice? Perhaps the meaningful depth of existence itself is what goes missing, hence the crisis of meaning we experience. To be clear, the replicas serve a critical function in scaling our spatiotemporal experience to stabilize and anchor its holistic meaning, such that we can intelligently interface with the wider World of beings and their activities. We could imagine that, without these mental anchors, we would be like a person who falls out of a raft on a river with Class VI white water rapids. Our imaginative life would be tossed hither and thither and would never attain a stable orientation within the experiential flow. Yet when our attention is tightly ‘sucked into’ the fragmented elements of these replicas, the feeling-imbued meaning quickly fades into the intuitive background, and we are eventually left manipulating dry intellectual tokens.
Thus, through a bit of introspection, we have already come into the concrete experiential vicinity of the meaning crisis characterized by isolation and alienation from the intuitive foundations of existence. Our thoughts about it are already becoming more like our thoughts about the song that our soul has lived through and moved with. It is through such a participatory approach that we mitigate against the risk of our idolizing our concepts about the ‘meaning crisis’ and assembling them into rigid theoretical schemas. With the benefit of such intimate experience, we can safely approach more philosophical concepts and relate to them in a testimonial way, such that we can resonate with the underlying ideal movements that animated the philosophers and their frameworks. The alienated existence of modern man, for example, was intuited, conceptualized, and clearly expressed a few centuries ago by various philosophical minds such as David Hume.
Cultural Expressions of the Meaning Crisis
Hume became skeptical that the sensory panorama ‘out there’ could have any resemblance to the essential things that stimulated their appearances in our consciousness, since the latter would necessarily lack sensory qualities. Furthermore, he was skeptical that the lawful transformation of this panorama, which we discern via thinking, could have any objective reality apart from the human mental habits that linked particular impressions together, just as a dog habitually associates the sight of its owner with the pleasure of play or food. According to Hume, it is only because we have become so accustomed to perceiving certain perceptions followed by others that we can speak of a “causal relation” between them. We may have seen the Sun ‘rise’ innumerable times before, for example, but that doesn’t speak to any objectively lawful process, only an ingrained human mental habit that is incapable of guaranteeing that the Sun will rise again tomorrow (see The Problem of Induction).
We are not concerned so much with the philosophical reasoning at work above, but rather the underlying mood in which such concepts are drenched. When we pay attention to such moods, we become sensitive to the ideal patterns that structured the last few centuries of thinking and were expressed through varied philosophical systems, i.e., rationalism, empiricism, critical idealism, pragmatism, and so on. Such moods often act as ‘gravity wells’ in our consciousness that attract corresponding trains of thought that seek to justify the mood. It is similar to how, when we find ourselves in a depressed mood, we can only think about the negative side of our life experiences, where every thought seems to confirm how much ‘bad luck’ we have had over some arbitrary period that we have chosen to focus on. Likewise, this epistemically pessimistic mood steered the philosophical thinking of Hume and others, who adopted an arbitrary focus on sensory experience and the manipulation of compressed replicas, to the exclusion of holistic intuitive experience.
This mood also heavily influenced Immanuel Kant, and through the latter, the intellect became entirely fortified in its alienated tissue of mental pictures, which were imagined to be isolated from the meaningful essences (‘things themselves’) that lay at their foundation and stimulated them.
When contemplating such quotes, one cannot help but also think of the ancient Taoist allegory of a man who dreamt of being a butterfly and, upon waking, could not determine whether he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. From an intellectual perspective, it is indeed impossible to resolve such a conundrum, just as we cannot determine the exact momentum and position of a particle at the same time, or we can’t say whether a photon is ‘actually’ a wave or a particle. All these riddles are born from the intellect’s confinement within its compressed or expanded replicas. This confinement is a synonym for the intellect’s conditioning to exclusive reliance on such replicas. It is a confined state from which the intellect spawns endless meaningless conundrums for itself. It isolates certain portions of its total imaginative content and puts that portion into opposition with other portions. Indeed, if we pay attention, we will begin to notice just how much of intellectual discourse is characterized by this sort of oppositional partitioning of imaginative contents (e.g., materialism vs. idealism, free will vs. determinism, discovery vs. invention of mathematics, etc., etc.)
The more we carefully pay attention to the flow of experience over various timescales, the more we sense how much it resembles a dreamscape. We are not clear on where various sensory and emotional phenomena ‘came from’ or where they are ‘going’, we are not sure why we have a certain temperament, disposition, sympathies and antipathies, etc., and we don’t know what our life was like before a certain age in early childhood or what it could be like after death. Just like in our dreams, we awaken to our existence as self-conscious individuals at a certain stage of life and have no clue how we got to be in that state; we don’t know how we are able to walk, speak, and think. The collective scale of human history is no less dim and dreamy, patched together from various physical fragments and corresponding extrapolations and inferences. It is interesting to note how the ‘hard sciences’ have also inferred impenetrable intellectual boundaries from their observations, such as the Planck scale limit for measurement, the black holes that cannot be probed, or, more recently, the interstellar ‘wall of fire’.
In modern times, this skeptical philosophical intuition has transposed itself into the theoretical constructs of various world outlooks, such as the Matrix-style simulation theory or the mystical notion that the World we perceive is merely a series of images dreamed up by ‘pure consciousness’. The intellect then imagines that, if it were to awaken from the dream, all these ‘objective’ constraints that characterize its living experience, like the changing seasons from the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, would fall away and be revealed as dreamed illusions. Then, it is hoped, we would be like ‘free electrons’ that could explore ‘Godel’s candy shop’ of experiences in any way that pleases us. The average person may not pay much attention to such views, but as soon as we begin thinking seriously about what can be known about the reality we experience, it is inevitable that such a view is adopted in more or less subtle ways. Most people can sense that, from the intellectual perspective, these theoretical constructs about the nature of reality are internally coherent and logically unassailable.
As a reference point, I will quote Felipe Bautista, who has established a framework called ‘ouroboric idealism’:
To put it in another familiar metaphor, imagine we are engaged in a multi-player computer game on a network, where the reality of the other players is interfaced through the pixels on our screen. How can we know if the pixels moving on the screen are the outer physiognomy of a coherent inner perspective experiencing ideas, emotions, and sensations as we do? No matter how we reason through the moving pixels, we could never be certain that their dynamics are not simply the result of a mindless algorithm that only appears to be interacting with our avatar intelligently. Even if a text bubble pops up on the screen with the words, “Hey, my name is John Smith, and rest assured I am a living human being just like you are”, and then begins conversing with us about finance, politics, religion, and so on, we can’t be sure this ‘dialogue’ isn’t also the result of the mindless algorithm. Indeed, the reasons to suspect the latter are growing every day as ‘machine learning’ technology advances and imitates human discourse.
If we pay close attention to our flow of experience, this skeptical conundrum for the modern intellect also reveals itself in our daily interactions. We surely feel like we are interacting with living beings who experience coherent inner perspectives, and we modulate our speech and actions accordingly, but when we reason through our mental pictures and try to trace the source of our confidence in this feeling, we are left empty-handed. There is no logical means of proving that we are not merely interacting with non-player characters (NPCs). It is like we are trying to reconstruct a 3D puzzle when we are constrained to assembling the pieces on a 2D surface. We can model the quantitative sensory transformations of habitual behavior with mathematical precision, but the depth of feelings, impulses, ambitions, plans, hopes, goals, etc., remains elusive and, for all precise intellectual thinking purposes, practically non-existent. When the unexpected inevitably happens, we call it ‘random’ or backproject a rational explanation for it based on our preferred narrative.
In any case, we experience a split between ourselves as philosophical and scientific thinking beings, who cannot ‘prove’ whether we are interacting with NPCs, and as a living soul who must act as if we are surrounded by equally living souls. We direct countless inner energy toward the contemplation of theoretical conundrums about ‘determinism’, ‘free will', ‘wave-particle duality’, the ‘limits to knowledge’, ‘whether reality is a dream simulation’, and so on, while we continue functioning as if we are free agencies interacting with other free agencies who are capable of knowing each other and the World. We experience ourselves as self-conscious beings with moral impulses, yet we ‘explain’ that experience as the product of mindless biochemical processes that somehow became self-conscious and impelled by “moral values” to aid their survival and reproduction. It is as if we are making meaningful gestures with one hand and, with the other hand, making other meaningful gestures that attempt to explain the former away.
As we can see, many modern materialistic and mystical philosophies are rooted in something akin to this epistemology, and the history of human civilization reveals that such philosophical currents prophesy what will later permeate the wider social and cultural spheres. It is only a matter of time before we not only think but also begin to feel and act as if the World is our NPC-populated dreamscape. Could many acts of ‘senseless violence’ today already testify to this deeper feeling? Perhaps, if we are honest with ourselves, we are somewhat sensitive to this deeper distancing from other souls in our lives. How often do we look others in the eyes and smile when we walk by them? How often do we summon interest in the experiential pathways of our family members, relatives, neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, and so on, let alone in the souls who live on the other side of the planet? How often are our interactions with other souls merely a utilitarian transaction for material or emotional benefit? These are alienating conditions that most people can imagine as a problem for others, but generally refuse to consider for themselves.
That inner conflict is a source of continual tension that grinds away in our souls, and its degenerative effects on our psyche and physiology should not be underestimated. When we explain away our past with mindless evolutionary theories, it comes at the expense of our future evolutionary development. Because we subconsciously sense this inner isolation and tension, we often rail against such theories of reality as a form of compensation. We imagine that we sufficiently fulfill our moral obligations when we use our compressed replicas to grant the evolutionary process a “Divine telos”. It is similar when we rail against solipsistic theories. We grant everyone their private bubble of consciousness and protect the imagined boundaries of those bubbles from being challenged. Yet it is easy to see that this results in the most solipsistic outcome of all, since we have practically ensured that the alienated conditions of the modern soul persist. It ensures that the reality of other souls, or the Divine telos, will only remain as thin pictorial replicas posted on the inside of our soul wall.
Intellectual 'Solutions' to the Crisis
To ease the inner tension, modern souls also engage in scientific inquiries. The search for meaning is often unconscious in the natural sciences, i.e., the intellectual thinkers who seek ways to orient their understanding of the phenomenal world and its metamorphoses don’t realize that they are, in reality, seeking ways to resonate with the inner lives of other souls. Instead, they feel like they are exploring the ‘meaning of reality’ at a much more abstracted and externalized level, like trying to find the programming code that explains the operation of a computer. If we introspect this scientific process, however, we can discern that our research questions, experiments, data analysis, models, philosophical frameworks, etc., are (a) originally shaped and inspired by the activity of other souls, i.e. all the social, educational, and physical influences that shaped our current cognitive capacity and interests, and (b) aimed toward understanding the constructively or destructively ‘interfering patterns’ of those influences (as a metaphor to the interference patterns of wave dynamics).
Through these ‘waves’ of interfering activity emanating from varied centers of coherence, the phenomenal flow of our experiential states is manifested. The patterned rhythms of our lives, shaped through geography, climate, heredity, family environment, education, career, relationships, interests, and hobbies, etc., are manifestations of such waves of interfering activity. That is easy enough to notice when contemplating cultural life. Who can deny that family, education, finance, politics, highway traffic, etc., are the result of interfering human ideas, impulses, and intents? When we attempt to discern the lawful patterns at work in these domains, it is implicit that we are trying to more closely resonate with the emotions, desires, ambitions, ideas, and goals that live in other human souls and which amplify one another or ‘cancel out’. If one half of the state legislature aims to approve a funding bill, for example, and the other half aims to squash the bill, then those aims interfere destructively. For the average citizen, it would be as if nothing happened.
The interfering activity of other souls was also responsible for our health, socialization, education, and thus our ability to eventually conduct intellectual inquiries into the characteristic qualities and relations of that very same activity. Even if we assume most of our stable psycho-physical traits are the result of gene expression (which is not necessarily supported by the latest science), we know such expression must be related to spiritual activity spanning generations of our ancestry. The genes could only survive in this stream of heredity because our ancestors conducted their physical, emotional, and imaginative activity in ways adaptive to their environmental circumstances. Our genetic inheritance can then be seen as the interference pattern of our ancestors’ activity. In that sense, our inquiries are a recursive (testimonial) means of probing the constraints that originally shaped and actualized their potential — namely, their capacities, aims, methods, and direction of unfoldment.
When developmental biologists or psychologists study the characteristic phases of human life, for example, they are probing the underlying psycho-physical context that shapes and supports their capacity to probe. Without a properly functioning physical organism, in turn supporting properly functioning capacities of perception, memory, reasoning, and intuition, no such probing would be possible. Without the palette of physical experiences amassed in childhood through instinctive mimicry and imaginative play, no higher-order conceptual thinking with assortments of compressed replicas would be possible. All the living influences that shaped this meaningful context are implicit in every inquiry conducted, constraining the content of the inquiry and how it can potentially unfold, for example, what data points will be sought and paid attention to. Yet how many philosophers, scientists, theologians, and so on, are aware of this inner process they are continually participating in to probe the ‘nature of reality’?
That also applies to the average modern soul who navigates life through intellectual thinking. When we plan our day, how often do we pause to ponder how our mental images about what to eat, where to go, whom to meet, how to do our job, and so on, are probing the various transpersonal influences that imbue them with meaning and steer their flow? These influences include, most proximately, everything we dimly conceive of as ‘sympathies and antipathies’. We can’t honestly claim that we are in control of such sympathies and antipathies; rather, they feel like they are imposed on us from an instinctive, dreamlike development since childhood. We feel naturally drawn toward some career interests and not others, toward some people and not others, toward some social situations, some cuisines, etc. Even if we aren’t very clear on the details, it is clear enough that such psychic influences have been fashioned through the interfering activity of other souls.
When contemplating the processes of the natural kingdoms, in contrast, the ‘phase-gap’ between these inner influences and the contents of thinking (usually sensory measurements and mathematical models) grows much wider. It’s difficult to even imagine what kind of interfering inner activity directly contributes to the water cycle, for example. Surely human activity is indirectly involved in that cycle, but we also feel like it would continue to run its course even if humanity didn’t exist. This feeling points to a demarcation of our inner state that cannot be ignored. The experience of such an inner demarcation helps account for the whole course of modern civilization. Through it, modern humanity habitually externalizes the interfering activity of souls onto imagined entities and mechanisms, whether the latter are considered to be mindless particles, divine beings, or anything in between.
When we study the structures and functioning of the brain, as another example, we are once again probing the constraints that shape our thinking - the very same thinking that is doing the probing. Yet most thinkers now flow with the habit of explaining their thinking process as a product of the mechanically transforming compressed replicas of the brain. That is like concluding that the idea of ‘traffic laws’ is a product of the stop signs and traffic lights. In the latter case, it is obvious that the signs are reflections or embodiments of the idea and serve to anchor the idea’s meaning, but don’t themselves produce the idea. Yet in the former case, the idea of ‘thinking process’ is substituted by the replicas that anchor its meaning. Thus, it is concluded that the pictured neurochemical pathways and firings are the source of our thinking experience, and the first-person qualities of that experience are deemed illusory or epiphenomenal.
Despite the obvious logical flaw, such a move feels natural to the modern intellect and is not easily questioned. The theoretical physicist would find it, at best, ‘poetic license’ to speak of the patterns of interfering light or water waves as akin to the narrative meaning we experience when contemplating the interfering patterns of human culture, i.e., the meaning of aesthetic and moral purposes and goals. Instead, they feel that the first-person experiential qualities we discern in natural patterns are merely a theoretical overlay on the mindless ‘third-person’ mechanisms that cause them. The typical biologist, for example, would balk at describing an organic process as the embodiment of archetypal meaning, like the hero’s journey of psycho-physical deaths and rebirths. We can surely feel that meaning at some obscure level when observing the process below, but that feeling is considered a merely ‘subjective’ idea that is overlayed on the ‘objective reality’.
Indeed, to immediately describe the above process as something of objective moral significance feels somewhat dishonest for the intellect. Unlike our mathematical models, which attempt to mimic the perceptual dynamics of such processes, the narrative overlay feels like we are adding something onto the dynamics that cannot be surveyed in our lucid consciousness. We cannot trace the source of this aesthetic and moral feeling like we can trace the connections of our lucid thoughts when weaving our activity through mathematical calculations. Thus, we become increasingly insensitive to that feeling-imbued intuitive context of our perceptual states and begin to assume it is merely ‘subjective’, ‘epiphenomenal’, and so on. This invisible context gradually becomes a ghostly and speculative space of ideas and ideals, which are no longer considered active forces within the phenomenal flow of experience, only abstract ideas that theoretically attempt to explain that flow.
This ignorance of what we are continually doing in our intellectual efforts to triangulate the interfering activity of other souls is, in itself, a symptom of the underlying isolation and alienation. The latter has become so extreme that, unlike our ancestors who lamented the ‘Fall’ from a state of transpersonal communion and instinctively understood their daily pursuits as a means of restoring that communion, we no longer know what exactly we are isolated and alienated from anymore. We only have a vague feeling that the content we perceive and think about in the World is cut off from who we are and the nature of our existence, in their deeper essence. Thus, we feel stimulated to ask research questions about that content and investigate its lawful relations. What the person asking the questions contributes to that lawfulness, however, has been completely obscured. The lawful relations feel like they are something external to our agency, of which we are only passive spectators.
Another method that the intellect has found to ease its inner tension and alienation is modern entertainment. Video games, for example, have advanced to the point where we can inhabit a semi-realistic looking environment with other players who are aligned in common tasks with us, i.e., in various goals, missions, friendly competitions, etc. The ‘interactivity’ of games is only becoming more immersive through the development of virtual reality technology, such that we begin to feel like we are inhabiting a more exciting compressed replica of the sensory world. Instead of using time-lapse photography to contemplate the transformation of cloud patterns, we use VR technology to feel like we are involved in a thrilling adventure. Here again, the soul resigns itself to the illusion of communion with other souls and their inner lives, while the inner depths of experience remain as opaque as ever from our gaming perspective.
Seth Miller has explored this gaming phenomenon with great insight:
In other words, the creative “I” is tricked into feeling like it is making progress in life and integrating new experiences as it scores points, levels up, unlocks rewards, and so on. It is obvious, however, that this never translates into new inner skills, i.e., expanded degrees of freedom, and corresponding experiences of new ideas, feelings, or sensations. There is no expanding intuitive orientation to the lawful relations of phenomenal experience, i.e., the intimate reasons why we think, feel, and act in the ways that we do as individuals and collectives. We don’t become more sensitive to how the contents of our consciousness are shaped through the interfering activity of other souls. Instead, we remain confined within a tissue of mental symbols that only try, over a compressed period, to replicate the soul’s advancement over longer developmental periods. Since the compressed symbols have become more ‘interactive’ than the memory pictures and verbal anchors of our vacation last summer, the risk of being enchanted by them grows exponentially.
Again, such a faux sense of creative advancement does not only apply to video game imagery and narratives. This virtual domain of subsensible experience also acts as a parable for our ‘real world’ stream of sensible experience, where spiritual images that support the development of the human ego are virtually non-existent. Instead, we are fed a consistent diet of images that stimulate our lower impulses and selfish tendencies, whether we are shopping for groceries, planning a trip, looking for good schools, trying to learn about something on YouTube, or what have you. The modern marketing-based social environment provides various incentives and rewards that are spiritually vacuous, i.e., they link to the idea of advancement but do not carry the reality of advancement. Thus, we get compressed symbols implying that, if we purchase this Land Rover, we will practically live through all these same experiences depicted below.
We won’t escape confinement from the wall of scaled images by rearranging them into more and more exotic forms via computer technology. Instead, our liberation is to be found within the implicit intuitive gestures which precede the condensing images. Hopefully, we caught glimpses of these gestures when working with the initial exercises. Even the Ad images above can provide such glimpses if we concentrate and try to sense how they are designed to influence us, by manipulating deeper moods and impulses that shape our imagination. We can’t see these deeper gestures as yet more scaled images, but we can surely feel them surging beneath the surface of those images. The more we live into this surging feeling, the more the images feel like testimonies to the meaningful depth of our inner process, i.e., like true flashes of insight into the evolutionary flow of our existence. In that sense, even the ‘prison’ of vacuous symbolic replicas can be leveraged toward our spiritual nourishment and freedom if we become more conscious of how it precipitates from and feeds back into our unseen inner process.
In all cases, we must anchor our conscious insights with scaled images, so we shouldn’t imagine that we can simply float off into ‘pure meaning’ and make do without them, as it is often imagined within various modern mystical approaches. Yet, through our initial efforts, we may soon also realize our mental ‘ticking’ scale of physical-sensory replicas is not the only available scale of compression. Just as we can use different algorithms to more efficiently compress the files on our computer, we may sense that we can exercise different forms of inner activity to more efficiently and livingly compress the intuited meaning of our existential flow into different ‘formats’ of scaled images, and conversely, to ‘unzip’ the meaningful depth of those images. To redeem the meaning crisis from within, our inner activity must consciously flow through deeper scales of feeling-imbued meaning and work with more integrated images that stabilize and anchor the meaning. This redemptive process is not a one-time affair but an ongoing journey. Indeed, it is the evolutionary process itself, across all interfering scales of existence.
CITATIONS:
(1) Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning: Thinking and Thought
https://owenbarfield.org/read-online/ar ... d-thought/
(2) David Hume, Treatise, Sect. II, Of Scepticism with regard to the Senses
https://www2.lawrence.edu/fast/ryckmant ... bodies.htm
(3) Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Part 1
(4) Seth Miller, Video Games and Spiritual Development, a preliminary analysis
https://spiritalchemy.com/1560/video-ga ... velopment/
Living Into the Meaning Crisis
Our modern lives are characterized by extreme isolation and alienation from the inner experience of other living souls (human, animal, or otherwise), on the one hand, and a frantic search for ways to rekindle that experience, on the other. Modern thinkers have dubbed this the ‘meaning crisis’. There are many obvious outer symptoms of this crisis, ranging from psychic epidemics of depression, anxiety, and neurotic conditions to widespread violence and war. However, perhaps the most dangerous manifestation of the meaning crisis is the souls who remain unaware that they are in the midst of it. We can easily point toward other institutions and people who are deprived of meaning, but we often imagine ourselves to be immune to this crisis. The following essay intends to trace the roots of this crisis, not to something happening ‘out there’, but to the dynamics within our intimate cognitive experience. Only by becoming more sensitive to the meaning crisis within the life of our soul can we properly orient toward the outer expressions of the crisis in the wider World and trace the path of its redemption.
If I were to ask you to think about the rich experience of a song, for example, ‘Stabat Mater dolorosa’, how would you go about it? Assuming they are not readily familiar with the song, most people would simply start thinking about musical experience in general. They may feel like: “I don’t know that song, but it sounds like an older song with religious significance. I can approximate it by thinking about how songs unfold in measures, phrases, melodies, lyrics, and so on. Then I can imagine how those things could be combined, and the lyrics of the song title would be present too.” That is somewhat analogous to modern abstract thinking about the ‘meaning crisis’. We try to approximate it by spawning thoughts about ancient souls that lived in a sacred flow with the Cosmos, how souls have now lost touch with that sacred flow, how they now experience many forms of psychological degeneration as a result, and so on. We place a hypothetical ‘sacred flow’ on one end of the scale and weigh it against ‘modern life’ on the other hand, and judge the scale to be out of balance.
On the other hand, now you are presented with the song experience:
Once this concrete encounter happens and you allow your imaginative activity to flow with the layered movements and articulations of the song, then the song title and your subsequent thoughts about the song become a living testimony to that rich and holistic inner experience. Likewise, the meaning of the ‘meaning crisis’ is deepened if our thoughts about it become testimonial, i.e., the thoughts point to concrete inner experiences that distinguish our ordinary imaginative life from a potential form of inner activity that is entangled in a more sacral meaningful flow. We can then feel that we are living out the meaning crisis and, in some mysterious way, this intimate knowledge of its inner dynamics also helps us participate in its redemption. As a more condensed example of the above, we can consider the difference between (a) imagining a picture of a clenched fist, and (b) physically clenching our fist before remembering the physical experience in our imagination. What this illustrates is that we lack the deeper meaning of something only so long as our thoughts about it feel disconnected from experiences we have lived through.
To live through the meaning crisis, we can first explore the thinking process by which the meaning of our experience is always explored. Just as the clenched fist is a finished fact, our ordinary thoughts about the ‘meaning crisis’ (or any similar existential topics) reflect a fully crystallized set of abstract observations. In other words, these thoughts can only reflect upon manifestations of the crisis that have already happened and fail to grasp the deeper ‘gravity wells’ of potential that are attracting its unfolding states. Our inner meaning-seeking process, on the other hand, is in a state of continual becoming and points our attention toward the domain of potential storylines that can unfold, depending on how we orient or fail to orient to the crisis within. It points us toward what the Lord doeth within the depths of our soul, instead of what is already done (the manifest world of finished facts). In this respect, Owen Barfield has provided a nice metaphorical image for us to contemplate:
(1)Owen Barfield wrote:To take, however, a very homely example: the man of today knows quite well, of course, whether his hair is long or short; but if he examines this knowledge more closely, he will find that it is only knowledge of a result. Thus, he may look in the glass, he may see the snippets lying on the kind of surplice in which barbers envelop us, he may find that his new hat is now large enough to include his ears, or he may feel cold round the back of his neck as he goes out into the street. On the other hand, he may feel the heat or weight of long hair. But if we try to imagine that, instead of this way of knowledge, we could actually be conscious in the growing of our hair, could feel it as movement in something the same way that we still feel our breathing as movement, we should be making an approach towards the difference between Greek consciousness and Greek thinking, and our own.
Thus, we need to bring our thinking consciousness into the growth processes of our imaginative life, i.e., the living forces through which its memory images continually integrate and provide the opportunity to traverse novel states of meaningful experience. We first stimulate those living forces, bringing them into our ‘aperture’ of consciousness, by closely introspecting the ordinary movements of our imaginative life. Although we symbolically speak of ‘forces’, ‘growth processes’, and so on, it should be kept in mind that these symbols only anchor our first-person experience of inner activity, experiential states, and their transformations. There are no separate ‘forces’ or ‘mechanisms’ that act upon that first-person experience from an orthogonal space, as we usually imagine. In other words, the process of unleashing these living forces in our consciousness is identical to the process of becoming more conscious of how our first-person stream of experience is always shaped and constrained in its transformations.
Our Constrained Life of Symbolic Replicas
The most proximate constraint on this stream is our finished mental pictures (hair clippings), by which we orient to the lawful flow of experience. These pictures feel ghostly and confined within a tiny parcel in our heads. Through this narrow aperture, we contemplate the existential flow (the growing hair) as if through a glass darkly. This contemplation generally takes the form of picturing certain phenomena and complementing them with pictures of other related phenomena until the interrelations between them provisionally feel to ‘make sense’. When we build these mental puzzles out of our memory pictures, however, we don’t feel like the ‘laws’, ‘principles’, ‘rules’, etc. that we derive from their logical patterns are the reality that explains the phenomenal appearances and dynamics. Even many materialist reductionists still feel like the ‘frequency wavelengths’ of colors, for example, are only symbols for some other reality that explains the color manifestations.
In that sense, what exactly the World essence is becomes a question of our preferred mental pictures, i.e., what kind of reality we desire to be ‘running the show’ that we passively observe and contemplate. Some people prefer a benevolent and omnipotent God to whom we can surrender our agency and on whom we can rest our salvation. Others desire mindless mechanisms to which there is no accountability and on which we can blame our suffering. In the end, however, these all remain speculative and ghostly mental pictures plastered on our ‘soul wall’ that we periodically gaze at when we are feeling inquisitive or despondent. They bring us a certain sense of satisfaction, or a sense of temporary relief from the pain and anguish of not knowing (with diminishing returns). Yet, with this wall of mental pictures, we practically remain as the person thinking hypothetically about the melody and lyrics of a song we have not yet concretely experienced.
Many people may feel like the above is an overstatement and that they have concrete experience and knowledge of the wider World in which their lives unfold (even if others don't). We need to engage in a healthy dose of introspection before we can disabuse ourselves of this feeling. We need something to compare our normal state with. For example, we can notice that whenever we contemplate the wider World of past events that we experienced (or anticipate experiencing), we don’t have a living impression of those experiences. The immediate qualities of such events have rapidly receded into a domain of memory pictures that compress the rich meaning of temporally extended experience into point-like imaginative replicas. These rich qualities feel like they have been stripped from the images, and all that remains are dim sensory qualities and thoughts we habitually associate with such qualities, sometimes accompanied by vague hints of feeling. Whenever we want to contemplate the vast expanses of space or the temporal flow of events, we can only do so through these stripped-down imaginative replicas.
For example, we can consider a summer vacation we took with many interesting and rewarding experiences. If we could remember our two-week vacation last summer only in real-time, it would take us two full weeks of concentration to do so. Instead, we grasp our overall intuition for the past period, and we can anchor it in a verbal symbol, ‘my summer vacation last year’, which is a replica of real-time bodily speech. Now we can intuitively move through the landscape of the vacation memories and condense more concrete images of the actual happenings, which in the end are also instances of real-time bodily experiences (fragments of what we saw, heard, felt, etc.). We do something similar when we make a plan for our next summer vacation. We should get a really vivid feel for this dynamic. Our verbal thinking can only flow at the ‘ticking’ pace of our physical speech and is a replica of that speech, yet the words continuously focus intuitions that span greater or lesser, future or past, time spans.
As another example, when we look at a calendar, we behold a real-time visual perception, yet we grasp it as a compressed symbol of our intuition for all the days in the year. When we think about faster processes – for example, the flapping of a bee's wings – we need to imagine them slowed down. Our real-time imagination looks like the physical perception of waving condor wings, but we grasp that as a scaled-up image for our intuition of the rapid process. Today, we also use technological aids to produce these compressed or expanded replicas. For example, we could hardly perceive the transformation of clouds before time-lapse photography, nor the flapping of bee wings before slow-motion video. With such examples, it should now be clearer how much we are reliant on such compressed and expanded replicas to interface with the ‘concrete world’ of spatiotemporal happenings. The whole wider World we imagine to be ‘out there’ is only known insofar as it is mediated by such symbolic tokens.
Moreover, we feel forced to spawn such images whenever we want to think through the meaning of our experiential states. It is something that just happens to us, whether we like it or not. A quick exercise to become more sensitive to this constraint is to first think of the alphabet. In the concept ‘alphabet’, we experience the intuition of the auditory, visual, and gestural ‘palette’ that can be used to clothe our ideas in linguistic symbols and reflect on or communicate their meaning. If we try to concentrate on this concept, we can feel the whole alphabet as a holistic ‘wavefunction’, as if all the letters and their potential meaningful combinations are superimposed. Now we can take our hand or our foot and try to trace out the letters of the alphabet and feel the meaningful intuition of the gestures. The task is to perform these gestures and live in their meaning without voicing them in our mind, not even as a subtle whisper. We should feel like our concentrated activity is fully present in the experience of tracing the letters and is resisting ‘standing back’ from that experience to comment on it.
Not so easy, right? Perhaps it even feels practically impossible to refrain from replicating the gestures verbally as we trace them out. Such exercises provide us a window into the default conditioning of our imaginative life, which is always present. When a melody or lyrics get ‘stuck in our head’, it simply means we have temporarily become more sensitive to this habitual inner process that normally unfolds in the subconscious background. Another simple exercise is to contemplate the trees outside and immerse our inner activity in the meaningful gesture of ‘lush greenness’. We should try to live in that meaning without any intellectual commentary, neither about the trees nor about what we are doing. Often, in such exercises, we will subtly spawn verbal images that comment about ‘living in the meaning of lush greenness’ and confuse that subtle commentary for the real-time experience of living in the meaning. Thus, we need to remain vigilant of this tendency if we want to become more sensitive to the inner constraints at play in our imaginative life.
What exactly are we missing when the holistic meaning of experience is immediately and automatically compressed into these point-like replicas, like the sounds of our inner voice? Perhaps the meaningful depth of existence itself is what goes missing, hence the crisis of meaning we experience. To be clear, the replicas serve a critical function in scaling our spatiotemporal experience to stabilize and anchor its holistic meaning, such that we can intelligently interface with the wider World of beings and their activities. We could imagine that, without these mental anchors, we would be like a person who falls out of a raft on a river with Class VI white water rapids. Our imaginative life would be tossed hither and thither and would never attain a stable orientation within the experiential flow. Yet when our attention is tightly ‘sucked into’ the fragmented elements of these replicas, the feeling-imbued meaning quickly fades into the intuitive background, and we are eventually left manipulating dry intellectual tokens.
Thus, through a bit of introspection, we have already come into the concrete experiential vicinity of the meaning crisis characterized by isolation and alienation from the intuitive foundations of existence. Our thoughts about it are already becoming more like our thoughts about the song that our soul has lived through and moved with. It is through such a participatory approach that we mitigate against the risk of our idolizing our concepts about the ‘meaning crisis’ and assembling them into rigid theoretical schemas. With the benefit of such intimate experience, we can safely approach more philosophical concepts and relate to them in a testimonial way, such that we can resonate with the underlying ideal movements that animated the philosophers and their frameworks. The alienated existence of modern man, for example, was intuited, conceptualized, and clearly expressed a few centuries ago by various philosophical minds such as David Hume.
Cultural Expressions of the Meaning Crisis
Hume became skeptical that the sensory panorama ‘out there’ could have any resemblance to the essential things that stimulated their appearances in our consciousness, since the latter would necessarily lack sensory qualities. Furthermore, he was skeptical that the lawful transformation of this panorama, which we discern via thinking, could have any objective reality apart from the human mental habits that linked particular impressions together, just as a dog habitually associates the sight of its owner with the pleasure of play or food. According to Hume, it is only because we have become so accustomed to perceiving certain perceptions followed by others that we can speak of a “causal relation” between them. We may have seen the Sun ‘rise’ innumerable times before, for example, but that doesn’t speak to any objectively lawful process, only an ingrained human mental habit that is incapable of guaranteeing that the Sun will rise again tomorrow (see The Problem of Induction).
(2)David Hume wrote:To begin with the senses ’tis evident these faculties are incapable of giving rise to the notion of the continu’d existence of their objects [e.g., the moon, butterflies, men, etc.], after they no longer appear to the senses. For that is a contradiction in terms, and supposes that the senses continue to operate, even after they have ceas’d all manner of operation…It is a question of fact, whether the perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them: How shall this question be determined? By experience surely; as all other questions of a like nature. But here experience is, and must be entirely silent. The mind has never any thing present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connexion with objects. The supposition of such a connexion is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.
We are not concerned so much with the philosophical reasoning at work above, but rather the underlying mood in which such concepts are drenched. When we pay attention to such moods, we become sensitive to the ideal patterns that structured the last few centuries of thinking and were expressed through varied philosophical systems, i.e., rationalism, empiricism, critical idealism, pragmatism, and so on. Such moods often act as ‘gravity wells’ in our consciousness that attract corresponding trains of thought that seek to justify the mood. It is similar to how, when we find ourselves in a depressed mood, we can only think about the negative side of our life experiences, where every thought seems to confirm how much ‘bad luck’ we have had over some arbitrary period that we have chosen to focus on. Likewise, this epistemically pessimistic mood steered the philosophical thinking of Hume and others, who adopted an arbitrary focus on sensory experience and the manipulation of compressed replicas, to the exclusion of holistic intuitive experience.
This mood also heavily influenced Immanuel Kant, and through the latter, the intellect became entirely fortified in its alienated tissue of mental pictures, which were imagined to be isolated from the meaningful essences (‘things themselves’) that lay at their foundation and stimulated them.
(3)Immanuel Kant wrote:Even if we could bring our intuition to the highest degree of clearness, we should not thereby come any nearer to the constitution of objects in themselves. We should still know only our mode of intuition, that is, our sensibility. We should, indeed, know it completely, but always only under the conditions of space and time — conditions which are originally inherent in the subject. What the objects may be in themselves would never become known to us even through the most enlightened knowledge of that which is alone given us, namely, their appearance.
When contemplating such quotes, one cannot help but also think of the ancient Taoist allegory of a man who dreamt of being a butterfly and, upon waking, could not determine whether he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. From an intellectual perspective, it is indeed impossible to resolve such a conundrum, just as we cannot determine the exact momentum and position of a particle at the same time, or we can’t say whether a photon is ‘actually’ a wave or a particle. All these riddles are born from the intellect’s confinement within its compressed or expanded replicas. This confinement is a synonym for the intellect’s conditioning to exclusive reliance on such replicas. It is a confined state from which the intellect spawns endless meaningless conundrums for itself. It isolates certain portions of its total imaginative content and puts that portion into opposition with other portions. Indeed, if we pay attention, we will begin to notice just how much of intellectual discourse is characterized by this sort of oppositional partitioning of imaginative contents (e.g., materialism vs. idealism, free will vs. determinism, discovery vs. invention of mathematics, etc., etc.)
The more we carefully pay attention to the flow of experience over various timescales, the more we sense how much it resembles a dreamscape. We are not clear on where various sensory and emotional phenomena ‘came from’ or where they are ‘going’, we are not sure why we have a certain temperament, disposition, sympathies and antipathies, etc., and we don’t know what our life was like before a certain age in early childhood or what it could be like after death. Just like in our dreams, we awaken to our existence as self-conscious individuals at a certain stage of life and have no clue how we got to be in that state; we don’t know how we are able to walk, speak, and think. The collective scale of human history is no less dim and dreamy, patched together from various physical fragments and corresponding extrapolations and inferences. It is interesting to note how the ‘hard sciences’ have also inferred impenetrable intellectual boundaries from their observations, such as the Planck scale limit for measurement, the black holes that cannot be probed, or, more recently, the interstellar ‘wall of fire’.
In modern times, this skeptical philosophical intuition has transposed itself into the theoretical constructs of various world outlooks, such as the Matrix-style simulation theory or the mystical notion that the World we perceive is merely a series of images dreamed up by ‘pure consciousness’. The intellect then imagines that, if it were to awaken from the dream, all these ‘objective’ constraints that characterize its living experience, like the changing seasons from the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, would fall away and be revealed as dreamed illusions. Then, it is hoped, we would be like ‘free electrons’ that could explore ‘Godel’s candy shop’ of experiences in any way that pleases us. The average person may not pay much attention to such views, but as soon as we begin thinking seriously about what can be known about the reality we experience, it is inevitable that such a view is adopted in more or less subtle ways. Most people can sense that, from the intellectual perspective, these theoretical constructs about the nature of reality are internally coherent and logically unassailable.
As a reference point, I will quote Felipe Bautista, who has established a framework called ‘ouroboric idealism’:
The chief source of the question of what happens to man after he dies is maya — what is maya? I’ll use an example to explain what maya is: imagine that you are watching a movie on a television monitor, and now imagine that you become so entertained by the movie that you no longer even notice the television monitor (all you can focus on is the drama unfolding in the movie); this is exactly what happens when one becomes entertained with the drama of human life, such that one forgets that it is all a play of representations (Vorstellungen) arising on the surface of the “monitor” called consciousness. Man cannot actually die anymore than a character in a movie playing on a television monitor can actually die. If I am watching a movie on a television monitor, and a character in the movie dies, all that has happened is the pixels of the television monitor have lit up in a particular pattern (nobody has actually died); in the same way, when I notice any event in the empirical world (whether some man dying or what-have-you), all that has happened is representations have unfolded in some particular pattern on the (if you will) “monitor” called consciousness. Just as the characters and scenes of a movie playing on a television monitor are only really pixels lighting up in particular ways, so too are empirical objects (houses, mountains, rivers, men, etc.) only really arrangements of representations (Vorstellungen) arising on the (if you will) “monitor” called consciousness.
To put it in another familiar metaphor, imagine we are engaged in a multi-player computer game on a network, where the reality of the other players is interfaced through the pixels on our screen. How can we know if the pixels moving on the screen are the outer physiognomy of a coherent inner perspective experiencing ideas, emotions, and sensations as we do? No matter how we reason through the moving pixels, we could never be certain that their dynamics are not simply the result of a mindless algorithm that only appears to be interacting with our avatar intelligently. Even if a text bubble pops up on the screen with the words, “Hey, my name is John Smith, and rest assured I am a living human being just like you are”, and then begins conversing with us about finance, politics, religion, and so on, we can’t be sure this ‘dialogue’ isn’t also the result of the mindless algorithm. Indeed, the reasons to suspect the latter are growing every day as ‘machine learning’ technology advances and imitates human discourse.
If we pay close attention to our flow of experience, this skeptical conundrum for the modern intellect also reveals itself in our daily interactions. We surely feel like we are interacting with living beings who experience coherent inner perspectives, and we modulate our speech and actions accordingly, but when we reason through our mental pictures and try to trace the source of our confidence in this feeling, we are left empty-handed. There is no logical means of proving that we are not merely interacting with non-player characters (NPCs). It is like we are trying to reconstruct a 3D puzzle when we are constrained to assembling the pieces on a 2D surface. We can model the quantitative sensory transformations of habitual behavior with mathematical precision, but the depth of feelings, impulses, ambitions, plans, hopes, goals, etc., remains elusive and, for all precise intellectual thinking purposes, practically non-existent. When the unexpected inevitably happens, we call it ‘random’ or backproject a rational explanation for it based on our preferred narrative.
In any case, we experience a split between ourselves as philosophical and scientific thinking beings, who cannot ‘prove’ whether we are interacting with NPCs, and as a living soul who must act as if we are surrounded by equally living souls. We direct countless inner energy toward the contemplation of theoretical conundrums about ‘determinism’, ‘free will', ‘wave-particle duality’, the ‘limits to knowledge’, ‘whether reality is a dream simulation’, and so on, while we continue functioning as if we are free agencies interacting with other free agencies who are capable of knowing each other and the World. We experience ourselves as self-conscious beings with moral impulses, yet we ‘explain’ that experience as the product of mindless biochemical processes that somehow became self-conscious and impelled by “moral values” to aid their survival and reproduction. It is as if we are making meaningful gestures with one hand and, with the other hand, making other meaningful gestures that attempt to explain the former away.
As we can see, many modern materialistic and mystical philosophies are rooted in something akin to this epistemology, and the history of human civilization reveals that such philosophical currents prophesy what will later permeate the wider social and cultural spheres. It is only a matter of time before we not only think but also begin to feel and act as if the World is our NPC-populated dreamscape. Could many acts of ‘senseless violence’ today already testify to this deeper feeling? Perhaps, if we are honest with ourselves, we are somewhat sensitive to this deeper distancing from other souls in our lives. How often do we look others in the eyes and smile when we walk by them? How often do we summon interest in the experiential pathways of our family members, relatives, neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, and so on, let alone in the souls who live on the other side of the planet? How often are our interactions with other souls merely a utilitarian transaction for material or emotional benefit? These are alienating conditions that most people can imagine as a problem for others, but generally refuse to consider for themselves.
That inner conflict is a source of continual tension that grinds away in our souls, and its degenerative effects on our psyche and physiology should not be underestimated. When we explain away our past with mindless evolutionary theories, it comes at the expense of our future evolutionary development. Because we subconsciously sense this inner isolation and tension, we often rail against such theories of reality as a form of compensation. We imagine that we sufficiently fulfill our moral obligations when we use our compressed replicas to grant the evolutionary process a “Divine telos”. It is similar when we rail against solipsistic theories. We grant everyone their private bubble of consciousness and protect the imagined boundaries of those bubbles from being challenged. Yet it is easy to see that this results in the most solipsistic outcome of all, since we have practically ensured that the alienated conditions of the modern soul persist. It ensures that the reality of other souls, or the Divine telos, will only remain as thin pictorial replicas posted on the inside of our soul wall.
Intellectual 'Solutions' to the Crisis
To ease the inner tension, modern souls also engage in scientific inquiries. The search for meaning is often unconscious in the natural sciences, i.e., the intellectual thinkers who seek ways to orient their understanding of the phenomenal world and its metamorphoses don’t realize that they are, in reality, seeking ways to resonate with the inner lives of other souls. Instead, they feel like they are exploring the ‘meaning of reality’ at a much more abstracted and externalized level, like trying to find the programming code that explains the operation of a computer. If we introspect this scientific process, however, we can discern that our research questions, experiments, data analysis, models, philosophical frameworks, etc., are (a) originally shaped and inspired by the activity of other souls, i.e. all the social, educational, and physical influences that shaped our current cognitive capacity and interests, and (b) aimed toward understanding the constructively or destructively ‘interfering patterns’ of those influences (as a metaphor to the interference patterns of wave dynamics).
Through these ‘waves’ of interfering activity emanating from varied centers of coherence, the phenomenal flow of our experiential states is manifested. The patterned rhythms of our lives, shaped through geography, climate, heredity, family environment, education, career, relationships, interests, and hobbies, etc., are manifestations of such waves of interfering activity. That is easy enough to notice when contemplating cultural life. Who can deny that family, education, finance, politics, highway traffic, etc., are the result of interfering human ideas, impulses, and intents? When we attempt to discern the lawful patterns at work in these domains, it is implicit that we are trying to more closely resonate with the emotions, desires, ambitions, ideas, and goals that live in other human souls and which amplify one another or ‘cancel out’. If one half of the state legislature aims to approve a funding bill, for example, and the other half aims to squash the bill, then those aims interfere destructively. For the average citizen, it would be as if nothing happened.
The interfering activity of other souls was also responsible for our health, socialization, education, and thus our ability to eventually conduct intellectual inquiries into the characteristic qualities and relations of that very same activity. Even if we assume most of our stable psycho-physical traits are the result of gene expression (which is not necessarily supported by the latest science), we know such expression must be related to spiritual activity spanning generations of our ancestry. The genes could only survive in this stream of heredity because our ancestors conducted their physical, emotional, and imaginative activity in ways adaptive to their environmental circumstances. Our genetic inheritance can then be seen as the interference pattern of our ancestors’ activity. In that sense, our inquiries are a recursive (testimonial) means of probing the constraints that originally shaped and actualized their potential — namely, their capacities, aims, methods, and direction of unfoldment.
When developmental biologists or psychologists study the characteristic phases of human life, for example, they are probing the underlying psycho-physical context that shapes and supports their capacity to probe. Without a properly functioning physical organism, in turn supporting properly functioning capacities of perception, memory, reasoning, and intuition, no such probing would be possible. Without the palette of physical experiences amassed in childhood through instinctive mimicry and imaginative play, no higher-order conceptual thinking with assortments of compressed replicas would be possible. All the living influences that shaped this meaningful context are implicit in every inquiry conducted, constraining the content of the inquiry and how it can potentially unfold, for example, what data points will be sought and paid attention to. Yet how many philosophers, scientists, theologians, and so on, are aware of this inner process they are continually participating in to probe the ‘nature of reality’?
That also applies to the average modern soul who navigates life through intellectual thinking. When we plan our day, how often do we pause to ponder how our mental images about what to eat, where to go, whom to meet, how to do our job, and so on, are probing the various transpersonal influences that imbue them with meaning and steer their flow? These influences include, most proximately, everything we dimly conceive of as ‘sympathies and antipathies’. We can’t honestly claim that we are in control of such sympathies and antipathies; rather, they feel like they are imposed on us from an instinctive, dreamlike development since childhood. We feel naturally drawn toward some career interests and not others, toward some people and not others, toward some social situations, some cuisines, etc. Even if we aren’t very clear on the details, it is clear enough that such psychic influences have been fashioned through the interfering activity of other souls.
When contemplating the processes of the natural kingdoms, in contrast, the ‘phase-gap’ between these inner influences and the contents of thinking (usually sensory measurements and mathematical models) grows much wider. It’s difficult to even imagine what kind of interfering inner activity directly contributes to the water cycle, for example. Surely human activity is indirectly involved in that cycle, but we also feel like it would continue to run its course even if humanity didn’t exist. This feeling points to a demarcation of our inner state that cannot be ignored. The experience of such an inner demarcation helps account for the whole course of modern civilization. Through it, modern humanity habitually externalizes the interfering activity of souls onto imagined entities and mechanisms, whether the latter are considered to be mindless particles, divine beings, or anything in between.
When we study the structures and functioning of the brain, as another example, we are once again probing the constraints that shape our thinking - the very same thinking that is doing the probing. Yet most thinkers now flow with the habit of explaining their thinking process as a product of the mechanically transforming compressed replicas of the brain. That is like concluding that the idea of ‘traffic laws’ is a product of the stop signs and traffic lights. In the latter case, it is obvious that the signs are reflections or embodiments of the idea and serve to anchor the idea’s meaning, but don’t themselves produce the idea. Yet in the former case, the idea of ‘thinking process’ is substituted by the replicas that anchor its meaning. Thus, it is concluded that the pictured neurochemical pathways and firings are the source of our thinking experience, and the first-person qualities of that experience are deemed illusory or epiphenomenal.
Despite the obvious logical flaw, such a move feels natural to the modern intellect and is not easily questioned. The theoretical physicist would find it, at best, ‘poetic license’ to speak of the patterns of interfering light or water waves as akin to the narrative meaning we experience when contemplating the interfering patterns of human culture, i.e., the meaning of aesthetic and moral purposes and goals. Instead, they feel that the first-person experiential qualities we discern in natural patterns are merely a theoretical overlay on the mindless ‘third-person’ mechanisms that cause them. The typical biologist, for example, would balk at describing an organic process as the embodiment of archetypal meaning, like the hero’s journey of psycho-physical deaths and rebirths. We can surely feel that meaning at some obscure level when observing the process below, but that feeling is considered a merely ‘subjective’ idea that is overlayed on the ‘objective reality’.
Indeed, to immediately describe the above process as something of objective moral significance feels somewhat dishonest for the intellect. Unlike our mathematical models, which attempt to mimic the perceptual dynamics of such processes, the narrative overlay feels like we are adding something onto the dynamics that cannot be surveyed in our lucid consciousness. We cannot trace the source of this aesthetic and moral feeling like we can trace the connections of our lucid thoughts when weaving our activity through mathematical calculations. Thus, we become increasingly insensitive to that feeling-imbued intuitive context of our perceptual states and begin to assume it is merely ‘subjective’, ‘epiphenomenal’, and so on. This invisible context gradually becomes a ghostly and speculative space of ideas and ideals, which are no longer considered active forces within the phenomenal flow of experience, only abstract ideas that theoretically attempt to explain that flow.
This ignorance of what we are continually doing in our intellectual efforts to triangulate the interfering activity of other souls is, in itself, a symptom of the underlying isolation and alienation. The latter has become so extreme that, unlike our ancestors who lamented the ‘Fall’ from a state of transpersonal communion and instinctively understood their daily pursuits as a means of restoring that communion, we no longer know what exactly we are isolated and alienated from anymore. We only have a vague feeling that the content we perceive and think about in the World is cut off from who we are and the nature of our existence, in their deeper essence. Thus, we feel stimulated to ask research questions about that content and investigate its lawful relations. What the person asking the questions contributes to that lawfulness, however, has been completely obscured. The lawful relations feel like they are something external to our agency, of which we are only passive spectators.
Another method that the intellect has found to ease its inner tension and alienation is modern entertainment. Video games, for example, have advanced to the point where we can inhabit a semi-realistic looking environment with other players who are aligned in common tasks with us, i.e., in various goals, missions, friendly competitions, etc. The ‘interactivity’ of games is only becoming more immersive through the development of virtual reality technology, such that we begin to feel like we are inhabiting a more exciting compressed replica of the sensory world. Instead of using time-lapse photography to contemplate the transformation of cloud patterns, we use VR technology to feel like we are involved in a thrilling adventure. Here again, the soul resigns itself to the illusion of communion with other souls and their inner lives, while the inner depths of experience remain as opaque as ever from our gaming perspective.
Seth Miller has explored this gaming phenomenon with great insight:
(4)When thinking about spiritual development, the most important thing is to make sure that the images that the soul body encounters are spiritually nourishing. Without getting into too much detail, an image is spiritually nourishing when it can be penetrated by the ego, and when in so doing the ego can find something in the image that coherently connects it beyond itself to the parts of the universe that support the development of the human ego. (Yes, this definition has a circularity in it.) In other words, when an image becomes meaningful with respect to how the ego needs to bring itself forward for that particular individual, the image is nourishing. Such images are symbols, and can even become healing symbols when the ego uses them for spiritual development.
Video games are largely devoid of exactly these kinds of images. They are symbolically empty with respect to the development of the ego. But the real issue is that the combination of the fight/flight and reward activation pathways in the endocrine system is linked to images that give a false sense of development to the ego. The specific images that trigger the reward centers are almost invariably linked to the idea of advancement—but do not carry the reality of advancement. This is played out differently in different styles of games, but is a near-universal feature of all games: higher scores, in-game achievements, item drops, new character skills, gold pieces, unlocked content, and so forth.All of the advancement that occurs in the context of the game stays within the game. Your ego does not get any spiritual traction in this kind of situation; the game challenges are not (with perhaps a very very few exceptions, and I’m not including, for example, Deepak Chopra’s game Leela here) the sort that help the ego develop itself spiritually. In other words, the rewards are spiritually vacuous, even while the physical, etheric and astral bodies undergo an experience as if there was some kind of advancement occurring or immanent.
In other words, the creative “I” is tricked into feeling like it is making progress in life and integrating new experiences as it scores points, levels up, unlocks rewards, and so on. It is obvious, however, that this never translates into new inner skills, i.e., expanded degrees of freedom, and corresponding experiences of new ideas, feelings, or sensations. There is no expanding intuitive orientation to the lawful relations of phenomenal experience, i.e., the intimate reasons why we think, feel, and act in the ways that we do as individuals and collectives. We don’t become more sensitive to how the contents of our consciousness are shaped through the interfering activity of other souls. Instead, we remain confined within a tissue of mental symbols that only try, over a compressed period, to replicate the soul’s advancement over longer developmental periods. Since the compressed symbols have become more ‘interactive’ than the memory pictures and verbal anchors of our vacation last summer, the risk of being enchanted by them grows exponentially.
Again, such a faux sense of creative advancement does not only apply to video game imagery and narratives. This virtual domain of subsensible experience also acts as a parable for our ‘real world’ stream of sensible experience, where spiritual images that support the development of the human ego are virtually non-existent. Instead, we are fed a consistent diet of images that stimulate our lower impulses and selfish tendencies, whether we are shopping for groceries, planning a trip, looking for good schools, trying to learn about something on YouTube, or what have you. The modern marketing-based social environment provides various incentives and rewards that are spiritually vacuous, i.e., they link to the idea of advancement but do not carry the reality of advancement. Thus, we get compressed symbols implying that, if we purchase this Land Rover, we will practically live through all these same experiences depicted below.
We won’t escape confinement from the wall of scaled images by rearranging them into more and more exotic forms via computer technology. Instead, our liberation is to be found within the implicit intuitive gestures which precede the condensing images. Hopefully, we caught glimpses of these gestures when working with the initial exercises. Even the Ad images above can provide such glimpses if we concentrate and try to sense how they are designed to influence us, by manipulating deeper moods and impulses that shape our imagination. We can’t see these deeper gestures as yet more scaled images, but we can surely feel them surging beneath the surface of those images. The more we live into this surging feeling, the more the images feel like testimonies to the meaningful depth of our inner process, i.e., like true flashes of insight into the evolutionary flow of our existence. In that sense, even the ‘prison’ of vacuous symbolic replicas can be leveraged toward our spiritual nourishment and freedom if we become more conscious of how it precipitates from and feeds back into our unseen inner process.
In all cases, we must anchor our conscious insights with scaled images, so we shouldn’t imagine that we can simply float off into ‘pure meaning’ and make do without them, as it is often imagined within various modern mystical approaches. Yet, through our initial efforts, we may soon also realize our mental ‘ticking’ scale of physical-sensory replicas is not the only available scale of compression. Just as we can use different algorithms to more efficiently compress the files on our computer, we may sense that we can exercise different forms of inner activity to more efficiently and livingly compress the intuited meaning of our existential flow into different ‘formats’ of scaled images, and conversely, to ‘unzip’ the meaningful depth of those images. To redeem the meaning crisis from within, our inner activity must consciously flow through deeper scales of feeling-imbued meaning and work with more integrated images that stabilize and anchor the meaning. This redemptive process is not a one-time affair but an ongoing journey. Indeed, it is the evolutionary process itself, across all interfering scales of existence.
CITATIONS:
(1) Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning: Thinking and Thought
https://owenbarfield.org/read-online/ar ... d-thought/
(2) David Hume, Treatise, Sect. II, Of Scepticism with regard to the Senses
https://www2.lawrence.edu/fast/ryckmant ... bodies.htm
(3) Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Part 1
(4) Seth Miller, Video Games and Spiritual Development, a preliminary analysis
https://spiritalchemy.com/1560/video-ga ... velopment/
