We're on the Verge of a Cultural Reclamation of Meaning

Another origin point to this deep feeling of lack is the core paradigm of our culture that we are separate from the world.

Once the dagger has penetrated our core ontology the rest is history; inadequacy, not-enoughness, depression, anxiety, uncertainty, overwhelm, the list goes on. There arises this deep void which we're told we can quench through having more.

Perhaps it originated with our ape ancestors, in that those apes that sat in awe at the beauty of reality before them were easy prey.

Donald Hoffman, in his book The Case Against Reality, argues that "natural selection does not shape us to perceive the structure of reality, but rather to perceive fitness points, and how to get them. And the probability that fitness reflects any structure in the world drops to zero as reality and perception gets more complex." And if we take the structure of reality to be the inherent inter-connectedness and nondual unity of all of existence then evolution is working against interbeing.

And what's so ironic is that the best pursuits of Being in our culture are just Having in disguise; be more mindful, they tell us, heal more, they tell us. All I hear is "To feel full you need to have more mindfulness, more healing, more growth, and more happiness." But this doesn't ever shift us from having to being.

Our culture today seems to be merely the product of every possible ramification of separation in the systems that we're a part of.

It's a feeling that who I am is a finite, time-bound human organism and there's a vast reality out there operating under the laws of space and time.

And as I'm coming to find out, I'm not the only one grappling with this search for meaning in a world that has lost it's mind. Jamie Wheal puts it eloquently in his book Recapture the Rapture, he notes that "[f]or seekers repelled by the tenets of fundamentalism but overwhelmed by uncertainty and complexity, the moderate middle isn’t always enough to hold them. Those not drawn to the promise of the all-in-one Megachurch don’t always end up where Harris and Hitchens would have imagined—in the realm of reason and rationality. They often drift to the other extreme and fall into nihilism instead. Pew and Gallup don’t survey this particular group of the unchurched and unbelieving. But public health officials do, and their findings are sobering. Diseases of despair—anxiety, depression, suicide—are rampant. One in six Americans takes psychiatric medications just to cope with the banality of modern life. To put this in harsh relief, the World Health Organization reports that more people today kill themselves than die from all wars and natural disasters combined."

Diving into my own experience I've noticed glimpses of something else entirely. This feeling that I'm residing in a beautiful and infinite eternity — beyond the conceptions of past, future, self, other. A sort of magnificent solipsism.

And that I'm not separate from this eternity, but that I AM this eternity.

But these experiences are few and far between. My mission at this point in my life has become a co-creation of a new form of meaning — a more all-inclusive way of arriving at meaning through systematic progressions of ego-transcendence, trans-paradigmatic sensemaking, and new forms of intersubjective coherence.

What do you think?! Are you ready to step to the challenge of tackling this epidemic loss of meaning? Are you ready to construct entirely new conceptions of reality that transcend and include all paradigms and beliefs yet to be in existence?