all right so let's say you have oriented
yourself but not perfectly because
you're full of mistakes and errors so
then what do you do because you have to
fix those errors but you still have to
be oriented and this is why I started
getting interest to get interested in
the phenomena of meaning as a
phenomenological experience to
experience something as meaningful it's
not exactly obvious what that means to
experience something is meaningful I
think that you can you can approach it
obliquely you know like if I said watch
yourself for two weeks and notice when
you're doing something that you regard
is meaningful I could say well here's
some here's some markers you lose a
sense of time you lose a sense of
vulnerability you're deeply engaged in
it it seems it seems worth the effort
right you forget yourself while you're
doing it
maybe you forget your existential
concerns while you're doing it you're
not ruminating or obsessing about the
meaning of your life right so so there's
markers for it's like the flow states
that chick said my highly described and
then you can experience it you
experience it under certain sort of
ritualistic conditions you might
experience it when you go see a great
movie you might experience it when you
listen to music I think music is a very
very standard pathway for people to have
that kind of experience because
virtually everyone gets intimations of
mute of meaning from music and I think
music music is hierarchically structured
patterns that are representative of
being laying itself out properly it's
something like that so it's an abstract
representation of proper being and so we
can we can grapple with the phenomena of
music and we can we can Bach or
phenomena of meaning we can box it in a
little bit and start to conceptualize it
we can start to conceptualize it perhaps
as the manifestation of a deep instinct
and so I would say well meaning is what
manifests itself when you are when
you've oriented yourself properly and
when you've optimized the flow of
information between you and you between
you and chaos that might be the right
way of thinking about it because later
you think about a piece of music if you
want it to be predictable but you don't
want it to be perfectly predictable you
want to be it to be predictable with
some interesting variations and
predictable with some variations that
make sense maybe you can conceptualize
that as something like this it's like
it's predictable at this order of
stability but it's it's varying down
here from time to time and so you've got
stable stability there but variability
there and you can handle that
so you want an overarching structure of
stability with some internal variability
and maybe that's the way that you update
yourself without falling apart and then
I would say you can find the pathway to
the optimal rate of update by relying on
your sense of meaning that's what it's
for what it tells you is that you're
you're wandering your way through the
world between the catastrophes of chaos
and the catastrophes of order and now
and then you swing into the proper
locale you're you're where you should be
and what happens is you get engaged by
that you get meaningfully engaged by
that and it's fragile it'll move on you
right because it's very difficult to
exist at that point constantly your bad
habits all sorts of things your
situation there's all sorts of things
that are going to interfere with that
but that doesn't mean that that isn't
where you should be and so then you
might say well that's where you should
strive to be all the time and then the
question might be well what would it be
like if you were there all the time and
I think that's where intimations of
paradise come from I mean when words
think it was Wordsworth talked about
intimations of immortality and childhood
people tend to romanticize their
childhood because of the sense of
intense engagement that goes along with
being a child and it's one of the
wonderful things about being around
children actually it's it's it's one of
they pay you for their care and the way
the children pay you for their care is
that they turn normal things into magic
again when you're around them because
you've seen it a hundred times before
and so when you see it you don't see it
you see what
you already know but when a child sees
that they don't because they don't know
they see it and then when you watch them
see it you see it too and so it's just
it's tremendous fun leading a small
child around to do things that you've
done before because they're so you know
they're like this they're like all the
time and you know maybe that's two
months and they cry and they get upset
and all of that but a good part of the
time it's just wild eyed Wonder and then
you can see the world through their eyes
and it's payment and so that's that
sense of being engaged like that is
something that people love about
children and rightly so but it's also a
marker to the proper way of being you
know there's a dictum in this is a union
idea that there's no difference between
the archetype of the wise old man and
the archetype of the child they're the
same thing because the wise old man is
the person who found what he had in
childhood but lost right it's a that's a
very powerful motif is that the purpose
of maturation is to return to the state
of childhood as a mature being not to
stay in the state of childhood that's
Peter Pan but to make the sacrifice is
necessary for maturation and then return
so well how do you do that well if you
do that in part by knowing what it is
that's meaningful you for you to engage
in I would say it's your nervous system
reporting to you right hemisphere and
left hemisphere balanced that the
balance between chaos and order produces
an output that says you are in the right
place it's a perception the meaning is a
perception of being in the right place
it's the genuine thing however because
it can be pathologized that's the thing
and that's why I think there's a call to
virtue in most great religious
traditions if you're going to rely on
your sense of meaning to orient you you
have to play a straight game because
otherwise you warp and twist the inputs
and then the mechanism won't function
properly you know it's like if you if
you were only if you're if you've
blinded yourself to half the world you
can't use your perception story and your
self properly because the half of the
world that you're ignoring is going to
pop up at you unexpectedly and take you
down and so if your relationship with
the world isn't pristine honest
primarily then you can't rely on your
own in turn
orienting mechanisms and then you either
fall into chaos which is an absolute
catastrophe or you have to rely on some
kind of external Authority and that
makes you prone to possession by
tyrannical ideologies for example which
give you that sense of meaning that you
should in fact have as a consequence of
your own action