Meaningness

[Lauritz]

I wanted to recommend this online book: https://meaningness.com/

It gave me many valuable insights. The book emphasizes the idea that there are no absolute truths around meaning and purpose. Nihilism and eternalism are both wrong and everyone can confirm this in their experience. Life is neither meaningless nor meaningful in an absolute sense. It sometimes feels meaningless or meaningful. Meaning is a spectrum that we experience moment to moment. Meaning has many facets, is nebulous and patterned. When we hold any fixed idea about it, sooner or later we will suffer. Because it does not match how meaning is in reality fluid and dynamically changing. It is deeply tied in with spirituality as meaning (and especially purpose) can be a self-created ground that we are unconsciously holding as true. 

 

An excerpt: 

 

Too Close to See

Whatever you do, however boringly mundane, takes into account the meanings active in your situation. That includes concrete, immediate aspects, such as the usefulness of a potato-masher for mashing potatoes; and also longer-term, more abstract ones, such as the symbolism of vegetables versus meat in your culture. Usually you are not particularly aware of such meanings, you just mash potatoes; but your activity makes sense, and it makes sense only because of them.1

Whatever you do, however exalted your mission, you ignore innumerable meaningless details; irrelevant events that occur for no particular reason and don’t affect your project. You cannot avoid momentarily noticing such features, but you usually dismiss and forget them as quickly as possible.

You are, therefore, always already implicitly in the complete stance. You recognize, at some level, that both meaningfulness and meaninglessness are pervasive.

This is inescapably obvious. It is like the blurred image of your nose, always present in your visual field but almost never noticed. It is so obvious, so much a taken-for-granted aspect of everything you do, that you constantly pass over it without reflective consideration; without thinking through what its implications might be.

 

Too simple

The complete stance can be defined in several ways, all ridiculously simple:

• Recognizing that meaning and meaninglessness both exist
• Recognizing that meanings are both real and indefinite
• Abstaining from both eternalism and nihilism

That’s all? That’s it?? That’s your Answer to Life, The Universe, And Everything?!

Well, yes.

I’m sorry you were hoping for something complicated and difficult. That might make you feel like you’d got something when you finally understood it, so you’d have made progress and could feel better about yourself.

There are implications… and applications… and practices… and… enormous conceptual complexities? You are now only a small way through the book Meaningness. Maybe the rest will be more satisfying?

It’s just looking at particular patterns of meaning to see how they are nebulous and what that means, though.