Find meaning!

It is intelligibility that leads to meaning

Meaning is the reward we get when our world feels intelligible to us.  This is not as easy to achieve as we might think.

Science can tell us how the world behaves and thus we can build technologies to exploit these behaviours, but science can tell us little about what the world is.

Without both pieces of the puzzle – what our world is as well as how it behaves – it will continue to lack full intelligibility.

We need a metaphysics alongside our science and historically religions have provided this. However, religions have tended to provide supernatural explanations of what our world is, and today, it is harder to make that case against more naturalistic approaches.

This is a conundrum.  We know there is a crisis of meaning in the modern world (rising rates of anxiety and depression, ‘escaping to the virtual’ and so on).

We can practice mindfulness and contemplation and various sorts of activities to increase connection with others (empathy circles, dialogos, as two examples), all of which will help improve our functioning.

But, without going on a journey into the nature of reality itself, we cannot hope to find our lives re-imbued with meaning.  This is not the domain of science, but of philosophy or theology.

As adults, to help children along this path we need to be on it ourselves.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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