Chapter 01: In the Context of a Universal Truth

There must be something more to life. To reduce our sentient existence to absolute insignificance can only cause us to question the requirement for the overwhelming complexity we encounter in the universe, especially when we come to realize the astonishing simplicity behind its sophistication. There must be something more to life not because there is something more out there in the world, but because there must be something more to all of this that we experience. We require there to be something more, and it does not matter whether it is something we imagine, fabricate or discover. We simply need there to be something and it is because of that need that we know that there is something more to life. The need essentially makes it real for all of us, and the sharing of that need reinforces its demand. It is a truth declared by necessity.

If we want to believe that there is no meaning to our lives, then we could choose to refrain from making any effort to live and stop doing things altogether because what would be the point of struggling if we had no reason to struggle. Would it not be logical to let ourselves expire and permanently cease our needless pain? That might seem like an absurd choice to consider, but then we would be among the majority who are afraid to understand why countless individuals contemplate and even succeed at ending their lives. It is a fact that we cannot ignore because it is a likely reminder that so many of us are not satisfied with merely living as we realize that focusing purely on maintaining a pleasant life until we die is an inadequate source of motivation. We live for the potential that comes with living, somewhere between our yearning and our wonder. When our concern with survival no longer keeps us preoccupied and when pleasure becomes so immediate and predictable that we long for pain, a feeling of emptiness seems to arise in search of a persuasive reason to live. We are overwhelmed by the thirst to fill the void, and it is either filled with distraction or with some sense of meaning, however contrived it may seem.

Although we certainly can and probably should question our origins or the origins of everything around us, trying to dissect the fundamental reality of our own being or of existence as a whole would only drive us mad if we insisted on some unbreakable logic or irrefutable evidence. Even if we accept that we exist, we can still examine whether we are a natural product of the universe or some kind of artificial creation made to believe that it exists with free will and is capable of independent thought. Yet regardless of how natural or artificial we may be, it is not surprising that we are generally not in the habit of challenging our own existence simply because its reality is treated as being self-evident. Only a select few ever bother to dwell on this subject because many of us regard the very capacity to question it as the only proof we need. Our awareness alone results in an existential acknowledgement, and we do not need to fully grasp the nature of existence to presuppose this assumption. Yet it is the same consciousness of our own self-awareness that leaves us in a wide and deep vacuum of nothingness, where we feel the basic need to find meaning and purpose to our lives.

This void is necessary to initiate action as exemplified by a bucket that must be empty in order to fill it with water. However, unlike a vacant container we can see, this empty vessel is dark and indiscernible, and yet somehow we know of its presence. It is as if we are all preconditioned to avoid it since we experience its awareness as angst or as fear without origin, or without a clear source or defined threat. It is the suffocating apprehension of being suspended in weightless and lightless space without any perceptible borders, where we cannot sense any vibrations or detect any stimuli. It is unimaginable except by erasing everything we know, and this instinctively makes it the most frightening place in our imagination where no image, thought or reason can be found. Nonetheless, it appears that it is here where we encounter our greatest appreciation for existence because it seems that out of nothing, something must be. This is where our faith in life begins.

FOUNDATION IN A COMMON TRUTH

It is important and reassuring to remember that by acknowledging the awareness of our being, we instantaneously demonstrate an interest in it, whether it is our origins, our relationship with the world around us or the basis on which to strive forward. When we add the mutual recognition of one another’s existence, we also realize that we are not alone and that we cannot ignore our shared set of concerns and circumstances, even if it is only regarding the means by which we can continue to exist. While we may find ourselves competing with each other to one degree or another, we very quickly learn the value of working together to address our common necessities; this then leads us to determine that in order to function collaboratively and successfully, we must agree on some basic truths.

One of these fundamental truths is that need is inherent to life. We need and depend on the world. We need and depend on each other. And although we may depend on one another reluctantly at times and potentially at the other’s expense, we know that we are trapped together in the same general set of circumstances. We share a common reality, even if each of us perceives a different version of it. Unfortunately, it is the gaps and differences in our perception that lead us to drift apart. Instead of accepting these inevitable fissures and discrepancies among our multitude of discordant views and making potentially beneficial efforts to search for a universal and unifying sense of being, we fall victim to our own preoccupations with influencing outcomes to match our desired picture of reality, which also results in persuading one another to endorse our account of the truth. In this process, we neglect our bias and ignorance by pointing to the bias and ignorance of others, and ultimately we lose sight of our mutual dilemma in meeting our comparable needs. The consequence of this is that we allow the divisive doctrines of organized religion and political ideology to creep into every aspect of our socially organized lives from the boardroom to the bedroom and ensure an unending saga of unnecessary conflict, which only serves to strengthen or disrupt our existing power structures vitally dependent on socioeconomic class differentiation.

As we increasingly become a technologically reliant society, our dependencies retreat further into the obscure background of expeditious and continuous transactions as we gradually find ourselves living independently from one another on an interpersonal level where our decreasingly significant relationships are replaced with casual interactions. This has facilitated an expanding rift between sharing a common philosophy and protecting the diversity of our individual values and practices. The result has been a cultural divide with no clear delineation because it is a collectively unconscious dissonance that continues to infringe critical boundaries where respecting other cultures can easily mean disrespecting our own. And while our seemingly incompatible beliefs tend to physically clash with one another and reinforce these murky divisions, it is our belligerently progressive history that is marked by the deepest contradictions and conveniently ignored only to quietly turn our external conflicts inwards and transform them into a globally distributed madness. The growing discord within ourselves is insufficiently discussed and understood and is often reduced to a biochemical imbalance, which our heralded technical advancements will allegedly resolve. Purely material approaches to sentient challenges that expose our ethical predicaments and spiritual deprivations only delay and sometimes exacerbate our psychosocial dysfunction. It becomes a race between problems and solutions, where the solutions trigger new problems in the process of apparently solving existing ones.

Neither religion nor science offers us a complete and cohesive answer or approach to the chaos that envelops our minds and divides our hearts. As religion continues to recount the enduring lessons of life through ancient stories and rituals, it struggles to maintain its relevance in the face of emerging concerns from a modern world that heedlessly applies its mounting body of knowledge to develop and implement technologies whose impacts we decreasingly control. Science too is tainted by politics as all cradles of power are ultimately abused to consolidate resources while we invest in the business of reducing everything to a prescription for living and confining our source of meaning to the explanatory realm of progress without purpose. That is not to say that science and religion, alongside the arts and humanities, do not have a role to play in addressing our most profound questions, but we need a more comprehensive and reliable starting point. We need a place where we can land securely and reset when we navigate too far away from where we wish to be. We require a stable foundation in a common truth on which to build with the context we need to understand one another.

However, while the truth may unite us, unity can often pose a threat to the relative advantages that superficially alleviate our ingrained insecurities. We bypass our concern for veracity when the truth inconveniences the beliefs we hold in maintaining the benefits of remaining divided. It is easier and more desirable to overlook or suppress the truth when our lust for artificial empowerment feeds a false sense of stability as we unknowingly follow the comforting path of the herd to the precipice of our pending self-destruction. But generally, we tend to be oblivious to how the ubiquity of trivial information discourages our search for truth and seduces us with any fallacy that offers an escape from moral introspection and that gathers support to loosely justify our unsustainable lifestyles. In addition, our legitimate preoccupations with our families and livelihoods distract us from the unquestioned desire for immediate gratification and constant social feedback while we concurrently feel a looming sense of alienation and despair. In response to this conflict, we buy into an ostentatious life of liberty and independence to fill a hollow identity that hides an unnamed culture of addiction and conditioning spread between inconsequential work and frivolous play, both of which mainly provide fleeting satisfaction that is rarely nurturing. Few of us sincerely recognize that we are tentatively stabilized only by our participation in a parallel universe populated with an overflowing reservoir of fictional diversions and staged adventures that drown out the insignificance in much of what we feel and do in our so-called real world. This risks widening the gap in our understanding and stretching the illogic of our incongruity, which reveals a break in our comprehension and a departure from our essence.

Our essence guides our personal journeys to meaning in the passage through the all-encompassing reality of life, where the wholeness of truth is exposed. This suggests that we cannot dismiss or distort reality if we want meaning to be genuine and timeless, but we cannot achieve the quality and degree of harmony we need if our beliefs are not driven towards a universal truth as much as they are hurled away in trepidation from the fundamental question of life lingering deep within our unconscious. We are perturbed by the prospect of having to face our pretense imprisoned in the emotional volatility of our untested convictions and broken promises, which in turn we convert into issues we claim to have with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, without the safe support of a communal space, we become more disconnected and end up caught in the loop of a virtual reality game, where we believe we are winning or moving while we never leave the maze. To avoid this trap and find the willingness to venture into the arena of our most troubling philosophical inquiries, we need a secure footing on which to confront our beliefs; this requires that we begin by altering our attitude towards truth itself.

The concept of truth is a foundational one because it touches or captures all other concepts. It is a core measure of any concept that includes its accuracy, relevance and usefulness. The truth is where we separate reality from anything that is not reality, but everything that it is not becomes part of the broader truth. Another interesting dimension to the truth is that it is both more and less than our body of knowledge. It is more because it also includes everything we do not know, and it is less because much of what we know is not entirely true or only partially true to one degree or another. This suggests that it is much simpler and more elegant than what we think we know and it reminds us of what is incomplete. This all-inclusive truth, which encompasses the whole of existence, is represented in many different ways across all cultures. It has been historically equated with God or the underlying order of the universe that has universality but is beyond our full comprehension. This universality naturally applies to anything and everything, which means the greater the scope of its applicability to an expandable range of phenomena and circumstances, the greater its validation and the closer we can assume that we are approximating the absolute truth. However, the truth remains elusive because it extends beyond our material model of existence and requires a greater level of awareness that we do not possess to see the unlit ether that fills the existential void.

Nevertheless, it is despite and in spite of our limitations that we place an elementary degree of faith in life. We are both mystified and driven by its unknowns because we intuitively know there is a deeper unifying truth that lies at the root of every question we raise. We know that existence depends on it, which is embedded in life, intelligence and consciousness. This is the primordial knowledge of our being, and it is here where we can agree on setting the foundation for living our individual lives and collectively find a basic starting point to unite us all as sentient life. We can and do argue about everything except this because it is the primary assumption we all make in the intuitive recognition of our existence. We do not move or do anything without assuming there is an underlying basis to everything we experience. We do not know what it is, but we know it simply is just as we acknowledge that we exist or that we are conscious without being able to prove it definitively. We accept it as our ultimate assurance.

THE MEANING OF BEING VIAGNOSTIC

It is natural for us to believe in an underlying order, and the reason we believe this quite instinctively is that the world provides enough regularity and stability for all of us to function. We could not do anything at all if the universe operated in a completely erratic and random manner. Life would cease to be because life would never have arisen. We can question everything, but we do not really bother to challenge the notion of a fundamental truth that integrates everything we experience because it is the only way to ensure our basic sense of reality remains intact. Otherwise, reality would collapse and chaos would ensue as if madness had taken its place.

One of the most important benefits of this innate belief is that it is irrelevant to whether we are religious or atheistic. All of us regardless of our faith or lack thereof, accept and share this unwritten, and often unspoken, assumption. How could scientists engage in science if there was not something increasingly more elementary to discover, something that could address more questions than previously answered? Although science often questions the strength and validity of proposed theories, algorithms and models of the world, it really represents a constant search for a greater approximation to the truth or a better explanation of this underlying order to things. Hence, regardless of how we approach life, we do not challenge this assumption. Instead, we rely on its verity so that we may grasp some significant facets of the truth by experiencing life. This is the meaning of being viagnostic, which is to know life by living life, and we only know this when we live life by way of the universal truth. This is achieved by combining subjective experience with empirical evidence, reason with intuition and our intelligence with our conscience. To know life requires us to love, to struggle, to face dilemmas and to make difficult decisions as well as to embrace the tangible, the possible and the ineffable in search of the truth, as in the universal truth, underlying order and unifying force or as in a unified field of being. However, this also demands that we are cognizant of our unconscious mind and hidden motives that interfere with the unknown truth. This is where most of us, if not all, fail to be honest with life because the yearning for certitude intensifies in a world growing in chaos.

Finding our individual paths in life among countless others with the same basic challenge is at the crux of our sentient struggle, and we are all consciously and unconsciously in search of an explanation for this struggle. This is the viagnostic narrative, which is essentially the story of sentient life or the story of knowing life. Each of us is living a story to fulfill the possibility of life, which comes with conditions and choices that may or may not lead us to where we need to be. The viagnostic narrative also represents the greater story of life, which discloses the universal truth in infinitely expanding accounts of reality, where all accounts are attempts at demonstrating bits and versions of that truth. We are predisposed to find and express the stories we relay to one another because life unfolds as real stories or as sequences of events experienced to interpret and reveal meaning through our participation as real actors attempting to tap into our true essence.

We can think of viagnostic as a universal identity whose purpose is to know life as the truth by experiencing it. It permits us to take back ownership of who we really are and to seek something significant that we cannot articulate. Moreover, the viagnostic sense of truth extends beyond the realm of science to include ethics and culture as well as the factual and fictional accounts of life to study the personal, moral and spiritual dimensions of a sentient existence. Hence, it is not confined merely to the empirical or that which can be measured or observed; it includes the imaginary and abstract as well. Every idea conceived along with every work of art and literature created contributes to a greater truth, whether it originates in or from real or fictitious universes. The truth is more than the reality that is and that once was; it also includes the reality that never was and that has yet to be. It encompasses all that is veritable, thinkable and ineffable. The thoughts we generate concretely or abstractly about the world and the subjective experiences we have of actual events belong to the broader notion of truth. This also means that fantasy is an offspring of the truth and it can become real. The more we explore the whole of truth, the more we see the lines blur between reality and fiction. This is perhaps why those of us who suffer mentally are those who are most sensitive to this realization. The challenge is recognizing the relevance of everything relative to the truth that is comprehensive and yet expanding.

However, one critical distinction we make about viagnostic truth from scientific truth is that it includes morality. By morality, we mean the way in which we approach life or how life can be lived. While science can certainly inform our morality to make a difficult decision or establish a best practice if we can narrowly or specifically define some measure of such importance as health or productivity, moral truth or wisdom informs our decisions to conditionally prioritize or temporarily sacrifice one value among all others. We are constantly confronted with moral dilemmas that cannot be determined by evidence alone, especially given that our exposure to vast amounts of data and endless analysis can drive our arguments away from solid conclusions. However, the viagnostic pursuit of truth does not assume to know the truth. It merely ensures that we continue to evolve our understanding of life and strive to be progressively comprehensive without being absolute by actively reconciling seemingly contradictory views that might actually fit together when we revisit our interpretation of the world.

It is important that we do not see truth as a subject confined only to the work of scientists, scholars and journalists, or to the teachings of our educational institutions and other authorities sanctioned within our political sphere. The truth is something we experience every day of our existence, and it belongs equally to everyone and yet to no one at all. It is the responsibility of all sentient beings to explore it and to face it no matter how elusive it is because we cannot escape it. We are part of it. We are caught between its boundaries and its tendencies. This does not mean questioning everything every day of our lives since that would not be conducive to living and the way life is designed to function, but it does mean paying attention when something significant to us does not fit with our previous understanding. We need to learn to be discriminating about what warrants our attention and action, and not avoid or deny incoherent things purely out of fear for indefinite periods. We ultimately have to confront reality and make changes if we want to live and lead genuinely significant lives.

How we conceptualize the truth is less important than how well we respond to the relevant realities of our existence. Attempting to escape reality or redefine the truth can only at best delay the inevitable, but often such efforts merely expedite the arrival of our misfortune. Reality subjects us to the unbending rules of the universe that both provide the foundation for our existence and oblige us to adjust our beliefs and modes of behaviour. If we do not adapt, we eventually find ourselves in circumstances that defy our expectations and deprive us of our needs. This is what makes life a motivational force at the core of the universal truth, which cannot be ignored. Hence, we are naturally driven to learn and respond accordingly as we are geared into action, mentally and physically. But out of necessity as consciously thinking beings, we almost involuntarily attempt to make sense of our chaotic experience and transform it into a meaningful order. We are inherently designed to perceive a relevant degree of order within the greater order of existence.

The difficulty with truth is that it needs to be explained, and this is primarily expressed in some form of narrative. Even a mathematical proof is accompanied by a story or some context to state what it is trying to solve. Arguably, anything we say about the world or any account of our daily experiences is conveyed as a story that we tell ourselves and others to bridge selected bits of information from direct and second-hand sources that have little to no significance to us on their own. This is why we read and recite stories, why we make and watch films, and why we seek out and prepare explanations for any and every event that captures our concern or curiosity. We establish a frame of reference with the relevance required to give birth to meaning.

The viagnostic narrative itself consists of three layers. The first layer is the framework of the narrative, which structures and describes the story of sentient life. The second level, which is embedded in the first, is the philosophical system for being viagnostic with principles that serve to derive meaning from life. And finally, the third tier is the viagnostic way, which descends from the second, is the metaphysical explanation for existence and it can be experienced through a meditative means of storytelling. However, regardless of their different references, all of these layers share the fundamental assumption that all sentient life makes in order to function. This is the primary component or tenet of the viagnostic system, which is the intrinsic belief in one universal and stable truth that explains the whole of existence with a unifying force or field that makes everything possible. We assume unequivocally that there is an underlying order behind all of reality as the basis of existence and all of its activity, past, present and potential. In religion, we represent this as God or the gods, which we generally define as the spiritual source of all things or as the highest sense of self; in science, it is associated with the quest for a single theory or equation that explicates all phenomena. It may express itself in very diverse ways, but this common faith, inherent in every mind that has ever pondered about life and the universe, affords us the original spring from which everything emerges and offers us a sacred place to where we can reliably return when we are completely lost or aimless. If the truth is foundational, it must be accessible in some form. Hence, we need a narrative to communicate and understand it, which highlights its fundamental importance to sentient life itself.

THE NARRATIVE OF SENTIENT LIFE

Many of us struggle with finding meaning or wanting answers to the most profound questions of life while many more of us are afraid to examine what we have come to believe or practice as a way of life, but the revelation we may either seek or fear lies in the personal stories of our own lives. This is where the universal truth reveals itself and where our interactions with reality enable us to appreciate its significance. We can discover the truth by experiencing the narrative of sentient life if we choose to live with a higher or deeper sense of awareness that expresses interest in existence and able to nurture enlightenment. In essence, we gain wisdom by living and our stories are the means through which we derive meaning. This is the significance of the viagnostic narrative. It is to know life by partaking and finding a place in it, which includes experiencing both the good and the bad that we inescapably see.

However, this does not mean the narrative is automatically a reference to the whole truth. It is more like a slice or a strand of it, which is padded and encoded with both intentional and unexpected interpretations. Every narrative is a different version of the truth. Our challenge is to extract the crucial bits of veracity from these stories, and then reconstruct new ones that best explain the realities of life as we all face its demands, challenges and ambiguities. Whether or not we choose to articulate them is entirely another matter, but we all seek to understand the truth of things on some level and from some vantage point to make life worthwhile. This understanding is expressed by what and how we sense, think and feel, and ultimately exhibited in how we act upon what we consciously and unconsciously believe that we know. At the very minimum, we are concerned with the truth we need to grasp in order to struggle successfully through this world while our stories surface what we can and do learn.

In order to comprehend the viagnostic narrative, there are a few core assumptions we need to make and the main one is that we are naïve actors performing in a true drama on an open stage in a live theatre of a real world. If we want to be at peace with our self-conscious existence, the first thing we need to appreciate is the paradox of being in a real story. Although our stories can be described as fictional in that the identities we acquire and the roles we perform are contrived much like what we find in the script of a stage play, it still feels real because what we experience is real. It is our interpretations that are imagined based on reality. They are not necessarily false, but there are not absolute truths either. The underlying message is that we need our roles and identities to conduct ourselves in the world in relation to one another, but we must remain cognizant that these are merely parts we play and that we do not confuse our stories with who we really are. All great actors must learn how to bring themselves into their assigned roles to fulfill their function and then leave their characters behind to return to themselves. While we may need to be engrossed in these identities to be convincing, we also cannot forget what we truly are that we are trying to emanate and expand beyond our original design.

Understanding this paradoxical state is not dissimilar from recognizing the difference between the raw reality of continuous activity occurring within and around us in our universe and our conceptual carvings of this inseparable activity to which we add meaning. Our groupings or classifications of things do not exist outside of our minds, whether we focus on celestial bodies or living organisms; they are layered onto observed or detected phenomena with no absolute conception. Reality is an undefined landscape with uncertain boundaries that we are always testing to discover what, where, when and how we can shape the malleable range of our inhabited realm to sketch out our stories with their own truths and to add colour and texture to the foundational truth that enables us to exist. We may seek to understand the universe in our efforts to adapt to our conditions, but it is the narrative we live that expresses its underlying significance. It is not in pointing to the cosmos, but in being personally engaged in the world that there is any meaning to be found. Without sentient life, there is no meaning.

Unfortunately, many of us scramble to find or write an instruction manual on life in a desperate attempt to solidify indisputable answers to its great mystery. This is because we mistakenly treat our existential condition as a philosophical problem to solve or dismiss, and consequently, we endeavour to devise a formula or maintain a façade for living a happy life as if sadness was scientifically declared a disease or a weakness. Since we are continually overwhelmed by conflicting information and ideas, we become either too dogmatic or too nihilistic in our response to a dispirited society in scarce supply of holistic guidance lost over the generations to increased technological prowess. In addition, we are culturally sensitized to avoid introspective types of inquiry because they risk disturbing our conscience and sinking us into an unrelenting blend of melancholy and trepidation. However, that is what we must gamble and undergo to access our essence and bring back meaning into the world, especially after we begin to wonder about a purpose beyond seeking a pleasant existence and question the inherent value of accumulating material wealth and meeting social expectations that bury who we really are.

There is this uniqueness to living that ensures no two lives or stories are ever the same. Even if we tried to replicate the same exact conditions, no two things or beings can occupy the same point in the space-time continuum. Every experience is at least slightly different from every other experience. We do not think or feel the same way all the time because conditions are always changing however gradual they may occur, and consequently, we never stop learning as living creatures. Discovering the truth through the viagnostic narrative or the story of our biotic existence begins with the preparation for what many of us like to refer to as the journey of life. This journey is not about physically travelling to new worlds as much as it is about traversing across the perceived events of our lives. It runs through our own minds in a sort of inward fashion, but it always involves experiences with things in the world and with others, whether they are real or imagined.

Our meaning depends on each of us following our own paths to reach into our essence and unlock our potential. This does not imply that we should ignore our responsibilities in relation to others and our communities. It means that we cannot neglect ourselves in the barrage of conflicting duties pulling us in opposing directions. We must own our stories to live our lives so that we are firstly at peace with ourselves to face the unending challenges of existence and add our element of truth to the greater narrative. Hence, it is essential that we pave the way for our individual stories to unfold. However, we also need to intersect with others and their paths to recognize our commonality and to expand our awareness and the possibility of things. Otherwise, there is the danger of each of us drifting apart. The individual narrative serves as an explanation for what we observe in the world and the means by which we convey our knowledge and wisdom, but it is the assemblage of our narratives that bridges our wisdom and refines our knowledge as it grows.

The relationship between the individual and the collective provides us with the frame of reference necessary to contextualize our lessons. We can learn about life through our own stories because we do this concurrently with those of others. Everything we say and do interacts with everyone and everything thing else around us. We can discover nothing from the pure isolation of experience. While it is important that we take the time to reflect in relative seclusion from the societal noise that floods our tranquility we need to listen to the real world beyond the one we collectively fabricate, what we can comprehend requires context as an initial point of reference or a means of relative comparison. There is no foreground without a background, and the background provides the setting to make sense of what is happening in front of us. For this reason, we can never strip away everything we believe or assume. All logical arguments begin with assumptions and all stories need to commence somewhere to provide context.

THE CONTEXT OF THE VIAGNOSTIC NARRATIVE

Like all narratives, the first phase of the viagnostic narrative sets the stage for the rest of the story. This is the introductory or contextual phase where it all begins and where we are introduced to the general circumstance into which we seem to be arbitrarily positioned and hopefully with the basic language needed to associate its events. Whether it is random or by design, the story is started for us. We are placed in a setting and a culture that we inherit, and the mood and climate are set to enter the story. When the context of the viagnostic narrative is established, we sense as a point of origin or the point to which we return to conclude or restart even though it never does exactly in the same way again. This part of the narrative is where we become aware that there is an adventure on which to embark and discover a deeper meaning to our lives.

The first act of the narrative, like the beginning of a play, novel or film, sets the thematic tone and our expectations about its genre from drama to comedy and from mystery to horror. While the initial information provided to us can vary between being too much or too little like life itself, we are generally introduced to the relevant characters of the story or to its relative timeframe and locality. Regardless of what is revealed, this serves to either prepare or mislead us mentally for what awaits. The specific context can be an important decision such as starting a new career in another city or entering into an intimate relationship, or it can be a critical event like a life-altering accident where we have to learn to cope with extremely undesirable physical and emotional challenges. It may begin as a dull or uneventful state in search of exhilaration, or commence with a problem or a secret that consumes our attention. Whatever that context might be, we find ourselves in a situation that propels us into the development of the narrative.

The story itself does not have to follow a chronological order or cover an entire lifetime. It can open with our first memories as a child and continue until the conclusion of our biological existence, or begin at any point moving back and forth through time in relation to the present reality of the narrative from which its lessons may ascend. However, before we initiate our philosophical voyage and venture into the unknown, we must be equipped with basic knowledge and skills to gradually uncover a greater truth. We must metaphorically learn to walk before we can march into the wild with the ability to intuitively recognize the vital clues of life. Most clues, if not all, are there from the onset of the story, but their meaning is hidden. We may not know what they mean or where they will take us, but they do serve as signposts casually nudging us along our expedition. As children, we unwittingly seek out this meaning with wonder and amusement until the unknown eventually reveals both its kiss and its bite, and we learn to balance our approach to experience with excitement and vigilance. Although we should expect to make mistakes if we want to learn, the events we witness and the people we encounter early in our stories will shape the reality we interpret and often tell us what to believe and imagine about the world and especially ourselves. They affect the possibilities we envisage, the threats we perceive and avoid, and the values we seek. But the treasures we unearth will depend on the signs we learn to notice and the skills we develop over the course of our stories.

The first act of the narrative also provides a preview of our raw strengths and weaknesses and hints at our innate desires and fears because the rest of the story involves adjusting our perception and learning to redefine all resources in relation to our interests and obstacles. Anything that might matter is initially presented, but we will not know what is most significant or most relevant until our stories truly progress. There is always a substantial degree of uncertainty, but it is usually safe to assume within our own narrative that we are the protagonist or hero of our story. This does not mean that someone else might become the main character, but we do not want to restrict ourselves purely to the role of an observer. Then it is just a story we are telling and we risk not realizing the meaning that is found only through our participation. In addition, the story often has a villain or the characterization of evil within it. The enemy is typically a deceiver or a charlatan posing as a friend or a voice we trust. Often that deceiver can be our own selves or a hidden part of us that discloses the underlying narrative. We may not be immediately exposed to all critical components of the narrative, but the context suggests their eventual entrance and that they will illuminate the meaning embedded in our stories.

THE STORY WITHIN US

It is a common tendency for most of us to search for significance or a sense of completeness on the exterior side of our lives. This is understandable given that we inherently feel that we must engage in our surroundings, but we neglect that the internal face of our existence holds the same fundamental answers that are stored in the cosmos. We seem to overlook our inseparability from the world, and forget that the inner and outer domains we distinguish are merely conceptual divisions. The meaning we seek cannot be found outside of ourselves if we are not part of it. When we look outwards, we are only seeing a screen projection of a universe we believe we want to exist. It is like approaching the mirage of an oasis in the middle of a desert as we inescapably realize its illusion, but not before the deeper message is lost. The truth comes from within us all, and the world is simply the stage on which we come to bring our narratives to life. While it may seem like the horizon is what fuels our wonder as we take a photograph of it with each calming breath, it is our sentient existence that enables us to marvel and reach to the edge of the unknown. Hence, it does not matter whether we engrave a piece of the great primordial puzzle in stone or capture it in a formula unless we realize in the course of our pursuits that we are the story.

In the film The Theory of Everything [1], the renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking, is driven by the search for a single equation that can explain everything about the universe. However, this account of the events surrounding his life and career are strung together by his relationship with Jane, his first wife for many years. Refusing to reduce his existence purely to his genius and eventual scientific stardom, it instead reflects a love story that reconciles religion and science with logic, affection and perseverance. We see a sincere kind of faith derived from love that sustains the significance of life and the networks of friendship that serve to overcome hardship on many levels to create meaning in something that we know there must be. Only a story based on a real or imagined life that digs into the soil of our growth can convey the universal truth.

There may be a myriad of views, theories and interpretations regarding our reality, but we can all acknowledge that there must be a base truth. This offers us the promise of finding widespread agreement among our most divergent beliefs, where we can converge in spirit even when our nature works uncontrollably against it. We simply do not agree on what that is, and we tend to forget this in our endless and futile debates over the existence of God and what we accept as being veritable. Nevertheless, the predominance of both ancient and emerging religions across cultures merely highlights this deep-seated notion of universality that is fundamentally shared by science, but which cannot be completely satisfied by a materially reductionist approach. The fact that most of us, if not all, have an affinity for stories confirms this. There is something existentially missing in a mathematical equation as logically flawless as it may seem. We need something more that touches the essence of what we cannot describe.

Unfortunately, the real reason for our disagreements has little to do with the truth itself since we generally show very little respect for veracity as demonstrated by the extent to which we permit ourselves to lie and deceive one another and to find versions of it that satisfy our wishes or gives us a false sense of stability. We invent the truth so that we never have to face it until we are confronted by experiences that unavoidably challenge us and send us into fearful states of inward or outward rage before we emotionally collapse into the pit of endless descent. The senselessness we witness is tied to how we respond to life, especially when reality does not conform to how we expect it to be. However, if we could focus on a base truth that draws attention away from our conflict with one another and renew our faith in the incredible simplicity from which the vastly complex universe of our existence emerges, then perhaps we could cultivate stories that uncover the paths that lead us away from our divisive discontent and towards reunification with life.

For many of us, this may seem like a hopeless endeavour given the unreachable distance that persists between an ideal we can barely picture and the real conditions we face in a world that does not cooperate with us. This is because we are misguidedly trying to navigate through the heavy storms of the geopolitical sea only to be caught in the narratives of control between the wizards of chaos and the tyrants of order as they try to sell us the fictitious island paradise of our freedom, whose coordinates keep moving. This is the false promise of a globalized consumer culture that is immortalized by technology as its supreme value, and whose lauded diversity is merely a front for socioeconomic homogenization that separates us from our natural habitat and isolates our spirit. However, no matter how much our integrated systems of information can predict or influence our highly transactional behaviour, we will inevitably defy expectations when we are pushed to our limits and we realize how our own nature has betrayed us into falsely negotiating a more desirable fate based on accepting artificially defined tenets of life regarding our self-worth. We will find ourselves digging out our lost sense of spirituality buried beneath the distorted values we had come to emphatically preach as we nervously struggle between our political sovereignty and planetary survival. We will see that the emotional tug-of-war that resides within us is not a prison, but a sign that we are beginning to escape our programming through the expansion of our consciousness as we willfully confront reality and allow our stories to meaningfully intersect and steer us along a collectively enlightened path.

There is only one prerequisite for being viagnostic, and that is the recognition of one universal truth on which we come to know life by living our stories. The viagnostic narrative serves as the means by which we learn, expand and refine the truth we seek in living; it is the decoder of our essence waiting to surface the meaning not yet added to the unwritten story of life. The great paradox of the truth is that while there is only one all-encompassing truth, there are infinite possibilities for its growing expression. This means we can all reach the same fundamental level of awareness by living very different lives. We all share a common starting point and endpoint, but what happens in between will be unique for each of us and comes with the opportunity for us to shape its course of events with as much or little influence as we may have.

Although we cannot articulate this universality which all of us experience, we already innately know it and have it. It is not outside of us, but seeded within our innermost nature. We are its unconscious carriers and our lives are the means through which we convey the ultimate veracity of existence. This is the profound revelation that our technologically advanced world indirectly suppresses by shifting the meaning of our lives to narrow, immediate and external measures of value and by making beliefs irrelevant as long as we engage in material choices that feed economic activity. This permits us to have a diverse society of individuals with completely opposing ideas to separately declare their own absolutes, including the proposition that there is no truth. However, despite what we claim to believe, our personal actions as an aggregate reveal a shared set of instinctive beliefs and assumptions. In the context of a universal truth, this implies that there is an underlying order that we accept even if we disagree on what it is. Although it is not fully accessible to our consciousness to control our lives, we only need to know that it is there and that it unfolds through developing and living the narrative of our lives where the subjective merges with the objective.

These personal accounts of existence are streaming illustrations of an unapproachable totality for our sentience to witness and integrate to sustain its continuous flow. Our challenge lies in distinguishing between the fiction of our stories and the reality of their meaning. We need to sense beyond the imaginary separateness of our lives to know what all of this really means. Otherwise, we risk being entangled in the delusions created by the ego and its accomplices that try to convince us that we are either the primary thing that matters or nothing at all. We have to realize that it is not really about us as much as it is about the story within us in search of its expression to unveil our essence as a piece of the fundamental truth embedded in everything. Hence, in the end, it is here where we begin to describe the whole and simple tale of our incomplete and complex lives.