Chapter 05: Born into the Meaning of the Narrative

It is an extraordinary experience to witness the formation of life from its conception to the anticipated moment of nativity. The process of childbirth represents the first stage of separation where an infant is no longer completely dependent on its mother by breathing in air on its own like everyone else. Freed from its incubation, it escapes the sheltered bubble of its mother’s womb to grow back into the infinite realm from which all things arise. The birth of a child is the first rite of passage for sentient life that reflects not only a beginning but also the perpetual cycle of life. This celebratory event follows an expectedly agonizing ritual where struggle and suffering are a vital part of transformation, but it is only meaningful to us if we can endure our pain long enough to see something of value.

A new narrative symbolically commences with that first breath taken, as the journey transitions from the story of an expecting mother to a life-given child whose quasi-detached adventures are about to begin. It is where our developmental process resumes in the illusory outside world, and where we initiate our preparation for the unknown by acquiring a familiarity with the basic activities of living such as eating, moving and sleeping. It is at this initial biotic stage that we start to play to the rhythm of existence, and in time, we discover that life naturally surfaces its significance through the evolution of our stories. In this sense, we can say that we are born into the meaning of the narrative, and slowly, we awaken to its five principles. The first is that there is meaning. The second is that meaning is encoded in the narrative for us to find it. The third is that it depends on our perception of things in order to decode its message. The fourth is that it arises from our interactions with the world and with others, but the fifth and final principle is that the meaning already resides within us all and within all things as opposed to being confined to a particular location.

Without the presence of life, events can occur but they can never be experienced. By that, we mean that it is through the functions of life that we can convert light rays into images and waves into sounds. There is no picture without sight or imagination, and there no sound without our hearing. Equipped with the right receivers, we can essentially turn any number of physical stimuli into sensory events. We are instruments and vessels of experience, and it is experience that rouses our awareness and evokes our basic sense of being alive, which pain and pleasure tend to accentuate but do not necessarily define. It is the conscious memory of our own selves and others that turns events into chronicles of experience and converts them into meaning. There is no meaning without sentient beings to unearth it through the story of life, but that existential story also represents the journey through which we realize our essence, and that essence expands beyond what we have or what we are when we are born. Hence, the final assumption of the viagnostic narrative is that we are always becoming who we are as we learn to actualize the potential in what we really are. And since our narratives reveal the critical features of the universal truth, we essentially learn what is worth teaching or reciting from our personal experiences and pass on that truth to the next generation in order for these experiences and their meaning to persevere. Otherwise, everything dies with us. The meaning we derive from life always extends beyond our own existence, but it always begins with us.

LEARNING THE MEANING OF LIFE

From almost the moment we are born, every experience is significant because every experience, from a physical sensation to an emotional response, is new to us. Not only are we overwhelmed by novelty, this significance is triggered by our separateness as individual beings. To become distinct individuals, we have to be partly detached from the world, and this instantaneously generates our attachment to the source and sustainment of our existence. Consequently, we immediately sense that we are not whole unless we are regularly interacting with our environment and gaining comfort from our bonds with people and things as providers that meet our needs to some minimal degree.

However, in time, each of us undergoes the process of learning to live with our incompleteness. As we survey our expanding experience of the world and confront our varying limits, we also find ourselves in an endless search for the missing elements of our undisclosed essence. That sense of deficiency comes with the realization that there are no boundaries to what we want or may need, and we are caught between obsessing over our insatiability and settling for the appearance of adequacy. What we learn is increasingly driven by getting what we want or what we believe we can achieve. But while we learn to exceed our limits and realize the boundlessness of what there is to learn, it is the general constraints of life that teach us to focus on what is most important for those of us who bother to notice. For young children, time has yet to have any meaning except for now, and although it is an insecure and impatient concern with immediacy, the best of what we are already exists in those divine moments of presence that many of us spend a lifetime trying to regain. This lies at the very core of what the most disciplined practitioners of meditation and prayer seek to attain and nurture throughout their lives, but it is in those most needy moments that the whole is found in the joining of the incomplete.

A human infant is a symbol of hope in a possibility wrapped up in a warm blanket of defenses against the cold suffering of life where we will all eventually have to face to help us extract its meaning. Life is a relentless source of trouble we tolerate in order to appreciate the gift that it is. When we stop appreciating it, we lose the will to endure it as well. But even long before that, we forget what that gift is altogether. Many of us do not realize that it is in the process of seeking something outside of ourselves that we neglect what it is that we already have, and what we have is an indispensable capacity to learn. Intelligence is the sacred offering of life. And while the human infant represents the vulnerability in us all, it houses the base ingredients needed to complete our viagnostic journey.

 As we experience the world and learn of its realities and fabrications, we begin to form a sense of what is significant, and we decipher these lessons of significance through the unfolding of the narrative. We find inspiration in the development of our stories through any number of sources. It can come from a tale passed on by others or from one of our own and it can arise from a true or fictional account based on features of past events, which can either explain what happened or imagine what could happen. This is the magic of the narrative, which is more than consuming information or understanding knowledge and which is not dictated by a pre-established structure. This is how we convey wisdom, which we do not confine to an equation or a formula. However, it does take a naturally familiar form that is both accessible to its author and to its audience, and it is free to be anything as long as it amounts to something.

We could argue that a narrative is not really a narrative if it is without meaning. To develop a story and make an effort to recount it, even if it is only to add levity to our precarious relationships and their uncomfortable interactions, it should at least have a basic point or lesson implanted within it. It is often the rarest of accounts that makes a story worth noting by describing something new or expanding the horizon of what is possible. Like a newborn child, there is an association with potential. Life is the basis of our motives where our hopes and fears subsist; it establishes the foundation and driver for our learning. The universe does not matter if there is no life to give it any attention. Without life, there is nothing to learn, and there is no need for the possibility of things.

Learning the meaning of life is like learning the meaning of learning. It is intelligence studying its intelligence. It is its own awareness. This principle is so fundamental to sentient existence that we can firmly state that the first stage of life is really nothing more than learning. In this first phase, human babies like offspring in many other species are unmistakably in an almost absolute state of dependency. Children require tremendous support as they go through several deceptively basic steps of autonomy that include eating, walking and speaking. But with the help of crucial predispositions at start of their lives, infants are applying their most valuable resource, which is the innate ability to associate and learn. It is the supreme asset and liability that we all possess. We are absorbing the universe at immeasurable speeds in our infancy, which makes this time in our lives so critical. Although it comes with unavoidable risks, it is one of the fulfilling experiences for both child and parent to share because we perceive what arises from this seemingly implausible process as being as much a miracle as the creation of life itself.

This is perhaps why it is so troubling that many of us unknowingly lose the natural right to learn willingly and uninhibitedly because we are subjected to a kind of cognitive enslavement, which consumes our thoughts with the need for control. Instead of realizing that freedom is readily available to us, our complex social construction teaches us to believe it is something we have to earn or fight to attain because we superimpose our economic and political notions of liberty onto our inherent freedom. Consequently, we end up developing into individuals who feel trapped, hindered and afraid of being controlled. We become preoccupied with power and success to feel free and independent. And while freedom and independence require power, or at least to be unconstrained by conditions, there is an important distinction to be made in how we look at the world and our lives. Undoubtedly, independence suggests something we achieve or acquire, typically an ability or resource we need to empower us and make us appear more autonomous in our dealings with our world. However, our fundamental power resides in our general capacity to develop the competencies we need to obtain and employ beneficial resources if or when they become necessary. We should know this as the basis of our freedom, but we should also know that despite the inborn freedom we possess and the technological power we accrue, our base state of dependency remains an inescapable fact. All the influence we can command and the success we can attain will never change this.

FOUNDATION IN UNIVERSAL DEPENDENCY

As infants, especially when we are born, we are fragile and defenseless creatures completely at the mercy of our caretakers. We may breathe and sleep without their direct help, but we have to be fed and protected from harsh environments. We can expunge our waste without any conscious effort, but someone needs to remove it and keep our bodies cleansed. We experience need immediately, and our response is to fulfill those needs. They are routinely met for us and we cry when they are not. As we get older, we learn to address them on our own, but those needs stay with us for the rest of our existence.

Through life, we encounter at least five types of dependencies. Not surprisingly, the first of these necessities is biological. This type of dependency pertains to our interrelated corporeal and environmental conditions, which includes our required bodily nutrients as well as tolerable ranges of temperature and atmospheric pressure. We all respond to the need for food and water, and seek shelter from the crude dangers of our surroundings. Managing these critical conditions quickly depends on a second type of dependency, which is developmental. We are extremely reliant on the development of many abilities and the accumulation of knowledge to survive and progress. As we mimic adult behaviour to function, including walking and talking, we discover our capacity for language and object manipulation. In time, we learn to master various techniques and apply several practices to alter and adapt to our environment; this includes our socially interactive space, which requires its own distinct system of development.

In the process of our cognitive and social elaboration, we form a sense of identity that reveals the third psychosocial dependency. This involves the definition of self and may begin by simply acquiring a name, but we very quickly learn rules of conduct, and we are assigned roles and ascribed characteristics; all of this influences the expression of our personalities and shapes our views of the world. This identity also comes with an evaluative element of self, which is often internalized based on the response of our significant others. Although much of our confidence and self-regard depend on our competence, there is considerable attribution given to our social value within the group on which we depend, and to which we are affiliated. Psychological dependencies may be developmental in nature, but they rely greatly on the social dimension of our maturity. This broadens to our civil dependency, which relates to our reliance on technology and societal structures that manage and sustain our economic means of survival and well-being. Since we are strongly tied to our social interactions to function at this scale, we have dependencies on the moral recognition and physical protection of our personal needs and political rights. As children, our guardians represent those rights on our behalf, but when we are deemed to be responsible adults, those rights are transferred to us within our civil society.

Some of us do not recognize the notion of a spiritual dependency, but for many of us who do appreciate this, this is the most elevated and deficient type of dependency. It refers to our need for higher or deeper consciousness, and it is accompanied by our fundamental need for meaning regarding our lives, which likely extends to the whole of existence. This capacity for existential enlightenment or greater awareness of life is a potential that remains dormant in most of us until we interact with the world, and at which point, our sentience seems to amplify and transform by shifting from a firm distinction between itself and its surroundings to a broader sense of self that expands to include its environment. Although its expression occurs naturally and unconsciously, this process depends on how we respond to the other dependencies and what we experience through the course of our lives. Nonetheless, it is actually critical to the development of the viagnostic narrative. If we are not able to see behind the apparent physicality of our existence, it is unlikely that we will acquire a more profound meaning to our lives beyond our psychosocial and civil dependencies, both of which can suppress this discovery. Some of us even believe that infants or young children already possess this awareness, but we quickly lose it due to cultural programming when our minds are easily fashioned and become attached to the objects that occupy our perceptible universe. As a result, we spend our lives trying to gain back this capacity for transcendent consciousness.

All of our dependencies come with some experience of suffering because we will inevitably encounter moments when they are not fulfilled. While much of it may be a state of mind, real suffering does occur because we do have critical needs and there are true feelings of anguish when we face severe and/or prolonged deprivation. We are not only reminded of our limitations, but also of our unbreakable relationships with the universe. We cannot exist in isolation. But while this means we cannot escape or separate suffering from experience, it does permit us to relate to the world and gain its trust through the consistency of things within it and through the stable and responsive support of others. When infants bond with their mothers, they experience their first real taste of meaning. In that first stage of life, nurturing and discovering come together, and a child feels safe enough to explore the world and find its way back to itself. The infant simply wants, which is the most basic form of love that no child should ever be denied to feel. If any of our elementary needs are withheld from us, we may suffer terribly later in our lives. It often depends on whether we develop ample support networks to build a healthy life or maintain excessive dependencies on others. Either we form strong emotional bonds based on reliable relationships or we isolate ourselves in defense against the rest of the world.

The hope of the possible is what many of us try to instill in children, but it is our experience with them that reignites our own wonder caught in the mystery of the cosmos, and that drives us to resume the great narrative of life. As we vicariously nibble on each of their experiences through their untainted faculties, we recall the once unacquainted scents that peppered the air of our underfed imagination and frustrated energy. We discover from our unfulfilled needs that there is foundation in universal dependency. Our awareness grows out of rudimentary necessity that remains ubiquitous, and presses us to test the boundaries of our will and to uncover what it is that truly captures the essence of our intelligent presence in the world.

THE FIRST DUTY OF INTELLIGENT LIFE

Many of us would say that life itself is our greatest gift, but our intelligence represents our most valued asset. It is an inherent possession that we cannot be purchased or transferred. It can only be used, expanded or lost. Coupled with the capacity to physically modify things and respond to events, intelligence is a self-correcting process. It is the ability to learn, grasp and ultimately adapt to the world. But life is more than intelligence. It also defines need or motivation, and as a result, life is an inseparable marriage between intelligence and motivation. While learning is a fundament function of life, it is our motivation expressed as wants and dependencies that help us focus on what we need to learn. And although it is preferable that we enjoy learning, there is no learning for the sake of learning. We may not always know the value of what we learn until we encounter a situation that it will serve, but learning without a driven interest is too random and is less likely to be retained. While where, when and what we choose to learn may be directed by momentary curiosity, it is more likely that we will be driven by the necessity of the moment.

As we learn of our many dependencies, we wrestle to establish our priorities in a roughly hierarchical manner and their rankings may change from one situation to another. Those priorities are rudimentary and built into our constitution to gain the attention of our caretakers naturally to attend to our needs as infants. This suggests that the only true responsibility of being a child is to learn since there is not yet an expectation that children can take care of themselves. That is someone else’s obligation until they are physically able to do so. Hence, the first innately mandated assignment given to children is to learn to assert their needs, and not by demanding but by communicating that they have needs in order to help realize what it is that they really need. This is the first duty of intelligent life and it remains true for all of us because we cannot learn to address our ongoing concerns unless we at least loosely know what they are and how they change. Unfortunately, circumstances may sometimes overly sanction or aggravate children in the gratification of their wants, and this may lead to a sense of entitlement or a feeling of unworthiness, or to both. Regardless of these risks, asserting our needs brings us all closer to the awareness of our essential dependencies, and directs our learning to determining how to meet them. It is here where we initiate our adventures, and where we take our first steps towards uncovering what it is that we truly are.

The primary need of children that underlies meeting all of their daily necessities is a sense of stability. They require enough solidity and constancy to believe that the world offers them the opportunity to serve their interests, and this allows them to accept some degree of suffering to gain fulfilment. Stability translates into the security and confidence necessary to climb the next set of stairs. It fortifies us with a sincere faith that things will somehow work themselves out and permit us to thrust forward with the sense that there is something more to discover about the primitively known meaning we have yet to articulate. Although we gradually exclude ourselves from the universe as distinct entities, this instrumental intuition drives us towards the realization that we are destined to grow into something more than what originally defined us.

Our minds are constantly and hastily struggling to make sense of a perplexing world out of which we were conceived, but to a child, the truth has not yet disclosed itself as a messy catalogue of contradictions because the mind has yet to be fully shaped or carved into the ways of society. We are still relatively exposed to the unknown truth as tiny, uncorrupted bits that we can link together as relationships through the power of our intelligence. Significance becomes the necessary intangible in appreciating the relevant qualities of a greater truth through our engagement in play. As children, we intrinsically know to live life. But while we remain within our most impressionable age, our unfortunate experiences alongside how we are taught to deal with the ambiguity of life severely impact our journey into the unknown. The internal compass we possess to find genuine meaning is either damaged or suppressed by societal influences, which orchestrate the fabrication of an ego whose importance is tied to our relative status in society and comparisons based on narrow definitions of value.

When we are very young, these influences have yet to harden because the expectations placed upon us are understandably marginal. But once we reach adolescence, almost everyone is infected with manufactured notions of reality and worth. Unsurprisingly, we all want to become competent in dealing with the conditions of the world, but we also want to feel valued and accepted in our society. Unfortunately, while our system of dependency has expanded so potently as to shield us from the harsh physical reality of an unforgiving world, it has also grown into its own crude environment where false perceptions of inadequacy drive an inequality of value. We are defenseless in resisting indoctrination because the power to discern our influences depends on the degree of context we already have when we are fed information and how much we have practiced our capacity for greater consciousness.

A SENTIENT IDENTITY

We think of life as primarily something organic and biological that reproduces. But it can exist in many forms, and it can be artificially designed as much as it seems to naturally emerge from the substances that cluster in the vastness of space. Life is relatively autonomous entity insofar as it possesses the intelligence and motivation to grow or change from its original conception. This assumes the capacity to modify itself to some minimal degree and store information to be utilized as required. While it is clear that without life, there is no such thing as need or motivation, it is also equally evident that without learning, there is no presence of life. This infers that life and learning cannot be separated, and that their union establishes the foundation for meaning. There cannot be a narrative without life, and there cannot be a viagnostic narrative without learning. Meaning is something that we have to experience and learn. It cannot be physically acquired or possessed, but it must come with awareness.

Although many of us do not normally think of life or the majority of life as having consciousness, all lifeforms have some degree of awareness in that as they process information about themselves and their surroundings. We can think of the inanimate as sending and receiving information as well, but it does not respond or have the capacity to respond in the way that the animate adapts to fulfill its base functions. Life is not just a set of properties that sustains the nature of its existence. It influences itself and its space to change and grow to serve its continuity and relationship with its environment. Although it may seem negligible for the most rudimentary lifeforms to have some minimal level of awareness, this quality is quite pronounced when compared to inanimate objects. Some of us would surmise that there is an underlying consciousness to all existence, but the complex molecular structure of a unicellular organism is quite distinct from other nonliving matter. However, regardless of our views on the mystery of consciousness, the self-sustaining behaviour of life functions asa kind of real-time or near-time witness. It experiences things as they more or less happen, which is expressed as not only signals or sensations in response to physical stimuli or feelings arising from perceptions, but also as memories of ideas, objects and events that we directly recall or replay from external recordings as if it is recurring.

However, basic environmental awareness or response is not enough to define meaning. It has to evolve from its growing awareness of itself, and it is this capacity in conjunction with its social interaction with other potentially conscious entities that a meaningful identity surfaces. We define ourselves because others are defining us as well just as we try to define them. Children begin to develop identities at a very early age when we give them attention as well as respond to them as they try to capture our attention. This recognition of each other’s existence and the initial bonds we form give rise to an expanding sense of identity or what some of us often refer to as the ego.

The ego becomes synonymous with self-awareness as we begin to construct ourselves as separate entities in the detectable universe like all other entities we acknowledge, except that we become its main point of reference. Once we see ourselves as distinct from the rest of our world, we struggle to place ourselves back into the locale of our origination. This is the natural and cultural consequence of our cognitive capacity to develop a sentient identity, which turns irrelevant events into meaningful experiences. But the ego as our perceived individuality and the defined value of the self is both a window and a barrier to accessing the truth and attributing meaning to our world. The level of meaning we detect hangs on how wide our consciousness can stretch or how deep it can dig, and the manner in which the ego develops can enable or obstruct that capacity for awareness. It depends on whether it sees itself as the centre of everything that matters, or as a product and an extension of something more foundational.

The identities we form are part of our broader collection of concepts and beliefs about our recognized universe in which we include others and ourselves as well. This is necessary to coordinate the continuity of our existence with other entities in the arena of life. For this reason, children must learn extensively and quickly about themselves and their surroundings in order to live with some degree of autonomy. However, what we learn from our childhood and onwards is a mixture of truth and fallacy that becomes almost impossible to distinguish depending on how much our beliefs harden in the face of contradictory evidence. This blend of fiction and reality may enable countless possibilities for a better life, but it can also limit our capacity for greater consciousness while directing our thoughts to be more mechanized than inquisitive and our culture to be more vindicated than reliable.

THE UNVEILING OF THE EPICULTURE

Culture represents the shared beliefs and practices of a particular society, and this extends to the technologies and languages that its members develop, assimilate and exploit. It preserves and disseminates the knowledge of tools and methods needed to survive as well as our codes of conduct expressed as rules, customs and responsibilities to collectively coordinate individual activity. This has enabled us to achieve greater material progress than what would have been possible by biological inheritance alone and consequently made us very dependent on our cultural evolution to sustain and advance life. The power of culture is that it serves as a multifaceted solution that strings together our core dependencies and addresses them through a single system that requires general adherence from its supporters to be effective with adequate opposition to reinforce its allegiance. Hence, as diverse as we are in terms of our geographic, ethnic and ideological differences, we are commonly instructed in the ways of living, and conform in the ways in which we think and behave to gain the benefits we are promised. However, this blinds us to the critical flaws in our beliefs and allows us to ignore our own shortcomings as well as hide our insecurities as long as we are persuaded that success is within our reach. This also make us vulnerable to much deeper and more seductive forms of influence that can confine or redirect our consciousness to serve the interests of the few or to work against the pursuit of a greater good, which includes deviating from the essence of who we truly are.

As the increasingly automated field of a convenient life expands, it becomes so overwhelmingly complex that our identities gradual dilute in a cultural mixture of highly concentrated power whose source is indiscernible because it underlies much of the logic and intuition we assume to be our own. We do not appreciate the viral nature of our beliefs spread across our vast social networks, which act as transmission routes for our unchallenged thoughts largely without our knowledge. It is like a pervasive force that infiltrates and mimics all culture, which we can partially harness to influence one another. However, its predominant power emerges from our collectively unconscious will, which furtively modifies our individual thinking and behaviour on a mass scale by simultaneously infecting us all with seductive fallacies we insist are true and by eliciting illusions of independently reasoned arguments. Many of us believe that we are blessed with a highly evolved awareness of the world and of ourselves, which makes our adopted views seem indisputable and inferior to none. Instead, we promote an artificial belief system that only serves to fulfill the objectives of those who embody the apathetic and dominant tendencies of our progressively impersonal civilization, where there are no consciously empathic beings steering the ship. This system is a pathologically effective and efficient machine that can fabricate reality to supplant the universal truth as long as it successfully meets single-minded goals with no concern or remorse for anything that it uses or that gets in its way.

Unfortunately, this means that we are at battle with an enemy we cannot easily recognize because it does not exist as a discretely living creature that we can directly confront. It behaves more like an undetected virus constantly mutating and mirroring everything that is familiar to us while inserting itself into everything we think and believe as the devilish lure of our fantasies. But subtle evidence of its existence is found in our mental enslavement and in the intricate web of conspiracies that are both real and contrived in their incidence while being both deliberate and unwitting in their execution. This clandestine force is the worst of all adversaries because it often presents itself as our most trusted and generous friend, or looks like the most attractive thing we have ever seen that promises all the excitement we have yet to imagine. It always seems to gives us what we want, but it tricks us into thinking that what we want is really what we need and deceives us into believing that we voluntarily decide on what matters. It may sway our philosophical views and political affiliations, but it does not care what we believe as long as it fuels its pervasiveness and continuity.

Although this silent power appears to be environmental and influences all of us before we can consciously lay claim to our own thoughts, its deception lies in the fact that it already resides within each of us and we cannot annihilate it without killing ourselves as its host. It spreads and strengthens its deceit by letting us contaminate one another, but it perseveres because we need to persuade ourselves that our most prized values and validated beliefs encompass the truth as demonstrated by the popularity and constant propagation of ideologies and tales that are incompatible with honest experience. Many of these philosophies and stories are praised as incarnations of sound reason and higher purpose, and yet their anticipated outcomes are generally divorced from the self-governing realities of life since they cannot be put into absolute practice while facts are manipulated to point to their evidence. Nevertheless, as we seek confirmation from others sharing the same unsubstantiated beliefs, the appearance of credence grows with its consensus or with the widening separation from our superior culture as proof of their alleged ignorance. This cultural counterfeit quietly replaces the universal truth and serves as a defense against our existential insecurity. We can refer to this invisible agent of suggestion as the epiculture.

The epiculture is a self-reinforcing grid of deeply instilled and rationalized delusions, which permeate every mind along its consumptive path by cloaking its presence through its association with every recognized culture. It is the mass hypnosis of a globalized society. It can generate a common stream of hallucinations and implant a conflicting set of commands simultaneously within most, if not all, individuals, and simply let us confuse the truth with its alluring ideas across our communities. It overlays our perception to distort or disfigure the image of veracity long enough to offer us a mutilated version of our shared reality as an alternative to dealing with life that can conceal our contradictions in the self-justifying grey space of our feelings. Acting as an intellectual sheath for our thoughts that diminishes our awareness and blocks our intuition, it feeds our induced emotions with more anxiety and rage to drain our spirited energy with sadness and despair. It provokes the negative into battle and sends the positive into retreat. Encoded in our cellular composition, the epiculture circumvents our consciousness by transferring itself to us genetically and culturally through our ancestral lines, and then activating itself by almost imperceptible environmental cues.

Shortly after our conception and surely from the moment we are born, we acquire a tangible notion of our surroundings as we quickly begin to grasp objects within our vicinity. We explore their taste and texture, and discover pleasure and pain. Eventually, we experience excitement and frustration combined with clarity and doubt as we learn to influence biophysical and sociocultural elements of our world. Throughout this process, the most fundamental activity we perform as intelligent beings is associate things to one another, and some of these things become symbols for what we believe to be real. As we use words and signs to represent objects, we also identify perceived needs and threats to facilitate the conceptualization of our environment and our interactions within it. However, these representations often come to serve as substitutes for real objects or events as illustrated by how we exchange money for material resources and services. And as we develop and expand our virtual universe, the distinction between what is veritable and fictional become decreasingly clear.

Since we have the technological capacity to satisfy our needs almost instantaneously, we can distance ourselves from reality and replace it with a widely warped interpretation of the truth and of our dependencies. This facilitates the fabled galaxy of the epiculture to elude us much like the meaning of life. Instead of bringing us closer to our essence, it plays on our imperfections so that we may collude with one another in an effort to overthrow the truth. This complicity extends further to the reassurance we gain in sharing the same perceptions and beliefs and to the subtle marketing of what we are led to believe we want in relation to what is offered. However, the epiculture is beyond our complete comprehension or control, and trying to fight it directly only pulls us deeper into it. What matters is that we are aware of it, and this is similar to being aware that there is a universal truth without ever truly knowing what it is. Although the absence of absolute clarity may make us vulnerable, our capacity to learn of the world and examine ourselves in terms of how we process our experience provides the antidote we need to break its spell and find our way to our essence. We can refer to this capacity and its associated development as forepsyche.

Forepsyche is the ability to access the truth by navigating through the complexities of the psyche, which include its biases, delusions and influences. This is not a new concept, but rather a term conceived to hopefully better describe and expand upon a capability and an overall state that is known as our meta-consciousness or metacognition, where we are able to observe and foresee what we think. It is the witnessing of the witness with the power to monitor and scrutinize its thoughts, beliefs, feelings, motives and responses to the world. Although our minds are the great enablers of our intelligence, they also contribute to the detrimental protection of the illusory ego and its false identities. But unlike metacognition or the process of introspection, which is typically confined to thinking about our own thinking or the awareness of our emotional states alongside their sources and triggers, forepsyche includes understanding the obscure minds of others, the concealed beliefs of a culture and the rudimentary motives of life itself. It is essentially the study of life through our consciousness.

While we can describe the philosophical framework of the viagnostic narrative as setting the foundation to access the universal truth, forepsyche is the ability to apply its principles. It is through practicing and engaging in forepsyche that we can experience the unveiling of the epiculture, and this is how we break its spell and free the mind to recognize the relationships among all things. When we do this, we also retain or reclaim what we already knew we had in us as children and this permits us to uncover meaning in the context of our narrative. In the animated film The Little Prince [5] inspired by the classic children’s bookby Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a little girl is meticulously managed by her mother at a relatively early age to prepare for later success in a grown-up world. But an encounter with her eccentric neighbor, known as the Aviator, interrupts her mundanely stringent schedule, and their emergent friendship rouses her curiosity and the imagination missing in her regimented life through the retelling of the original story. The underlying theme of retrieving our uncorrupted childhood wisdom is thrice-reflected in this story within a story: firstly when the Aviator originally met the Little Prince, then when the Little Girl befriends the Aviator, and finally when the older Mr. Prince regains his memory of being the Little Prince, who once questioned the illogic and bemusing compulsions of adults.

There is an assumption that the meaning of our lives depends on what we can bear in order to realize what is inherently already there. Our egos may alter what and how we seek the meaning we intrinsically need by allowing us to distort our genuine values and to project false images of ourselves, but it is in the expanding mind of an infant whose innocence is still intact and whose wonder drives it to learn that we realize the potential of life. The hope is that we secure the inspiration we need in our childhood before we face the darker side of reality so that we never repress our hunger to truly live life and comprehend its principles, and never fear asking good questions and testing our answers to remain faithful to the truth. Naturally, we all need a stable foundation upon which to build our narrative, where we are beholden to our innermost truth to fulfill its expression in the world. While our minds may be born out of an insignificant existence and we risk being bred for cultural serfdom, we must remember as the one constant wherever we go and whatever we do that we possess the possibility of a story that can contribute meaning to the greater narrative of life.