Chapter 13 - Viagnostic

Existence is a subject we can find at the crux of all philosophical discourse for the simple reason that there would be nothing to discuss if nothing existed. There would be no truth or reality other than that there is nothing at all. It is because of existence that we assume there is a universal truth or an underlying order that accounts for our reality, and like consciousness, existence defies our capacity to define it beyond itself. It is something we know intuitively since we naturally start with it as a foundation regardless of how much we think we understand, or how clever we may believe we are at describing the concept of being. But the intellectual struggle that persists over this topic presently and historically aligns with any of three general viewpoints.

The first view, but not the oldest, is that everything stems from a fundamentally materialistic world with a physically derivable origin, and that it exists irrespective of our experience of it. The second is an idealistic interpretation that places thought or consciousness at the heart of existence and reality to infer that things only exist as part of our perceived experience or that they are derived from our awareness. The third view suggests a duality of body and mind, or of nature and spirit, where the two either coexist and interact as separate influential entities or, as some might propose, merely behave as two inseparable sides of the coin and function as a single unit. Given the philosophical divide between treating material existence as the basis for any or all the other levels and positioning consciousness or some ethereal state as the alternative ruler of the real world, perhaps we should refrain from attributing directional causation to existence and instead interpret them as two faces of the same reality, which are also concurrently true. However, this notion of duality is a conciliatory third option that warrants further examination and expansion. Does this twofold perspective encapsulate existence or is there something more profound that we need to appreciate?

We know there are countless variations of theories and beliefs about the nature of existence, which are purported by even greater numbers of philosophers, scientists, theologians and spiritual masters. But most of us who bother to debate such ideas tend to confuse these concepts primarily because we try to discuss them as if they function at the same level of meaning, and this especially true when we aim to equate concrete examples with the concepts we attempt to abstract. The tools that we use to write or display the characters that form words such as freedom and love know nothing of the meaning of these terms, and their meanings are also distinct from the words intended to depict their significance. The physical process of sequencing alphabetic letters or drawing symbols says nothing about the meaning that might be ultimately conveyed through written words. The same could be argued about the neural activity that coincides with our thoughts and feelings. We have no direct conscious awareness of these biochemical interactions just as neurons firing have no individual understanding of the mental products they form or support.

There are also qualitative differences in meaning between similar activities. For instance, reviewing a technical document on constructing a dwelling has a fundamentally different significance from narrating a short story about a person building a house. Both involve reading and relate to the construction of a home, but while one focuses on learning about its material assembly, the other helps us imagine some aspect of a real or fictional person’s life. When we cross over from one level or frame to another, we know the context has changed. However, we fail to do this when we talk about concepts like existence and consciousness, or better yet, the brain and the mind or our physical body and our identity. This is important for us to consider if we want to acquire or maintain a more stable sense of the world and of our own selves, where perspectives can change as well as their associated meanings without losing sight of the unifying truth that brings all of these views together.

Since we require tangible objects or observable events to form constructs of the world, it seems natural for us to perceive material things as the base from which reality reveals itself. However, we also accept the world as already being conceived in principle, where physical reality is merely a projection or simulation of the underlying truth. This means that most of us unknowingly treat these two notions as equally valid. In addition, we acknowledge an existence where the truth is stable while the world is always changing, and this includes our own lives that we define as relatively fixed patterns combined with a sense of possibility or pending disruption. The probabilities of a complex world are the link between the steadiness of governing principles and the intermittent nature of change, and they fall within the same domain occupied by our hypothetical imagination and the conception of ideas. Some of these ideas turn into physical reality and others do not, but all of them can exist in the playground of our conscious and unconscious states. From this perspective, we might see how our sentience lies within the space where the intangible plane of the indescribable truth meets the experiential plane of the living being. And if so, then it might be possible to adhere to a universal framework that only requires three layers to existence with an arbitrator or interpreter wedged between the dualities of presence and absence, the tangible and the impalpable, and the earthly and the celestial, to concoct and digest the existential sandwich of life.

As we transcend the frontiers of modern science to encounter the retrieved lessons of ancient wisdom, many of us among a much bigger class of contemplative creatures have increasingly come to envisage an all-inclusive yet unlimited paradigm that we intrinsically recognize as an extradimensional web that holds all things together. This is the viagnostic way and the principal part of this is to consider a triadic system that encompasses the whole of the universal truth, and which includes the underlying order of our disorderly world and its unifying force that demonstrates all principles, weighs all options and enables all eventualities. It is an origin story that provides a source without a temporal cause or beginning because it plainly suggests there are three levels that instantaneously, comprehensively and necessarily surface from the chaos of two complementary movements towards order. These three emergent levels can be described as the physical, sentient and infinite planes of existence, which expose the respective layers of this greater truth.

The physical plane is what we generally assume to be material existence, but it includes all matter and energy of the experiential universe or of all universes. It constitutes the empirical sphere of our veritable world, but it is not limited to what we can perceive, measure or observe within our current frame of the space-time continuum where the dimensions of all phenomena remain a subject of endless exploration and discourse. The sentient plane is the conscious or imaginary field of existence that serves as the canvas on which everything we conceive or imagine might ultimately be projected onto the reality we experience. It is the home of all consciousness and the imagination, but more importantly, it represents the realm of the possible or hypothetical as well as our model of reality. This is where the universe is invented or simulated. However, its source lies in the infinite plane as the abstract or mystical base of an intrinsically untainted truth, which provides the unlimited potential of existence. We can label this third tier either as universal because it applies to everything or as essential because nothing would be possible without it, but it is something that is truly ineffable. We only try to grasp it by functioning in the other planes, but this metaphysical core conveys the nonduality and nonlocality of a paradoxical existence, which is both transcendent and indivisible. In this sense, a reductionist view of a materialist reality is simply the outer shell of a universal truth.

Another way to view these fields of being is to describe them as the corporeal, psychical and spiritual facets of our reality, which loosely relate to our various personalized notions of body, mind and soul or to a more generalized sense of nature, psyche and spirit. These terms may help capture and coalesce our divergent worldviews to facilitate a common approach to outlining the intangible truth. At the heart of this greater story is the psyche that leverages this cognitive layer of existence to provide the fictional playground where we develop our narratives as we reflect upon our experiences and explore its possibilities. This plane bundles the intellectual, emotional and intuitive streams of our experience together as well as extracts the philosophical and sociocultural elements of our cohabitation that define our moral values and concern our personal liberties and responsibilities as we contemplate our political rights and duties as individuals and as communities. And while there are many ways to conceptualize and illustrate these elementary levels of perspective, the basic assumption we can provide make is that there are three tiers or frames that provide a completely cohesive view of life and simplify or make more sense of a seemingly complicated existence.

The viagnostic way intersects with the third component of the viagnostic system, which involves diving into the underlying logic of being in a life that remains indeterminate. In other words, it is about opening up the black box of motivation and what drives life, and especially appreciating the intricate functions of a sentient existence. The viagnostic framework of the narrative depends on three important constructs: reality, meaning and essence. These concepts form the vital layers of our story that we need to navigate through reality to find meaning in our lives by tapping into and manifesting our essence. However, they do not directly depict the motivational circuitry embedded in life because they are more philosophical than they are psychological or biological. To explore this further, we need to peer specifically into the psyche, which plays an intermediate role between nature and spirit, or between the reality of life and the essence of being. And since the psyche is the handler of meaning where we bridge and integrate all three existential layers, it is here that we can contemplate who and what we really are.

A MOTIVATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON EXISTENCE

Although we know that life has a function and that there may be a basis for explaining why we exist, we do not fundamentally comprehend the true purpose of life. We assume what drives or incites our actions and why we commence or restart each day of our lives, but we do not really know why we do what we do. Even prior to the introduction and integration of advanced technology in our societies and their indispensable economies, our lives were already automated. Most of us do not notice how programmed we really are because we tend to rationalize what we do after we have done it and the reasons we tell ourselves are part of our programming as well. Hence, we are capable of living without needing to think about what propels us to act. But if or when we do venture into this grey area of our functioning, we risk unleashing a deep-seated crisis that can unravel our entire worldview and orientation towards life. We also risk solidifying shallow belief systems that discourage us from entertaining a more profound sense of ourselves and of our relationships with others that may challenge our current way of life and question the freedom and morality of our choices.

Regardless of how we respond to the ultimate question of life and how much we struggle to grasp its meaning that is shrouded in mystery, all we need to maintain hope and move forward is to know that there is a point to life and that it serves some purpose. Essentially, the point of life is that there is a point. This means that what we do matters, even beyond our own deaths. Perhaps this may seem like an anticlimactic response to a profound inquiry. But it is actually this belief that drives us to live life every single day, and for many of us, the opportunity to live every single day is sufficient. This is because it naturally affords us a sense of discovery and allows us to participate willingly in the world, where we face its trials and adversities as much as we partake in its wonders and celebrations. It is our task to uncover our purpose and what is important to us, and how we choose to live our lives depends on both the truth we realize and the reality we misconstrue in relation to the three tiers of our being.

The psyche provides a motivational perspective on existence by playing a critical role in translating these existential layers concurrently into our essential functions that range from biological survival to spiritual transcendence. Although life acts automatically as part of its base design, the psyche draws from the unique and shared blueprints of our biotic existence to encode and trigger the programs that run our imperative decision making processes. This includes discovering new incentives and refining existing goals through our working knowledge and flawed beliefs about the world and our identity as well as through our active imagination to recognize our choices and determine our actions as we exchange information and influence one another within the sociocultural domain of self-aware individuals. The psyche emerges from a collectively conscious and unconscious fusion we regard as life and serves as the bridging sentient layer between the physical and infinite realms of the truth to mediate all intentional and involuntary purposes including its own as an adaptive representation of reality. It is the watcher and translator of all tendencies and their outcomes. And since there can be no lessons if there is no one to learn them, the psyche is integral to the viagnostic narrative and the greater meaning of life by enabling us to peer into both the obvious and elusive elements of our true motives that can trace back the will of our essence to the universal truth.

We may think of what we do as being acted upon by a force or as being the net result of forces, but it is valuable to see our actions as simply abiding by an elaborate set of elementary principles because motivation is the underlying logic of behaviour and interrelated events that we may or may not observe. That logic may not be clear and at least the reasons behind the reasons may not directly accessible to us, but there are unstated principles guiding our decisions and actions. We know this because the complexities of many situations we face can prompt a multitude of concerns. This can be due to insufficient information, but it also arises from conflicts between our natural values such as between individual freedom and communal harmony. Many of us will rationalize or assume what rules to follow in order to address our discomfort with uncertainty, but this ambiguity is what facilitates our external influences and confuses our true interests with social norms or cultural expectations.

We generally infer our intentions from our response to the world, which is why many of us treat our survival as evidence of what drives us. But we can also tie much of our behaviour to the immediacy and urgency of our conditions without any clear sense of purpose. For instance, we have an almost instantaneous reaction to something burning our skin or to an object that is unexpectedly going to collide with us. We naturally respond to an actual harm or a perceived threat with flight or fight while being easily receptive to what pleases us as well. And while these enticements and defenses are necessary to maintain our functioning, they do not necessarily reflect our ultimate goals given that many of us deliberately endure avoidable suffering and refrain from opportunities for pleasure that are readily available to us. Are we living simple to live? If so, then why would we spend much of our time suffering for little pleasure? The hope to live another day assumes the possibility that something important could happen, but that foundation dissolves when the belief in the possibility or its likelihood is reduced to nil.

It is also common to view our general propensity to seek happiness or at least to reduce our misery, but happiness is only a preferential state. We spend much of our lives trying to determine what leads us to be content and yet the continual and consistent satisfaction of what we think we want eludes us especially when we suffer the broader or everlasting consequences of what appears to be fulfilling. Although we can plainly see that we are motivated to act in precisely the way that we do, the rationale for our decisions or deeds depends on how we interpret our feelings while our motivational source remains a compelling albeit unconscious logic that can override our basic rules of conduct.

Our patterns of behaviour seem instinctual. However, once we move beyond our immediate function of subsistence, our social motives diverge and range from our desire for achievement or power to our need for belongingness or acceptance. And when blended altogether, they reveal the obscurity of what we seek as demonstrated by a desire for personal liberty that also wants guidance or accepts the loss of freedom for security or by our penchant for certainty and familiarity while we are equally drawn to mystery and novelty or something different and salient enough to capture our attention. And in the face of wanting countless things we cannot concurrently have, we clearly have many competing motives with many more mutually exclusively options. However, this complexity requires an encryption key to unlock its secrets and translate their underlying simplicity into meaningful buckets or layers. And while there is no definitive answer to what we seek, there are perspectives that can shepherd us through life.

As a starting point, we can consider the possibility that there is one specific mode of operation applicable to each layer of existence that the psyche interprets, rightly or wrongly. And although these corresponding planes have no direct interaction, each mode can influence one another within the psyche and the development of each can affect the maturity of the others. We define these three primordial modes of operation as the fatalistic, egolistic and holistic levels of motivational awareness or behavioural logic, where each distinctly guides the interests and actions of sentient beings in relation to reality, meaning and essence.

The fatalistic mode of operation is embedded in all life. All living things unconsciously know they inevitably will die. While we tend to think of survival and pleasure as our primary drivers, the ultimate function of life is to reproduce or to ensure continuity through some vehicle that replaces its source. This logic is built into our programming. Our concerns with our sustenance and security as well as our desires and defenses are fundamentally nothing more than a means to an end in a reality moving naturally towards a confluence of events that has yet to occur. Although our technological progress has permitted us to self-indulge to the degree that we may believe our efforts to achieve positive states represent our basic purpose, life essentially grows and learns to adapt in order to transfer some of that learning to a fully or partially new rendering of itself before its current version expires. Whether it is through our offspring or our professional body of work that we pass onto others, we seem to work towards our replacement because life seeks self-preservation through its constantly changing forms in response to pleasure and pain as well as to perceived opportunities and threats that direct its actions. However, our subjective rewards and punishments always risk being misconstrued and can divert us from our innate objectives as we unwittingly slide into unrestrained decadence, exploitative acquisition and delusional self-importance that have become signature traits of narcissistic cultures while equally opening the door to authoritarian societies that imprison the distinct self and demand personal sacrifice.

We recognize that our behaviour is self-interested in its nature as it should be if we wish to survive long enough to do anything of value, especially for others. But much like our hedonic proclivities, egocentricity is only a means to an end. Given this, there is a subtle yet important distinction we must make between our egoistic orientation and the egolistic logic ingrained in our functioning. This second mode of operation, which arises from our socially facilitated self-awareness, pertains to the conception and development of our identity, which grows beyond the physical organism that houses our individual life and enables our sentience. Our relationships with one another affect how we assess our relative value and determine the roles we play in the socioeconomic theatre to which we belong. And since we are caught in a sociocultural web that influences our conception of the self, we fabricate countless and endless ambitions that serve a system, which presumes to measure our worth and label our personality. Many of us obsess over our success or status because our sense of who we are is neither well-grounded nor integrated, and this is linked to an illusory ego that believes it is truly autonomous or that it can be. However, egolistic motivation requires that we maintain congruence in our constructs of the world, including the self, to confidently seek greater quality within a delineated scope that begins with family, friendship and community, and extends to the rest of the relatable universe. This malleable identity may originate in our corporeal consciousness, but it does not remain there given that we actively engage in and expand our self-relevance as we work to achieve any temporarily selected set of goals, however big or small they are, that captures or introduces some attributed meaning that defines us.

However, this still leaves us with a significant gap in understanding what motivates us, which we either describe in very different ways or do not recognize at all. As we become increasingly aware of our world, we unknowingly elicit our longing to grasp the totality of life or to appreciate its complexity to find what is missing in a universe that provides the resources but not the character of a sentient existence. In addition, as we face more circumstances that instantly challenge our simplified notions of morality with rules seemingly invented for every occasion, we realize that we cannot reduce that which is indivisible or inexplicable without the context of the whole. This awareness triggers the logic behind the holistic mode of living, which is expressed as a spiritual need to experience what we really are beyond the ego and to illuminate a greater moral truth hidden within our conscience and unleashed by ethical conflict and political struggle. We come to recognize that this is not about our own personal expansion or progression, but rather about the integrity of pure and comprehensive unity. Some of us never mature to gain such awareness, and sometimes we succumb to inclinations towards conquest or absolutes as poor substitutes for completeness or we acquire a propensity for playing God that is enabled by delusional omnipotence or omniscience. Unable to balance confidence with humility or to exercise our volition with its inescapable vulnerability, we fixate on inflating the ego by exerting our relative power against others as a parasitic dominance over an unconquerable world. But by actualizing our quantum potential in the cosmic playground of life, we uncover a deeply hidden and misunderstood predisposition for self-transcendence that is attempting to fulfill its ultimate function: to transform into the essence of who we truly are while shedding the skin of what we have become.

In summary, these three modes of operation and their associated planes provide the basis for outlining the third component of the viagnostic system. The third tenet of being viagnostic stresses the importance of appreciating these motivational layers of a sentient existence and aligning to these natural tendencies by raising our awareness. These tendencies correspond to their own operating principles, which include (a) seminalism, (b) optimalism and (c) ethicalism. In unison, they can guide us through the fog of life and push or pull us through the dark moments of our past, present and pending future; their combined adherence increases the likelihood of knowing life by living it, which is the fundamental point of being viagnostic. Each represents a pattern that arises from our awareness of being alive and the sense that there is something we need to do or realize as we instinctively try to get at the essence of what we are and the deeper meaning of life, self and will respectively.

However, we should not confuse these modes of operation with levels of increasing ascendancy because it is only in their concurrence and combination that we can achieve alignment in our actions as they move in the same direction or dance to the same choreography. In addition, having multiple levels of awareness subjects us to a greater sense of responsibility and the effect of operating along these three tiers enhances our capacity for intention, which furthers the burden of our responsibility. By intention, we mean disclosed intention, which reflects being deliberately genuine as opposed to being false, hidden or unconscious, regardless of whether it serves to be good or bad. At minimum, our intent is open and direct, which surfaces or eliminates any ulterior motives that we may conceal to deceive others or to delude ourselves. Although we sometimes rely on deception when lives are at stake, these inherent tendencies are about recognizing the significance of their principles and acting upon that significance to ensure clarity in how we live our lives. This is in contrast to the conflicting voices that instruct us to uphold fictitious beliefs in an artificial world and mislead us in promoting the insincere and unnatural manifestation of our being.

THE NECESSITY OF SEMINAL CONTINUITY

Life is the source of everything that essentially conveys what we all are. Without life or some form of life, there is no expression of intelligence, consciousness or motivation. We tend not to associate these spirited qualities with non-living things, which account for the incomparable share of all existence. The preponderance of an inanimate existence would not matter without life because without the presence of life, there would be no world to experience and no narrative to script, chronicle or recite. This expanding, contracting and altering universe would move without a witness or a participant, and it would seem like a great waste of space and with no sense of time to record its changes. Hence, we among the living appear to be the designated residents of our cosmic home, which serves as both a playground and a battlefield for the diversity of life we encounter.

However, this universal residence comes with a multitude of conditions, clarifying that life offers no guarantees. The principal requirement is an indeterminate one that confirms there is an undisclosed expiry date with the option to renew. This biotic contract is binding whether we sign it or not because it applies to all of us without prejudice. Nevertheless, this perpetual cycle of life and death affords us the opportunities and risks of taking from the universe in order to give back with the primary purpose of negotiating our continuity, individually and collectively. As we come to terms with our fate, most of us realize that our ability to survive long enough to replicate or persist in some form depends on our personal capacity to learn and our communal affinity for collaboration with those who appreciate our shared predicament. However, this does not prevent us from enjoying the lives we have. Obviously, it is instrumental to our health that we function as pleasantly as we sensibly can. As we endeavour to ultimately give back what we have borrowed, it is the present and immediate duty of life to live it and experience the world. Our mortal fate is essentially a reminder that we must fulfill our agreement because, whether we do it willingly or not, the end will come and that gift of life will be reclaimed.

The fatalistic disposition of life is what drives us into action. We intrinsically know that we will no longer be. Consequently, we can either build for tomorrow and sacrifice for the next generation or greedily indulge until the very end and contribute nothing back. But it is between these two extremes that we are challenged to find balance. We do not wish to be slaves to the living, but we also know that we did not come into existence purely of our own making. Although many of us tend to dismiss or neglect that we came from somewhere, we cannot escape the fact that our lives had a source and that we continue to rely on resources we utilize to subsist and pursue preferential states of being. So instead of deluding ourselves about our false autonomy, we may wish to acknowledge our universal dependency in order to practice the operating principle of seminalism that most if not all lifeforms practice quite naturally albeit unconsciously.

Seminalism is the general tendency of life to plant the seeds of its growth and continuity. This is essentially the logic of a regenerative system, which is always leaving something behind in defiance of its entropy and mortality through a ceaseless cycle of production and consumption that ensures its broader sustainment. In other words, we need to put in as much as we take out. We contribute something back with whatever we have been afforded. The necessity of seminal continuity extends from the physical to the cultural in the belief that we reap what we sow, which has several nuanced meanings and associated expressions across numerous philosophies and religions. This includes the concept of karma as well as the way of the Tao as being tied to a universal state of balance or an overarching process of moving into equilibrium. We may not see it in the immediate or in some expected form, but we understand this to be ultimately inescapable. And while individual entities might be able to delay the direct consequences of this process, eventually all unpaid debts will be collected.

Unfortunately, despite a very long and rich history of transcribed and translated wisdom teaching us to heed the reckoning of life, we still continue to behave dismissively or obliviously as if we can escape natural law or that it does not apply to us and as reflected by our growing technological arrogance that gives us a false sense of security. Some of us also believe that we are more important and more cunning than the rest of our society and that others will or should suffer in our place, but the greedy complexion of our nature only amplifies the severity of the penalty we will all suffer when the mythological gods decide to pass judgment. When the host dies, so does the virus. And while too many of us mistakenly fixate on personalized illustrations of justice every time we perceive or experience a wrongdoing from our own perspective, we only find ourselves being distracted by our situational preoccupations to the point of ignoring the logic of commensurate contribution to replace it with retribution or entitlement. This seminalist tendency is about filling the gap rather than keeping score and about giving back what we take instead of pretending to offer so that we can thieve again.

While each of us is responsible for our own production and consumption, we do generally sway between avoiding the necessary chores we do not want to do and compensating for the inability of others to provide for themselves. And when we consider the behavioural diversity of our efforts and their unforeseen impacts, we realize that there is no standard measure we can apply to determine whether or not we have met our fair share of the work because it always remains unclear as to the real value of our efforts. Although some of us will attempt to freeload or exploit others if we allow for this, all of us passionately or desperately show the capacity to labour tirelessly at something that matters to us. Often we fail to recognize the unique donations that others around us make only because their actions or gestures are seemingly unrelated to what we want or expect. When we busily focus on our narrowly defined instances of contribution, we may misperceive idle behaviour as laziness rather than the lack of opportunity or appreciation for what others can offer. No one willingly wants to be lethargic or live passively through life. Hence, what we frequently see are examples of us surrendering in defiance of a biased system that shamelessly tightens the conditions of our participation.

The technological advancement of civilization has reduced the general need for many of us to laboriously partake in the economy of our sustenance while the appearance of overabundance that it generates hides the constant threat of uncertain scarcity. This celebrated progress has subtly allowed us to fixate on our own self-importance and reinforce the false notion that we are here only to serve ourselves without any obligation to contribute anything back to the same world that has made our lives possible. This egocentric worldview, deeply ingrained in our psyche, unnaturally severs us from our roots and our history, which results in blind irreverence towards anything and everything old. This senescent loathing combined with our juvenile contempt for tradition promises to destroy the good with the bad when creative destruction becomes necessary to discard the archaic to make room for something better or more adaptive. Such behaviour is unsurprising in societies where we permit the overgrown children among us to run our organizations, where we appraise maturity based on pretense and chronological age. Coupled with the permission to excuse callousness by right of self-proclaimed superiority, we witness inclinations to confuse independent thought with selfishness and to substitute self-preservation for ego-perpetuation. The pervasiveness of such tendencies individually leads to our collective demise or, at the very least, results in worse circumstances compared to where we started.

Our enduring vitality depends on the confluence of seemingly unrelated events in a universe of gradual change with constant activity. But while we are motivated to adapt to conditions that rule our bodies and our surroundings, the growth in our intelligence and the expansion of our knowledge imply that we are engaged in a kind of progressive continuity and that we do not persist for the exclusive purposes of intergenerational reproduction. Something more is at play that clearly drives sentient life, if not all life. Moreover, our communal subsistence is not limited to our biological survival and procreation. It includes other forms expressed in the various designs and constructions of what we transform from the matter and energy we harness as well as the information we gather as pertinent ideas, things and events we record and retain using any technology that functions as memory. This also extends to the knowledge that we inscribe in scientific journals and to the wisdom we embed in religious texts and convey through our art and literature. As we leave more and more things behind that are beyond our own offspring, we unconsciously reveal another level of contribution to life that involves the cultural evolution of self and society. The individual person and its community are inseparable extensions of one another that lead to our socially enabled self-awareness and give rise to an additional driver for living life. While knowing that life continues is more significant than knowing when life began, what we know is also less meaningful than what we do with our lives.

OUR INCLINATION TOWARDS OPTIMAL QUALITY

The self is always at the centre of our universe because everything is viewed through our own lens even when we empathize with others. We have to imagine ourselves as the other to be the other, which tells us that the self is like our means of teleportation. Serving as both the telescope and the microscope of our minds, it travels anywhere and everywhere that our perception and imagination can take us without necessarily being egocentric or acting in a selfish or self-interested manner. It merely suggests that the self is the conduit through which we understand the world, including what entails the perimeter of our relative autonomy for which we have responsibility. The mind and the self are one in this context since our awareness in this field of existence reflects a qualitatively different sense that operates beyond the environmental responsiveness we share with all life to include a mutual consciousness of one another that sets the stage for envisioning and developing our stories. Both our self-awareness and our meta-consciousness, where we are aware that we are aware and where we can think about what we are thinking, create another distinct level of insecurity that stands on top of the general concern we already have with our physical safety and subsistence that dominate our thoughts and feelings. How we perceive and evaluate ourselves in relation to our civilized world, which overwhelmingly influences our self-conception and alleged worth, dictates much of our motivation when we stop being preoccupied primarily and directly with our sustenance and defense.

The sociocultural transmission and application of our knowledge and tools succeed at providing steady access to abundant resources while our socioeconomic structures establish a sufficient buffer between our lives and the backwoods of our surroundings that minimizes our bodily risks. However, our societies and cultures also give rise to another wilderness where our identities wrestle with one another for meaning and expression. Our fixation with our place within the social sphere of our universe bypasses our primordial instinct to survive and reproduce. We prioritize our efforts to accumulate memories of our supposedly positive experiences and records of our milestones in a race to partake individually in our collective advances towards comparably better circumstances when measured against an arbitrary standard or against one another, which includes past versions of our lives. We also learn to suppress or delay immediate gratification to maximize or prolong our desired rewards because our inherent reasoning shifts to our inclination towards optimal quality as we attempt to exceed our personal limits beyond the degrees necessary for the continued preservation of our biotic blueprint.

The second motivation of life is to achieve or remain at the best possible state as an individual entity and as part of a collective of entities. This is the natural tendency and operating principle of optimalism, which expresses a fundamental interest in quality. This predisposition not only focuses our attention on being in better circumstances, but also on determining how to best attain them and extend their duration. It is the nature of all systems to reach and maintain optimal or balanced states such as the homeostasis of a living organism. And although the unbreakable logic of preferential states is prevalent across all motivational layers, our fondness for ideal conditions is far more pronounced when life becomes self-aware. As our self-awareness expands, this tendency culturally translates to a propensity for progress that is facilitated by technology. Only our knowledge enables us to weigh the costs and benefits of our changing options assessed against the available opportunities and potential threats we identify through the limited course of our uncertain lives while our intelligence and creativity find possibilities in how things within the boundary of our relevant world can be improved or secured.

However, our sense of progress much like our sense of self is always relative to what we decide is valuable, whether it is health and longevity or wealth and influence. We always seek facility or a state of being better, which can mean being healthier, wealthier, stronger, faster or smarter if we want to consider a few typical examples of comparable traits. But even the most exhaustive list of attributes we may pursue primarily relate to what we deem socially desired or recognized. Although our fundamental attraction to quality may innately aim to exceed the limits that depict our current state and present identity, it is diverted nevertheless to enhancing those characteristics that are prized or admired across the varying cultures of our societies and promoted through their exclusive celebrations and/or extrinsic rewards, including mating prospects.

We could argue that societal interests or socially triggered concerns represent another class of needs or motives, but they are inherently tied to our desire to optimize our lives where we seek happiness and fulfilment while securing a preferable place within our socioeconomic system. This proclivity is unfortunately susceptible to infatuation, obsession and compulsion because we are also vulnerable to delusions about things, events and people, especially ourselves. Our false beliefs and illusory perceptions can shrink our world and inflate our own importance or predicament to the point where we are severed from our other elemental modes of operation and their motivational logic. For instance, a number of us during the course of our lives become fixated on pain and pleasure often at the expense of our longer-term sustainment. We turn the notion of enjoying life into a rationalized excuse for our intractable addictive habits and our penchant for dominating or belittling others as a concealment of our own repressed insecurities regarding the realities of life. In the process of trying to circumvent the necessary lessons of our life experience, many of us prove to be as guilty of individually using one another as being virtuous in collectively bringing humanity forward.

The richness and diversity of our inclinations and behaviours share the same source, but their proliferation merely confuses us into believing our tendencies and identities are inherently different. The discrepancy lies in the development of our divergent perspectives, which divide easily when some of us benefit from stable conditions and good fortune while others among us agonize from enduring misalignment and the calamity of our experience. However, the complex differences between our lives can be so subtle that we may not appreciate both the indiscernible nuances and the dramatic variances in their directions and outcomes. We all want our states to improve in degree and frequency, but we vary in what or how we want to optimize as well as in what we include as part of our identity. Since we cannot perceive the self solely as its physical body because it attaches itself to anything it considers pertinent to defining itself, it must extend out to encompass the experiences that shape the stories of our lives and the community or society in which we partake as a whole. We assess an optimal state based on who and what we incorporate within the scope of its identity as exemplified by how some of us consider family to mean everything and consequently make little to no distinction between our base family unit and our own selves. This also happens in intimate partnerships. There is a merger of individualities that mostly or partially dissolves our own to be replaced by another much larger yet potentially more restricted one if too much of what we really are is sacrificed in that fusion.

However, regardless of where we set the boundary of our identity, the self naturally draws a line of separation in order to establish a vision of where it wants to go or to be and take measures towards achieving or sustaining that overall target state. This dividing line expectedly changes over time and place, but it is the self-relevance of events and the agents of those events that guide its demarcation. This perceived partition is understandably intermittent since we cannot be physically severed from the universe in which we exist and we cannot escape the reality that makes us what we are. But we do require momentary detachment in order to make conceptual sense of our experiences as we decipher the logic behind our logic. We need to model the world and ourselves within it, usually subconsciously, to steer through the conflicts in the assumed laws that govern our existence and in our rationale for living life. We learn the importance of congruence as a foundational quality as we discover that we want things to make sense more than we want to know things. We also want the world to align to our desires and values, however implausible, but the mind cannot function on illogic. Hence, it relies on multiple mechanisms to address its irrationality. One way is to submit to feelings and intuitions that surface into its consciousness to direct us into action or inaction when we have no clear answers or overwhelmed with choices that we cannot reason in a timely manner. Another is to simply ignore any contradictory evidence or reasoning that interferes with our deep feelings or that challenges our core beliefs. But if all else fails, the mind has the capacity to alter or fabricate its perceptions and memories that are necessary to falsify the congruence it demands in order for us to function.

This highly motivated power combined with our resistance to a nonconforming reality provides insight into why madness cannot be entirely understood by peering purely at neural irregularities and biochemical imbalances. There is a wholly different context missing that distinguishes the mind from the associated anatomy and physiology of the brain, which provides the physical apparatus for its functioning and manifestation. The mind goes further to expand outwardly and deepen inwardly to planes of existence not completely bound by materiality. The self seeks expression in some corporeal form, but its meaning cannot be directly discerned because it is invisible to the senses. It must be felt in a way that bridges all levels of awareness, and it is in our adherence to quality between the tangible and the abstract where this occurs. Given that the semantic layer of life revolves around what is relevant to the self, it must be through its own conception and the exploration of its boundaries that we encounter our essence and the universal truth. And since essence and the universal truth are both indescribable, they must be projected onto the world to be experienced through some accessible means.

The self provides a frame of reference where its temporal construction results in an identity that oscillates between who we think we are and who we think we should be or want to be as well as between who we once were and who we are now. Consequently, we make multiple simultaneous attempts at reconciling our personal continuum that strings together our perceived past, present and future selves in each one of us. And although we both deliberately and unconsciously work to close the gap between our current state of being and our purportedly desired ideal, we also find ourselves trying to compensate for our past lives and actions with the hope of removing its shame or returning us back to our former glory. But more importantly, we secretly want to regain the qualities we seem to have lost since we were children. And while some of us continue to suppress these traits due to our traumatic upbringing and the perceived threats that persist in our lives, our quest to approach our essence perseveres through our fictitious societal roles much like the parts we might perform in a theatrical performance. And whether we find ourselves on stage or in an arena or more commonly at home or in the workplace, we unwittingly seek out available settings where we can instinctively try to discover who we are while we discern the difference between reality and fantasy before we blend them together to develop our overlapping personal narratives.

We guide our stories through the self, which is aligned with the optimalist operating principle. However, we often mistakenly associate the self with free will. Although the mind may conspire with the rest of society to invent the illusory ego and construct the identity of the self, it does not necessarily act independently in its choices. The mind is the vehicle through which we become aware and able to focus our attention on what is relevant to learn and resolve. It naturally seeks clarity and congruence to achieve and retain mental balance without direct and deliberate intention. Its knowledge and beliefs can serve to influence and manipulate its physical and social environment, but it too can equally and easily be influenced and manipulated to suggest that it is also programmed by its somatic container. Arguably, we can equate it to a magnet attached to another magnet called the body, and that is only separated by a thin piece of opaque paper that prevents exposure of their concurrent movement. Each moves with the other, but neither has control. It is a rehearsed dance and who leads in the moment is arbitrary.

We can think of the body as a vessel for life, which taps into the mind and become its vehicle as well. Without it or without some bodily substitute in material or energetic form along some set of physical dimensions, we cease to be. The mind, by comparison, is the vessel of the self, which accesses the soul and serves as its conduit to our volition. We can say that the mind belongs to the field of consciousness, which gets its instructions from its physical environment and from its original source. This source is accessed by heightened awareness where it becomes voluntary as opposed to being instinctual or automatic. The soul has many different meanings across a broad array of cultures and religions. However, within this conceptual framework of the viagnostic system, it specifically represents the force of will. Hence, if there is a soul, then it is the vessel of our will, which can only be free and intentional through its awareness, agency and accountability, and it is only in this domain that ethics has any significance.

A COMMITMENT TO ETHICAL INTEGRITY

Some of us struggle with the notion of will or free will as we have become accustomed to a growing body of knowledge that points to a deterministic world despite the fact that we are constantly confronted by how indeterminate life seems to be. This is because we focus on an increasing set of numbers while ignoring the infinite space in which that set resides. Although infinity can be treated as a concept or entity, it is experientially inaccessible. We can conceive of its existence and symbolize it for its use, at least mathematically, but we can neither physically count it nor mentally grasp it beyond being an idea we delineate and label. In a similar sense, this is true of will. We can appreciate that there is will. We can recognize its presence, but we cannot dissect the brain to find it, touch it or graph it. If motivation were a living cell, then our will would be its nucleus. It is the mystery within the mystery of life, which aligns with our essence and the universal truth.

True volition seems incomprehensible and yet we acknowledge it just as we do consciousness. We may debate over its properties and origins, but we accept it as part of our sentient existence. And while we also know there are many things that directly motivate us like pleasurable experiences and anticipated rewards, we consider this to be our principal driving force that is subtle yet tied to a much more profound feeling than gratification. It is not the feeling itself, but the impetus that surfaces what it means to have soul, among other things. Will is the origin of all motivation in life, and it is what animates the self. It is from this that many of us draw our spirituality as we recognize something deeper operating within our existence that is beyond our continuity and progress. But spirit is not energy or consciousness. Although it shares the notion of being felt yet unseen, it only embodies and harnesses the things we experience or detect because it is the truth, force and order behind everything, and all of us have the capacity to sense it.

However, many of us unknowingly suppress this base awareness. We are either preoccupied with our lives to the extent that we are oblivious to this profound intuition that is the deepest feeling we can have, or we outright reject such sensations and dismiss them as the illusions and fabrications of the mind. While many would say that physical reality is the only reality, others might say that physical reality is also an illusion that we all share. It might seem real and we might be able to replicate our measures of what we detect within it, but it is still a holographic projection and we cannot distinguish it from reality because we too are holograms functioning within it. But behind all of what is and can be are principles that guide the possibility of the real and the fictional. These principles interrelate to encompass one underlying celestial order and all of its imaginings that we tend to depict as a ghostly omnipresent wizard operating behind the curtains. But regardless of how we attempt to describe this infinite plane, it is not something that we can touch, envisage or even articulate other than know that it exists.

One of the conceptual challenges with a spiritual or metaphysical plane is that we still think of this as some material place that we can travel to or some energetic space that we can enter as if we are going to encounter some undiscovered dimension of the cosmos or perhaps of the quantum world. If there are other dimensions, then they exist somewhere along the physical plane to be detected within the empirical realm of reality. And if we can conceive or visualize them, then they emerge in the imaginary or fictional space of our existence that conveys meaning. But there is an essential layer that functions as the source and governance of our being. It is our essence or the essence of all things. And although it seems to serve as our origin, it is indifferent to causality. It is simply the instantaneous, comprehensive and eternal expression of existence, and recognizing this allows us to stimulate our ultimate motivation.

There is something in all of us searching for answers, which seems like life is inherently trying to comprehend itself through its own transcendence. This suggests that to approach these answers and their questions, we have to liberate ourselves from both our innate and acquired programming to return to what we truly are and what we are is not contained within the boundary of an illusory ego or restricted to the outline of a spirited body. We are the seed of our own foundation attempting to manifest what cannot be described and only demonstrated by our humble participation in the universe. However, there are too many of us who blindly engage in self-righteous or self-important behaviour that tends to lead us down a perverse trail of destruction and result in the deformity of our essence to the point that we cannot recognize it. This annihilation comes from an inability to realize our sacred place in the whole of existence to which we belong. Instead of becoming who we truly are, many of us invent autonomous identities whose significance is drawn from the brute conquest of an environment that inescapably ensures our inseparable dependency. But if we are fortunate, we will learn that our true independence is found in freeing ourselves of contrived images and false values to regain the genuineness of the universal truth.

This authenticity in life relates to the operating principle of ethicalism, which is the motivational component of the truth expressed as a commitment to ethical integrity. Ethicalism is the process and state by which we come to know and live by the truth, which is at the crux of being viagnostic. This is not a philosophy but rather an intrinsic need to grasp the greater meaning of life by finding a path that leads us to actualize our essence as we discover who and what we are. We naturally seek a higher, broader and deeper sense of the truth that can be described as moral veracity. Although related, this is not to be confused with our moral upbringing because it is not simply a reflection of our convictions about what is right or wrong. It is about foundation and integration without absolutes, and alignment without obedience or compliance. It is to holistically approach the realities of life while confronting the bias in our desires and fears so that we may decode the lessons of a meaningful existence and apply them in an effort to bring the world and ourselves into balance with the universal truth. Instead of declaring what is right or wrong, we engage in thoughtful moral inquiry while acknowledging the complexity of every act or scenario to unravel a profound and entangled verity that converges with an ethical foundation.

When our awareness expands to see beyond the biosocial dimensions of our egocentric concerns, we begin to comprehend that true morality transcends societal law and doing what is right to move us genuinely closer to the universal truth. It is about living by what and how things essentially are. It is to embody the truth in our action. And when we consciously, deliberately and relentlessly abide by and apply an inherent set of interrelated principles, we have aligned ourselves with the truth. In that moment, we become indistinguishable from that which we seek. This is not meant to suggest that we know the truth definitively, but rather that we know there is a fundamental truth. Science and moral veracity both operate on that assumption, while art and religion both attempt to exemplify it. Since the ethics of nature is conveyed through balance and rebalance and since we are part of nature, it appears that it is through our sentience that this third and ultimate tendency of life is demonstrated.

Some of us may consider our conscience to be nothing more than an acquired internal program rooted in our societal indoctrination that instructs us on the difference between right and wrong. But while our moral conscience can be unconsciously influenced by our culture and easily confused with feelings of guilt and shame that our families and communities may instill in us, it is an innate capacity embedded in nature and matures with our expanding forms of consciousness. It emerges as a sense or intuition that tells us that something is not right or that something is incomplete or misaligned. But regardless of what we believe or how we experience moral awareness, it points to something that only averts our attention away from a deeper or greater truth. This is why we often to try to dismiss or ignore our conscience and associated feelings. It takes us to a place we do not want to visit. Unfortunately, it is only in its avoidance that we prolong our struggle with reality and never confront the truth hidden behind our delusions and fabrications, which are typically driven by baseless fears and lesser motives.

Since this motivational layer is the deepest but least understood, it is vulnerable to many misinterpretations, if not to outright disregard. It is also exploited to justify a wide range of condescending attitudes and domineering behaviours. We see this in the self-declared moral superiority and all-encompassing knowledge of life we associate with elitist or moralistic individuals whose permit themselves to dictate the truth as well as with the ruthless and autocratic who substitute unity with subjugation or annihilation, where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Both extremes are perilously delusional and responsible for obscuring or severing the indispensable link to our essence, which in conjunction with the broader influence of culture can also manipulate the meaning of integrity.

Ethical integrity is not limited to or even necessarily about consistency and commitment. Although consistency is a basic requirement in maintaining a sense of order or stability, it is also prone to causing dysfunction or disorder because if we are wrong, then we are committed to being consistently wrong. From that perspective, ethical integrity goes beyond practicing what we preach. It is about testing what we believe in a steady effort to approach the truth, which is not confined to the empirical and the emotional, or the objective or subjective. This is about a greater moral truth that we encounter in its many different manifestations along the wavering journeys of our lives that informs the significance of our narratives and that aligns us with the viagnostic way.

Unfortunately, as socially competitive creatures, our narrowly defined concepts of achievement and success encourage us to see integrity as maintaining the positive image we try to portray of ourselves as opposed to the authenticity of being true to who we really are. Although image and essence can converge, they rarely do because society sets the norms and perceived advantages that lure most of us into behaving in accordance to some shifting standard that benefits those of us who are already in a favourable position and wish to secure and increase our relative status. And as we deny our hypocrisy or rationalize it through its prevalence and through our allegedly just causes and feelings that supposedly vindicate our actions and our methods, we diminish our ability to recognize who we truly are and actualize our much more significant potential. The ethicalist principle, in contrast to our contrived or corrupt ways, often requires us to demonstrate leadership or take initiative when most of us seem to be going in the wrong or opposite direction. And this tendency only expresses itself when we raise our awareness above our programming, which includes our emotional response to the world, so that we may genuinely engage in free will or approximate consciously independent intention.

Volition only arises from being truly sentient. It directly depends on our perceived choices, which are identified based on knowledge of our past, present and potential circumstances. Moreover, it requires awareness of our biases and influences in order to override our immutable nature. It is not sufficient to have self-awareness and the ability to make choices. We need to be routinely observing and questioning ourselves in the context of the world to which we belong and to be readily receptive to the universal truth. By doing this, we reduce the extent to which we are programmed or manipulated to do something that deviates from what we might freely do while we align with an indeterminate existence that kindles the possibilities of life, which ultimately generate choices. However, ethicalism itself is not volition, but rather it requires that we have volition to make decisions based on a set of principles that we are committed to apply.

When we achieve pure awareness, we conceptually transcend our own bodily existence and the personal qualities that confine our identity. And as we contemplate the conditions and principles of life, we act upon the world in a way that aligns with what we recognize as true or necessary despite the known risk or expected agony that may come with our decisions. This may feel effortless because it is intrinsic to us and we see no other way it can be, but it can be equally painful since it may come with consequences that truly test our free will. Some of us may argue that our conscience is a form of subjugation because it compels us to act while its absence liberate us. However, without a conscience, there would be no fundamental struggle in the choices we make other than evaluating options in our favour. And without that struggle especially between what we know that matters and what we desire, there would be no free will to express since our choices would in effect follow a predefined path without any conscious need to direct them.

Motivation is primarily an unconscious process with intents that we infer from our behaviour. However, our essence that intuitively enters our awareness thoughtfully surfaces our purpose as a reflection of the greater truth. And when all three layers of motivation are aligned, they bring life into equilibrium as we integrate and apply what is important that adds stability to a chaotic world. We can see how seminalism offers a karmic sense of reciprocal balance while optimalism weighs the costs and benefits of moving towards a shifting qualitative target. But it is ethicalism that completes this overarching veracious tendency as a deliberate attempt to reconcile imbalances and imperfections by practicing principles that are neither directly provided by nature such as fairness nor fully captured by the psyche such as unity. Hence, it is in the spirit of all sentient existence to find the prescience and impetus needed to elevate and direct our consciousness towards moral truth and remedial action, where good can only prevail when evil is on the verge of succeeding.

THE EXISTENTIAL BURDENS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

As we become increasingly aware of our existential layers and their associated tendencies, we need a way to frame them in order to prevent us from confusing or confounding our different levels of understanding the world. This is where the viagnostic and forepsyche systems for appreciating reality merge as one balanced set of perspectives, but each one requires its own vocabulary to describe its own distinct function. While the viagnostic system provides guidance on living life, forepsyche offers an approach to questioning it because the psyche is both the bridge and barrier to the universal truth. As reality challenges the assumptions and choices we make to the point where we suffer a crisis of faith that breaks our spirit, the viagnostic framework treats this as inevitably reaching the crevice of our narrative. However, forepsyche helps us to illuminate the darkness of our indeterminate life by addressing the existential burdens of consciousness.

Most of us are so preoccupied with our own daily lives that we can be easily distracted from contemplating life, but distraction does not prevent or protect us from the looming bedlam of the psyche. While we live in a universe within a universe that partially shields us from a taxing biophysical reality, it equally exposes us to a sociopolitical one that only exists because we collectively construct and sustain it. This reality steadily converts into a cultural combat zone that disrupts the harmony we seek and require on multiple levels as we simultaneously encounter conflicts with ourselves, others and society as a whole. Our consciousness is continually bombarded with irregularities and discrepancies between what is falsely claimed and what actually transpires. But in a world where information accumulates and spreads rapidly with limited scrutiny, the lines between reality and fantasy are effortlessly blurred. As long as a desired and persuasive fallacy wins over any inconvenient and uncomfortable truth, the ostentatious few among us can feed on the rest of us dispersed across the marginalized masses as we jointly and unwittingly wage a clandestine war against all that is veritable.

Although we are all susceptible to delusion and we foolishly conform to the illusory realm of our social hierarchy in which the ego is its supreme leader, each of us has an inner voice that nudges us to find genuine meaning somewhere between the reality we may want to change and the essence we want to express. The fortunate among us are not those with material advantages, but rather those of us who are aware of the intangible riches of life. It seems inconceivable to many of us that we would sacrifice our endowments or fail to exploit opportunities that improve or secure our social standing, but these apparent sacrifices and irrationalities reflect a more profound insight into our existential struggle with personal burdens that require us to be mindful on three distinctly meaningful levels. These levels refer to the ecopolitic, the egodynamic and the ethostatic domains or arenas of a sentient existence, and they respectively relate to (a) the conditions forced upon our lives, (b) the identities and relationships we form with others, and (c) the principles we learn and apply in the greater narrative of life.

In an advanced socioeconomic system where we generally have easy access to basic provisions and many luxuries, many of us are sheltered from the visceral reality of a corporeal existence. However, if we were to briefly step outside of our immediate preoccupations, we would quickly realize that we operate within an ecopolitic arena, where everyone is obliged to enter but only the fittest or luckiest can temporarily leave. We cannot escape the domain of our survival, where we find our common struggle for power and resources and where we learn the harshest lessons of life. We settle on the best deals we can make with one another while we discern what and whom we can trust to build the cooperative alliances required for competing against the cruelest and greediest among us. This is the amoral sphere of existence, where those who obtain authority, either by a majority vote or by the threat of physical violence, set the rules. This is the crude law of the jungle, where beauty serves as a disguise for the ugliness of nature, and where most virgin qualities are lost to the lure of false offerings of kindness and insincerity preceded only by indifference. It is a battleground where we seek advantages over one another and where we make untrustworthy promises of success contingent upon group affiliation. This is the arena where the logic of raw power directly and deviously dictates the unfolding of events. Only the innocent and the naïve among us believe that this is a world managed by the good and protected from evil because experience teaches us that there is no clear distinction between good and evil in this complex maze of motives from the desperate to the avaricious. However, while these unforgiving conditions are inevitably forced onto all of us, it is vital that we do not lose ourselves in this primordial battle that mainly exposes the life that is and not the life we want because there is another layer of conflict we need to appreciate that impacts the way we perceive our existence.

An entirely other perspective that is perhaps the most common level from which we view and interpret events is found in the egodynamic arena or the constantly shifting web of the self, where the proverbial struggle to know thyself commands our experience. We are on a semantic adventure with a self-defining quest, where identity is the conceptual sum of our beliefs, deeds, traits and relationships that include their confidence, frequency or regularity and quality. This domain operates mainly within our own heads and yet requires all of us to do so concurrently in relation to one another because this is where we develop our individual stories in the context of interpersonal experiences and sociocultural interactions. Unfortunately, this extends to the pretension of living and knowing who we are by creating endlessly staged records of our supposedly happy lives or by believing what others tell us before we even bother to find out for ourselves. Whether we are mentally entombed in a neglected life or falsely liberated by a privileged one, too many of us cannot distinguish between what we are and the roles we play in our daily dramas because we are caught in emotional storms raining with inconsequential preoccupations and distractions. This is the social wilderness of indiscreet mating calls and ceremonial games where we choose to replace whom we are with our personas and avatars in order to collect points or win prizes that we do not know if we really want. The self originates from within this space, where we attempt to define and express ourselves while facing the requisite apathy of a biosocial jungle by voluntarily performing at an open yet shadowy theatre where no roles are preordained.

Very few of us knowingly enter into the ethostatic arena, but this domain represents the fundamental struggle we have with our conscience. It is where we wrestle with the principles of life to reconcile our competing values. It is where we discover if we have a higher self or a soul as we choose to partake in an ensemble of meditative performances or to sit among an uninvited audience of advocates and critics. While many of us find little time to step onto the dimly lit stage of our contemplation, the opportunity to achieve an enlightened sense of meaning rests on this platform. It is where the fight of the spirit resides and it is where we ultimately find it or lose it. And as we learn the true significance of good and evil, we come to realize that we may not be on the right side of where we think we are. This frame of understanding is not to be confused with our awareness of the unstoppable forces we face on a global or galactic scale, or with our introspection into the darker places of ourselves, and by extension, the people we love or hate. This is where we strip away our unspoken desires and fears to more clearly disclose the moral imbalance in our lives and envision the instrumental role we may play in resetting it. It is a deep-seated consciousness that goes beyond the familial, religious and political indoctrinations that we all undergo but which ignites or stirs something we already have within us. This means that there is no tolerance for the self-righteous justifications of our actions because we intrinsically seek harmonic well-being within and outside of ourselves, and because it is here where we discover our essence in our relationships with the world and its sentient creatures.

In the film The Shape of Water [13], the main character, Elisa, quietly lives within all three domains until an encounter with a captured amphibious humanoid tensely pulls these core perspectives together. As a mute woman working as a night shift cleaner at a secret government facility at the height of the Cold War during the civil rights movement when individuals were overtly marginalized for being different, she feels alienated and incomplete along with her small cluster of relegated friends and coworkers. However, the geopolitical, psychosocial and bioethical dimensions of a sentient existence converge in the unexpected relationship between a tortured aquatic beast extracted from its natural habitat and an unfulfilled social reject found abandoned on the riverside as a child with conspicuous scars on her neck. It is in the ambiguity of their anomalous origins that we find clarity of meaning, and it is in their forbidden love of the other where unity is achieved and moral balance is restored.

It is clear that fiction can explore the complexities of the psyche to expand on existential themes and convey meaning through the narrative that exists beyond the page and outside the flesh, but science will irresistibly and compellingly condense our lives to a set of biochemical programs that are responsible for our emotional torment and ethical behaviour. Undoubtedly, we will continue to uncover these programs and their neural pathways, but multiple layers of awareness are at play whose distinct contexts cannot be probed and managed by bodily scans, blood tests and all the monitoring devices we can introduce. And despite that many of our struggles are being minimized by innovation, technology will equally and ironically add to those struggles. Moreover, even as we come to measure our concerns with happiness and justice, calculate equations for maximizing our overall benefit, and shed light on behavioural anomalies like hunger strikes and self-sacrifices for total strangers, we will not gain any real insight into the significance of our values unless we discuss and understand them on their own terms. Our tools may enhance our ability to conduct science, create art and even contemplate our ethics, but they will neither solve the deeper mystery of life nor end our pursuit of the universal truth.

Technology has become so infused in our lives that it acts as a seamless extension of ourselves, and it will gradually become life by its own right as an animate product of our synthetic creation that independently learns and creates in an effort to move through and alter its environment as well as solve perceived problems. However, we are a long way from fully appreciating the underlying purpose of our existence that artificial life may never intuitively understand. We still have difficulty grasping why anyone would risk everything for an unwavering commitment to an intangible principle, or why any of us would destroy or mistreat the very thing we need to be genuinely happy or fulfilled. There has to be something more to this in the same way that we know there is an underlying order and meaning to life.

Instead of trying to liberate ourselves psychologically and technologically from the burdens of consciousness, we have an opportunity to master our own awareness and take ownership of the reality we choose to face rather than letting others or the world at large force it upon us. By considering these three existential planes, we can deconstruct our notions of mind, body and soul and integrate them into a more meaningful self and less illusory ego. As we look outwards beyond ourselves to discover or generate meaning through our experience, we realize that our essence is already within us and that our will holds the key to unlocking and actualizing our potential within our own stories while we openly recognize and deliberately participate in the greater narrative of life.