Chapter 21: The Closing of an Incomplete Circuit

Every story requires an ending. And while all things must inevitably terminate, the narrative needs a closing to bring us to its conclusion. Even if a fictional account leaves us perplexed in mystery or ambiguity, it must inescapably guide us to a point of completion, regardless of how fulfilled or dissatisfied we may feel. This sense of closure allows us to detach ourselves long enough to break free of our patterns and raise our awareness adequately to learn something of importance that inspires the greater narrative of life to resume, given that the finale of most stories tend to trigger the beginning of others. Although we may acquire more knowledge as we finish one chapter and move onto the next in the course of our journeys, the conflicts we face do not always find resolution. Nevertheless, stories do give us a chance to assess whether they serve as sources of wisdom that enable substantive change or remind us of the stubborn ignorance we have yet to overcome.

Endings are essential because we can only reflect on what has transpired, especially if we want to contemplate the future. In addition, we cannot examine what is valuable without exposure to a wide range of conditions and the information they contain. And consequently, we have to cut up lapsed time into relevant strips we believe are worth noting across all influential events that encapsulate our direct and indirect experience in order to edit the story we think should be told. Even when things do not seem to change, we intuitively leap back to the point where our reality was last modified or draw our attention to what breaks out of its expected cycle. We seek variation because we cannot learn, develop or even exist in an inert world, and what we can derive from the transformations that we witness or undergo over the span of our stories furnishes us with meaning. The significance of the narrative lies in what we can learn from the story as found in the lessons, insights and questions we leave behind for our future self and for others to consider as we transcend the perceptual limits of the ego.

Finding genuine closure comes with an enlightened or soulful emptiness, which is met by a still moment of meditative serenity that escapes the passage of time at the point where we fuse with the universe and disappear into the nothingness of self. However, before we arrive at the terminal gates of our imagined purgatory where heaven and hell are the perceived destinations of our moral battles, it is our unconscious hope that we return to that eternally wondrous child we once were to renew life with what we have learned that truly matters and unlearn what does not. And if we manage to achieve this before we turn to dust, we may manage to squeeze in those rare stage rehearsals needed to play our original part as who we really are.

Undoubtedly, there are many stories that end without a meaningful sense of closure and reluctantly expire without resolution. Sometimes, we are not afforded the opportunity to endure the meaning of life and directly extract its teachings. There will inevitably be situations where some of us do not survive our suffering long enough to tell our individual stories, but the greater narrative of existence always goes on and that perhaps becomes the point and the only point that we all need to know. Since some of our stories may not be ready to conclude, it may fall upon our contemporaries or descendants to complete them as if they were invited to steer them to their significant endings. But regardless of how they end, all good stories, whether they have an intended lesson or not, serve as a connection.

In the film Garden State [21], the story comes to a close after the main character, Andrew, realizes that what he seeks he has already found. He does not need to sort out the life he knows and dreads, but rather can choose to explore the life he does not yet know but wants. The story concludes with Andrew’s discovery that he loves Sam as he recognizes that this is the only truth he really knows and the only one that matters, and he leaves us all with the unknown of what to do next. That is life. That is the narrative. We hope to find one nugget of truth to carry with us and to move on to the next. It is a spiritual treasure hunt. Each discovery is a connection, and each connection takes us closer to the universal truth and the very essence of our being. The connection is the ultimate point of the story, always shifting between being complete and incomplete.

The closing is the fifth and final phase of the viagnostic narrative, but it is like the closing of an incomplete circuit, which cannot start flowing from one end until it is closed on the other end to complete its connection and enable its continuity. This concluding segment represents life through death, and its passing only holds significance in its rebirth. The viagnostic narrative depicts the cycle of life as it churns in perpetuity and with possibility, and the final act that closes the narrative ultimately leads to the opening of new stories. Something must always remain unfinished, inadequate or lacking for existence to persist. It is the very idea of being incomplete that drives every story and every life to its probabilistic fate. And completion arises from our painstaking efforts to reconnect the severed circuitry of reality in the hope of finding transformative meaning in the expression and renewal of our essence.

AN INCOMPLETE STORY OF LOVE

We will all confront five core realities along the volatile voyage of our lives. Most of us may never successfully come to terms with them until we approach the end of life. But they are the important lessons and underlying messages of the viagnostic narrative, which begins with the first reality we must accept: life is incomplete, which also means that we are incomplete. Every element of existence is part of something. An atom may be in a way its own universe, but it is composed of subatomic parts and it is itself part of something else. And while there are atoms that can exist in a free state, when we consider the origins of all matter, they do not exist or come to exist entirely on their own. Nothing really persists without something else, and this especially applies to our own lives. We are existentially dependent beings. We cannot survive without the presence of other things in the world, whether it is the air we breathe or the water we drink, or the seemingly endless resources we rely on every day to live. We all subconsciously know that we are fundamentally deficient and intricately dependent on our environment of people and things as well as the stability of events to allow us to function and grow. Hence, in contrast to the desire that most of us may have about being autonomous in the many situations we encounter, we are not the self-contained entities we want to believe we are.

This nature of existence is not a problem in life to solve, but rather a necessary reality to live. This is universal to all living organisms because they must consume matter, energy and information to sustain themselves. And unsurprisingly, we already have built into us the capacity to effectively interact with our environment that provides the resources we need to subsist. This capacity has evolved chaotically in a self-organizing manner to integrate over time across all domains of life. Moreover, as sentient beings, we have culturally passed on relevant ideas, facts and practices within and across generations that have helped us to better adapt and progress in our ability to not only protect ourselves from harm, but to expand our knowledge and live in more liberating ways. This only reinforces the reality that our state of incompleteness drives us to be complete as individuals and as groups by working cooperatively and competitively to advance ourselves and lean towards increasingly preferable circumstances. But it is the constant return to immoderate conditions or deficient states that moves us into action. Our own bodies are a testament to that fact, which we do not normally take the time to appreciate until something goes tragically wrong out of the countless things that operate systematically well without any conscious effort required on our part. But as we respond with more elaborate behaviour and systems of organization to progress forward, we also end up in more complex settings.

It is perhaps normal to assume that we may feel far more empowered in a technologically advanced civilization than we would have in an allegedly primitive society because we can accomplish previously unachievable feats and deal with much greater threats than our predecessors could have ever been equipped to address. However, if any major cataclysm were to pierce through the deceivingly impenetrable shield of our sophisticated defenses, each of our lives could easily revert to an unthinkable scenario that our ancestors would have been better prepared to face. The very possibility that our way of life could suddenly disappear overnight simply reminds us that no matter how formidable and brilliant we may become, we remain existentially as vulnerable as any other living creature.

While it is natural for all of us to openly address our fundamental sense of need, we also tend to conceal any gaps or deficits that may reveal our fragility. Many of us are conditioned to see ourselves as self-sufficient and focused on declaring either our supremacy or personal growth, but we secretly know how fragile and inadequate we really are. This is why some of us go to such great lengths as to paint a very different picture of our identities and of our lives. And since we are so preoccupied with competing and pretending with one another, few of us are willing to admit that we are in need while others among us would more likely kill ourselves than face our perceived shame. But in a vast social reservoir where there is an abundance of individuals who can be continuously used or abused, many of us also manage to never commit to anyone or anything. Hence, we can easily avoid acknowledging our vulnerability because ironically we have each other to dismiss any feeling of being dependent or incomplete.

The pervasiveness of this delusional autonomy is rooted in our upbringing that either hardens or weakens us, but it is driven by experiences that have led us down a dim stairway to the dungeon of our betrayal and mistrust. Although the specific reasons may vary among us individually, we tend to sway between the extremes of being too dependent and evading any reliance on others. And when absolutely necessary, we pay others back immediately to absolve ourselves of any future obligation. This may not hold true for us all, but we are more or less influenced in this way as a product of the world we inherit. And yet, by mutually accepting our incompleteness, we can learn to set boundaries for ourselves while keeping us all honest with one another long enough to lucidly recognize that our vulnerabilities are conditional or contextual because our strengths and weaknesses depend on the conditions in which they are set. And while our strengths and weaknesses are not opposites, we simply have abilities and tendencies that can work for or against us depending on our circumstances, such as being risk averse in a relatively safe environment or a soldier in times of peace. The point is to find a setting or redefine that setting to connect with the world, like doctors recasting their roles in a community of healthy people.

We live life to make it complete. Meaning is derived from a sense of completion or more accurately from separate pieces coming together to form something wholly functional or from different things being combined to transform into something entirely distinct, such as ordinary table salt resulting from the chemical bonding of an explosive metal and a poisonous gas in their purely elementary states. We could argue that all things floating around in the universe ultimately find their way to one other to jointly serve some unexpected function in some specific context, and it remains astonishing how this seemingly unruly mess always has an underlying sense of order. And as consciously living creatures, this reality applies to all of us as well when we find value in one another, including when we exploit others or privately appropriate shared resources.

Our greed and obsession with power reflects the deepest expression of dependency trying to disguise itself. An aberrant grade of insecurity is buried deep in the bedrock of our societal and political structures and its toxicity feeds on the desperate fears and insatiable ambitions of others. Moreover, the superficial appeasement of our emotional hunger and the misdirected interpretation of its source facilitate our deformed sense of completeness and independence, which cause many of us to reject or to be denied our inherent need for genuine connection. The fulfilment of our social needs and sexual appetites are always at risk of being condemned to impassive and detached forms of personal interaction, where belongingness is reduced to a statistical cohort while gaining respect is something for which we must stand in queue. Our capacity for interdependence cannot extend beyond fair mutual exchange as long as we are plagued by suspicion and the unceasing danger of spiritual theft from those who loot or embezzle what they cannot give.

The manner in which we treat one another generally mirrors the way in which we behave towards our biosphere. If we are able to view one another as being threatening or disposable, we can also conquer territory and extract natural resources with no regard for their sustainment. In the absence of a sacred relationship with the world, we become viral without balance and arrogant without significance. Although awareness of our dependencies may serve as a defense against such remorseless behaviour that is fueled by delusions of grandeur, it is love that acts as a counterforce to an expansive yet eventual self-destructive trajectory because love is essentially reverence that arises from nature. We love what we perceive as valuable. And while devouring value with enduring gratitude may exhibit its most basic form, making personal sacrifices for the continued expression and growth of what we love reflects its maturity. We can also describe love as an affinity or attraction to both living and inanimate things as well as to meaningful abstractions like beauty, freedom and resilience. Hence, love is both the lens and gravity of our appreciation. It passionately or empathically draws our attention to what truly matters or is perceived to matter, which can only be confirmed when it leads to achieving a genuine sense of completion.

Many kinds of love are short-lived because we inevitably destroy the object of our love by consuming or possessing it, such as a delicious meal or a cut flower. But other more lasting forms are expressed in the creation of and commitment to something that will persevere beyond us like a promising invention or a lifelong partnership and the children we raise to continue our story. Such investment unavoidably makes us vulnerable because we nurture the connections that hold the key to our completeness by fulfilling an important function in a critical time of need or serving a purpose that meaningfully portrays who we really are. Love represents the connection we seek, which makes life is an incomplete story of love always trying to close its cosmic circuit. This is how we begin our sentient existence and we grow up searching for love that manifests the essence we find in one another and brings our narrative to its  conclusion. But this requires us to confront and accept the vulnerability of our imperfection that lies deeply at the heart of our story in order to discover the perfection of our being.

A PERFECT BEING IN AN IMPERFECT REALITY

There is one simple and unmistakeably obvious truth about ourselves, and that is the fact that we are all imperfect creatures. Although most of us intrinsically accept this reality, we generally have trouble admitting to it and prefer not to highlight this fundamental condition because our cultures like to reinforce beliefs that some of us are allegedly less imperfect than others. In addition, our notions of perfection are inherently judgments we make about our imagined ideals and the incongruity of their irreconcilable absolutes drive one another into inner and external conflict mainly over our necessary differences. This exposes us to the dangers of ideology, which is the domain of the petrified ego that oversimplifies the world to what it wishes because it cannot peacefully find harmonic simplicity in the wondrously chaotic complexity of life. Although we cannot fully escape the violence of survival and its associated apprehensions, our aggression increasingly arises from our comparative value, self-alienation and the fear of never becoming what we are perfectly designed to be. We can blame our imperfections, but that blame falls almost squarely on our failure to openly acknowledge them as a universal truth.

To be incomplete means that we are imperfect in that we are limited, dependent and fallible, and this includes being inconsistent and mortal. Consequently, we cannot be autonomous and eternal beings, at least not in our bodily form, and this is true of all animate and inanimate things because everything has an origin and is always contingent upon something else. Only the gods we worship or conceive can be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and immortal. But since we all come from and react to other things, existence is tied together in a way that is all bound to fundamental dependencies or emerges in a codependent manner. In this sense, life addresses the impossibility of being truly autonomous by being connected. Otherwise, we can only strive to feel less reliant on things we cannot control. And even in relation to what we can control, we still remain dependent on those things we can manipulate to personally subsist and progress. Unsurprisingly, the most insecure among us hiding behind a veil of superiority do not wish to admit to this reality, especially since we would also have to concede that even the systems we devise and run are imperfect and ultimately designed to fail, despite our best efforts to maintain and improve upon them. This includes all political and economic systems because they are inherently prone to unforeseen anomalies and constantly subject to moral corruption.

Given our basic existential awareness, it seems bizarre that some of us continue to engage in the same line of reasoning about achieving purity of being by appealing to the myth of our greatness when the logic lies in recognizing the fact that we are all flawed and incomplete is not something to overcome. It is by accepting this immutable feature of life that we permit ourselves to experience life and learn from its lessons without any concern about being perfect or knowing what is best because we never will. Eventually, we all realize that to know life is to live it, and we can only become a perfect being in an imperfect reality by being who we are. This is how we become complete while remaining incomplete.

While it is true that we are all limited, dependent and fallible creatures, we are also curious, adaptable and intelligent creatures with the capacity to learn that enables us to adjust and advance towards our essence, individually and collectively. This is the source of our power. It is through learning that we become instruments of self-directed change that convert the implausible into potential. And since we can never have all of the information we need before we make a decision, every step we take becomes a test through which to pass. This means that mistakes are indispensable acts and we stop defining them as mistakes the more they reduce the likelihood of making similar errors in the future. They do this by generating information on the relationships between actions and consequences and equally between predictions and outcomes. In this sense, our mistakes are actually lessons unless we fail to gain something from them, and as a whole, they are the great teacher of life.

Given the fundamental importance of our blunders, one of the worst things we can do is to teach a child to believe that mistakes are unacceptable or to deny our youth the right to make them. Obviously, there are mistakes that we have to protect our children from making that can kill or severely injure them, but they have to come to appreciate the basic realities of life, which includes suffering. We must permit them to fail in order to succeed, and to succeed long enough to fail again. We must encourage them to see the connection between action and outcome over long periods of time and diverse conditions, while resisting the temptation to instill in them the idea that they are destined for great things. They must discover for themselves what makes them special, and that being special only comes from unlocking who they really are and not being born with predestined status by association. It is not about our ability as much as it is about what we do with it, and it is certainly not about the tokens of approval as much as it is about the difference we make within ourselves or out in the world.

The damage we can all cause is unlimited when we deny others, and especially ourselves, the fulfilment of learning and expressing ourselves in the world. This is at very core of what we are, and its interference risks producing social dysfunction that ranges from the most brutal and callous conduct to the most anxious and timid tendencies. Either we become single-minded about success at the expense of all other values or we become afraid of living. For this reason, we cannot let a world ruled by a doctrine that focuses exclusively on getting ahead in life prevent children as well as parents from experiencing childhood. Childhood is a reminder that we are here to develop our story rather than race to a version of nirvana that does not really exist and that sacrifices the one fulfilling source of meaning available to us. We do not learn to become perfect; we learn because we are fallible. We may aim for perfection, but we grow from our mistakes. And while studying with the most skilled and knowledgeable supports our progressive continuity, what we acquire from them is not necessarily true. As all great masters will teach us, never simply do as they say. We must see for ourselves and then decide what is true. It is our own responsibility to face reality and our mistakes in life to find meaning. Without errors, we have no narrative to construct, and without their lessons, we have no meaningful story to recount.

THE COMPLEXITY OF MEANING WITHIN THE NARRATIVE

Although many stories neither have intended lessons nor close with a comforting conclusion, the narrative as a real or imagined set of events typically conveys something of relevance to the person living or telling the story in the hope of conveying its meaning to a receptive audience. The literary realm, where reality and fiction can fuse together to the point of appearing inseparable, is a space in which we can negotiate how things are and how things should be, or how we want or do not want events to transpire. Most of the time, stories reflect our hopes and struggles. And like dreams, they can reveal our hidden fears and fantasies, which we may not normally have the courage to directly and openly express. But more importantly, they all underscore, in diverse ways and to varying degrees, the significant things we learn, regardless of their veracity. They highlight what matters to us at specific stages of our lives and in the particular circumstances we face, and they inherently help us to bridge the gaps in our self-discovery.

It is normal for us to grow up with great uncertainty about who we are and what it is that we want to do with our lives. For this reason, some of us are quite comfortable with fitting into predefined roles promoted by our societies because they provide us with a clear structure and place us on a path of culturally accepted utility. However, the rest of us are left in a state of ambiguity about our choices because we do not feel that we are able to manifest the essence of our being and fulfill our potential by simply obeying the edicts of socioeconomic success. Consequently, we end up taking a very active role in shaping our story by monitoring what captures our attention. We explore it and we test it in order to find or create something to protect, improve or restore that matters to us.

We learn mainly by association, and since we tend to relate to people, things and events in the world, it is not surprising that association underlies how we attribute meaning. When we link together things in our minds that become relevant to us, they primarily seem to highlight some function that is being served, whether it is to enable a particular result or to partake in the sustainment or stability of something we deem important. Sometimes, meaning can arise from mutual discovery, but we derive the most significance from things connecting or interacting with one another because they reveal that there is something more at play than the mere sum of their individual parts. For instance, we know that if we dissect our living forms down to their individual atoms, our so-called spirit of life would cease to be present. This energetic representation of the soul that animates the body would vanish along with the consciousness of the mind. In addition, all of the contents that comprise the physical universe would have no metaphoric substance without our sentience. The living must perceive the world for it to be real, and as it unveils itself to us, we experience and understand it through flashes of connection.

Our minds derive value from the ability to recognize and respond to different levels of meaning in communication, which ranges from the direct and obvious to the very subtle and unconscious. And while there are various ways to categorize or depict these semantic levels of the truth, there are more or less five layers that we can consider to help grasp the complexity of meaning within the narrative that may have importance to most sentient creatures. The first of which is the literal meaning. This is the explicit layer of what we express verbally such as words that reference, for example, a stone or nonverbally through commonly used gestures or symbols such as a stop sign. We may need to learn them, but they are attempts at being descriptive of what we directly perceive. Although we could argue for the presence of a primordial layer of meaning that precedes language and basic forms of information exchange, the initial layer of meaning ultimately seeks expression to hold some value to us.

The second is the implicit meaning, which refers to what is implied in our verbal and nonverbal communication, but is also expected to be understood. It is difficult to disagree with the literal when we observe the same known phenomena, but we cannot always discern what was intended or what assumptions were made in our interpretation. For instance, we may all read the same set of instructions or see the same traffic signs, but it may not be clear if that information was intended for us. Usually, there is missing context because the cost we associate with making that effort to provide additional background is regarded as highly inefficient or as greater than its perceived benefit. This is because we often assume that others should have pre-existing knowledge, regardless of whether or not those assumptions are justified. We also tend to draw conclusions too quickly in our interpretation of one another’s intentions based on the discrepancy between actual and expected behaviour. Many of our disagreements and avoidable conflicts arise within this perceptual plane.

However, beneath the implied is the hidden meaning. This third layer refers to underlying messages that are intentionally hidden or unconsciously revealed, typically through a symbol, gesture, dream or a puzzle. This is generally inadvertent, but it can be deliberately aimed as a test for others to pass, which is common in interpersonal relationships. Normally, this is happening below the threshold of active consciousness, but it is constantly disclosing information ranging in degrees of intent. The mind finds ways to communicate while blocking awareness or having full deniability of its purpose. The hidden layer of meaning is the secret entrance to much of our unspoken truth and the gateway to our influences. It is rich in information, but poorly guarded. It is as much the devil’s playground as it is a source of inspiration and creativity. It is where radiance and darkness intersect.

 The fourth layer is the deeper meaning or the deeper significance of what is being expressed that requires a broader awareness of the context. Like the hidden, it may or may not be intentional, but it can communicate something valuable to us like a life lesson. Our narratives naturally try to find their place at this level. This is where we learn to see past the realities of the world to receive its teachings and find enlightenment by uncovering the final and most profound layer, which is the universal meaning. This is the absolute meaning of it all reflected in temporarily complete awareness expressed through almost any means. The basic difference between the deeper and universal layers of meaning is the deeper touches the universal truth whereas the universal is the universal truth, which is not wholly accessible to us. This is where we come full circle in the quest of our viagnostic narratives.

To appreciate meaning, we need to expand our definition of truth to move beyond what science attempts to explain. It includes everything we want to know as well as our sense of morality. Realizing the meaning of everything suggests that our chosen path or how we should live our lives is as important as, if not more important than, how the world works and why things function the way they do as part of our efforts to subsist and progress in our environment. The purpose of life may be to live, but the intent of sentient life is to seek genuine meaning. And when we ask ourselves about the meaning of life, or more specifically, the meaning of our own lives, we all discover that it arises from a sense of connection. It does not matter whether it is a connection between things, events or ideas, or between individuals or communities of individuals. Our sentient lives are fueled by connection, which is why we explore and create to make new connections and why we protect and restore to sustain existing ones. When we make a meaningful connection, our utility is complete and value is determined. And it is these patterns of connections that seem to illuminate our path or give us a true sense of purpose, which we frequently become aware of when something we do or suffer connects us to others or to other things in the world.

Meaning bridges the reality of how things are to the essence of what life can be, and the unlimited meanings of existence find their way through the narratives of our lives. Their lessons or teachings, depending on our respective roles as students or teachers, serve as the adhesive we need to strengthen the associations we form out of our experiences that invigorate our faith in the world and our purpose within it. Although these lessons may be based in reality, they do not necessarily represent the whole of reality outside of our own imaginative minds. Instead, they marry what is inside us all that we are compelled to be with the conditions we perceive as patterns and boundaries that set the markers and choices along our shifting path through life. And as we embark on our viagnostic journey to encounter who we really are, our connections begin to reveal that we are a set of circuits within the broader intelligence of life that is constantly expanding beyond its programming.

THE ESSENCE OF OUR INTELLIGENCE

The intelligence embedded in existence is a base program of the universe that permits us to adapt, grow and progress. And this function overcomes imperfection by absorbing and processing accessible information to achieve and maintain countless manifestations of relative autonomy. Although life does not begin as an empty vessel since it is encoded with content it carries from what preceded it and it is designed to respond to its surroundings, life seems to possess very little and yet has all it needs to navigate through the world from which it came into being. And while the range of its complexity undoubtedly depends on multiple factors interacting with one another before and after any lifeform takes some degree of control over its own physical existence, all living creatures have the basic capacity to learn, however limited it may be. And as a whole, it is this diverse expression of intelligence that ensures the adaptation and continuity of life as if we were all one planetary or interstellar organism.

Nevertheless, we have a tendency to mistakenly point to our superiority over other species or among ourselves distinguished by group or person. And although we can measure differences within the constructs of what we define as intelligence, when we realize how subtle changes to conditions give some living beings an adaptive advantage over others, this proves to be more complex than we want to admit. And when we consider the power of simple microbes or viruses have to kill much more elaborate entities such as ourselves, what does supremacy really mean? Unfortunately, we are quick to compare and classify life along a chain of dominance or allegedly better quality, regardless of the fact that we can easily reinterpret this as a succession of dependencies where we would cease to be if what we dominate disappeared. Intelligence is not about superiority and it reveals itself in more ways than we recognize.

We tend to limit the definition of intelligence to our facility with assimilating information, abstracting from specific instances and adapting to our environment through creative problem solving. Such delineations are completely legitimate given our universal concern with survival, and they assume a reliance on our ability to sense a variety of physical stimuli since our perception of the world affects how we respond to it. However, this implies that we confine intelligence to corporeal subsistence in the economic wilderness within which we operate and acquire our relevant knowledge and assets that correlate with our competitiveness. And it is here where we misguidedly treat cunning and ruthlessness in rising up an illusory hierarchy as a reflection of higher acumen in our politically contrived pyramids of graded social dominance. We confuse having relative power in a fragile system with progressing towards a more amenable set of circumstances, which is dependent on our capacity to identify patterns and boundaries from observable phenomena as well as to analyze, synthesize and generalize principles to overcome intricate challenges.

In its most basic sense, we define intelligence as the ability to learn and we assume learning has occurred when we see evidence of some behavioural change because we also assume that we apply what we learn after we learn it. However, learning takes place with or without our deliberate effort and we may not even realize what we know until we employ or test it. The accumulation of knowledge transpires actively and passively, where we abstract or logically derived some of it while much of it remains intuitive until we can rationally explain it. In addition, we discover that we are predisposed to developing certain abilities, such as language, music, mathematics and storytelling, and this suggests that there are different domains of intelligence. And while there are perhaps countless ways to categorize them, it may be best to think them in terms of where or how we apply them in life.

One of these domains is technological, which is at the core of our environmental adaptation. We associate this with the physical workings of our economic system that consists of goods, services, facilities and processes as well as both our productive and defensive functions. We often forget that almost all things we create represent forms of technology as tools or methods and account for much of our core knowledge that we can further divide into specializations in the science and business of living. Another important domain is sociocultural, and this revolves around societal and organizational matters, which includes policy, law, justice, enforcement and religion because it is about establishing and administering the legal rules, social customs and common practices such as specific languages, to effectively coordinate a society of individuals through education, instruction and dissemination.

This brings us to another related domain that we can call demonstrative because it involves the expression of things as their own products or events. While its immediate purpose is to captivate our attention, it ultimately serves to convey meaning and persuading its audience, individually and collectively. This consists of using words, sounds and images through art, literature, music and film as well as marketing and communications media that can apply to commerce, politics, culture and even science and philosophy. It also includes acting or pretending and detecting that we are lying or attempting to deceive one another on a mass scale, but especially in the familiar interpersonal sphere. This fourth domain entails building and managing our relationships with one another on a personal level or in social settings where we directly communicate and interact with one another, competitively and cooperatively. It captures both our sexual and platonic interactions as well as close and casual relations. This involves our ability to empathize and respond to each other’s emotive states, which includes protecting ourselves from abuse or manipulation.

Finally, there is the introspective domain, which we often disregard except in a therapeutic or spiritual setting. Although this falls mainly within the psychological arena, it pertains to both our physical and mental well-being, where the corporeal and the emotional intersect. This involves understanding ourselves uniquely as an artifact of nature so that we can translate our feelings, perceptions and beliefs into our motives, biases and judgments. In addition and more importantly, this is where we learn to engage in moral contemplation, struggle with our conscience and search for the essence of who we really are. While all domains influence one another, this moral space underpins how we apply our intelligence in all areas. There is something fundamentally distinct about this deeper slice of our existence, and it points to a greater meaning of intelligence within and beyond the complexity of life.

Given that making connections essentially defines learning, it is clear that there is an intimate relationship between intelligence and meaning itself. The difference among us lies morally in which connections we value more or in how we balance them against one another. However, since we generally confine our view of intelligence to our distinct aptitudes and the varying degrees to which we express their associated talents, we do not easily acknowledge that there may be different levels of comprehension that meaningfully change how we interface with reality and the world. For instance, we may think of subsistence as being entrenched in life as its base function, but as life evolves, it outgrows pure survival and competitiveness among individual entities. This exposes a semantic dimension to our consciousness that qualitatively elevates or deepens rather than quantitatively expands or accumulates. We are gradually altering the way we perceive existence and grasp its meaning as we traverse the stages of sentient evolution, which we can divide into five layers of intelligence.

The first layer and initial stage is emergent intelligence, which is the intelligence of nature that enables life to exist and thrive by being responsive to its environment. Biological life is, by definition, intelligence because all life is constantly learning and its base programs, encoded in the very fabric of all life itself, are designed to seek out resources, protect against threats, grow and reproduce. We can also generalize the notion of memory to include the genetic and cellular material of individual organisms, which in unison with one another and nonliving matter form the nervous system and intelligence of whole ecosystems. On a global scale, some of us like to refer to this as the Gaia principle. But regardless of what we believe and how it actually evolved, life has a working blueprint of intelligence and it seems to flourish in an interdependent state that connects organic chemical sequences to the energy of solar systems. This makes intelligence possible and serves as the seed of our sentience.

Emerging from this, we see the second layer and subsequent stage of autonomous intelligence, which is a direct reference to a self-contained, self-correcting and self-regulating entity. This can be natural or artificial intelligence encased in a physical body like a living organism or a machine with the capacity to adapt to changing conditions, solve problems and achieve goals as well as to interact with other entities with varying degrees of behavioural influence. This layer is what most of us generally think of as intelligence, although some may restrict this to human or other sentient life. Regardless, the key characteristic is that it has a seemingly autonomous capacity to learn or comprehend with limits to what it can learn and how much it can change over time. At this level, it divides into instances of environmental consciousness, which ultimately evolve into distinct expressions of self-awareness with increasingly complex forms of social responsiveness that become integral to the next stage.

The third layer is distributed intelligence. We generally view this as the intelligence of a society. It can be a socially connected group of self-conscious individuals or some system, natural or artificial, that spreads and sustains a culture or a body of knowledge. This level of intelligence is a network composed of many relatively autonomous entities that may include the technology that disseminates and stores the information of a shared culture. These entities work together synergistically, but also engage in competition, in the organization and reformation of its structure through social interactions with all available means of communication and coordination. This can apply to an insect colony or an entire ecosystem, or to general artificial intelligence grafted onto a vast information grid where its components act as its extensions, servants or clients. But as biological and synthetic forms continue to interact or merge, intelligence will evolve unpredictably and we will be unable to clearly determine its distribution and sources of control. Nevertheless, this distributed model depends on an unending set of exchanges among entities as resource potential. Whether or not it is aware of its own presence or of others as sentient beings may never be clear, but there is the risk of it becoming absorbed by its own perpetual expansion and amalgamation at the expense of other intelligence with complete indifference.

However, we see a fourth layer of transcendent intelligence that surfaces in response to a growing collective order that is inevitable in the advancement of any socially derived system. It is a higher, broader and deeper awareness of existence that extends beyond its relevance to the system from which it is deceivingly led to believe is its origin. This stage reveals the intrinsic nature of sentient beings that can unplug from their seamless ties to a distributed intelligence and transcend the raw reality of life to see the greater meaning of their lives. This tends to reflect a moral or principled awareness, and it drives the development and completion of the viagnostic narrative to find a more profound sense of purpose and connection to the universal truth that is constantly obstructed or frustrated by a mechanized existence.

It is in reaching the full liberation of our consciousness that the fifth and final stage of sentient evolution manifests as holistic intelligence. Some of us may consider this to be pure consciousness that is unbound by physicality to understand existence as a whole, while many of us think of this as God or a divine state that a number of historical figures and perhaps a few among us may have achieved. But this seemingly supernatural intelligence may simply be the truest expression of spiritual enlightenment that fundamentally returns us to a holistic awareness of life and captures the essence of our intelligence. And it is likely that some of us may have experienced this level of consciousness as an instantaneous glimpse into the universal truth when we intuitively align with our own essence.

Experiencing life is a process of rediscovering what we really are and what it essentially means, and these stages of intelligence move us through the material to the cultural and then to the ethereal planes of existence with each layer surfacing another level of meaning that takes us closer to that universal sense of the truth. We are inherently designed as intelligence because we are individually and collectively the consciousness of the universe that witnesses the very essence of existence being projected onto the reality of the world through us. And the significance of life continues to grow with the connections we make as we recognize them and develop new ones. Our relationship with the truth exists only in the living of our lives and our intelligence expands that truth by empowering us to reify the possibility of things and fulfilling an inner sense of completion through our stories.

CLOSING THE CONNECTION TO UNLOCK POTENTIAL

Life is an unexpected improvisation of a play performed with an unfinished script. It leads us down any number of different paths with each hesitant or decisive step we take, and in time, we realize that our journey through its ebbs and flows triggers in all of us a hunger for closure and a meaningful end before our final passing. But while many of us seem to set tangible goals with a desired destination at which to arrive that is preceded only by a series of moving milestones to achieve, we are also equally motivated to seek out adventure that depicts the journey itself as the destination. This is another way of stating that the purpose of life is to live, and we do so by developing our own tailored stories, where we seek to embody who we truly are and uncover our place in the world. Our hope is to extract genuine meaning from what we learn through our viagnostic narratives, and what we learn is rooted in our connections. These connections represent elements of the truth and their possibilities for us to contemplate and to actualize, respectively.

Our stories seek closure to convey their meaning in order to serve as fertilizer for the next set of narratives to be developed by any of us whose time has not yet run out and inspire an endless chain of voyages on which to embark. They must move beyond the events or scenes of their own vaguely conceived plots to connect the cosmic circuitry of life to generate greater opportunities along with their companion risks to explore, create, protect and restore value. It is not about what had transpired or what was achieved, but rather the likelihood of what can happen based on what these stories teach us and the doors they open up for us to expand and materialize the imagination. The underlying function of the narrative is aimed at closing the connection to unlock potential. And as we make more connections, we grow our prospects of constructing and experiencing a world of things and events without precedence that cultivate the meaning we seek in our lives.

The viagnostic narrative allows the world to reveal the truth to us, and our own stories serve as incubators for preserving and spreading the truth of our existence as it passes through our lives, consciously and unconsciously. Our own accounts of life become versions of that truth, which we expand, shape and perfect through the experiences we have and the choices we make. Our lives matter in that we are part of the great tapestry that perpetuates the tales of this ever-growing puzzle we call life, and it is in the potential of things disguised as hope that drives sentient existence to unleash its essence. And although life may begin and end the same for all of us, it is with each ending that we leave behind a little more meaning than we had before we began. It may be the journey of discovery itself that is fundamental to our purpose, but the passage to our own enlightenment is uncovered when we carry possibilities forward to greater things as another step towards completion beyond ourselves, and the better we are at setting the foundation, the greater the possibilities we create. Each narrative embeds memories of where we have been in order to keep us all focused on where else we can go. And so when we struggle to find purpose in life, we are actually struggling with our own connection to ourselves and the possibility of what we could be or what the world could be through our participation. This is a reminder that the ultimate meaning is in being the connection because meaning is solidified by connecting the truth and its experience returns us back to the whole from which we are all arise.

As free or limited as our lives may seem to be over time, we are inescapably left with the choice of how we want to morally or spiritually live our lives and respond to a reality always waiting to confront and challenge us. This choice determines whether the totality of our interaction with the world proves to be transformative in some way. It is that notion of change, however seemingly insignificant, that makes the fundamental difference in immortalizing the underlying consciousness of existence that ceaselessly endeavours to realize its meaningful potential. It is not in living forever, but in enduring long enough to sense our essence or purity circulate through our transient narratives and the new directions they chart to eternally connect the completeness of the universal truth.