Chapter 25: The Greater Narrative of an Insignificant Life

The symbol of a tree is one of the most common and appropriate representations of both life and the principle of connection. When we look at its outer edges, starting from its main trunk to its branches that culminate at its leaves, each leaf appears to have little to do with almost any other leaf except that they are all leaves. Interestingly, we could draw a similar conclusion about many of the events we experience during the course of our lives. The experiences we have that are closer in proximity may suggest that they are more likely related like the leaves stemming from the same shoot. But like leaves, if we trace back their individual lineages, we find that they are all connected to the same source or seed. Moreover, the roots and branches of a tree almost mirror one another to complete the cycle of life as they naturally bring water and sunlight together to sustain balance and growth. The tree also represents the resilience of life since it adapts to its surrounding conditions like other living organisms, and by being part of life, it transcends its individual existence by integrating with the collective of life-sustaining entities that form its ecosystem. It serves as a microcosmic emulation of the macrocosmic world that enables it to exist, and its presence reflects back why there is a world in which to exist. Thus, it should not be at all surprising that we are drawn to this emblematic image because we ourselves feel like the tree of life. We too are symbols of adaptive change and resilience seeking to grow beyond our original design only to discover that we intrinsically mature in our potential to reveal what we already are.

However, our lives mean nothing on their own. Like all trees and other lifeforms, we emerge and then fade out of existence, and the universe endures with or without our occupancy. In this sense, we are mere echoes of the fifth and final fundamental reality of life with which we end the lessons of this viagnostic narrative just as we instinctively feared when it began: life is insignificant. This is because it does not come prepackaged with meaning, and there is none to be found hidden underneath some rock waiting to be overturned that will disprove this truth. No grand equation, no universal philosophy and no godly figure descending from the heavens will ever explain everything and satisfy our hunger for meaning in life. We would be mistaken to engage in a futile search for something that does not exist and that was never meant to exist in any static or autonomous form. Yet since this is possibly our most dreaded and repressed nightmare that we spend much of our lives avoiding, we endeavour to maintain the great lie that we are inherently special regardless of whether or not we do anything at all. However, no degree of fame or attention we might gain with all the power and wealth in the world we might accumulate will affect our insignificance. At the end of this final act, we all turn to dust and our galactic residence will barely register as a speck on the cosmic timeline as we are reduced to an obscure footnote in the countless chronicles of our shared history. Hence, whether we are neglected while we are alive or eventually forgotten after we are long gone, we do not exclusively matter.

It is perhaps both extremely puzzling and intolerable for many of us to accept the insignificance of life. Yet for many among us, it is a false confirmation that life is actually meaningless and that it is only what we personally make of our existence that has any importance, and for others, this becomes a feeble excuse for behaving greedily and ruthlessly. Since so many of us were taught to believe in the great rewards to be received for our faithful actions, we demand compensation for our efforts and do not see much value in things that do not serve us well. However, an insignificant life is also the most misunderstood reality among all of the lessons we come to learn. Many of us do not apprehend the seemingly dissonant idea that we lose our true meaning when we believe that we are independently important and distinctly separate from the world. It reflects how we have missed the point entirely. Life itself may not have a preexisting significance, but it does carry the potential to be in a reality that affords us the opportunity to attribute to or extract meaning from our interwoven stories. It is only through our participation in the universe where we encounter the entities and events that enlighten us and set us on a path to fulfill the essence of what we really are as we approach the universal truth in the unfolding of our viagnostic narratives. It is important to comprehend that our irrelevance is predefined purely out of necessity, which means that life has to be insignificant in order for it to become significant. There has to be no meaning for us to ensure that there is meaning. When we stumble upon this inherent logic, it becomes clear that it is pointless to seek something that we ourselves must bring into reality. It is like looking for a nonexistent device outside of ourselves that can locate something of deep significance while failing to realize that we are the instrument that can detect or derive the meaning we pursue.

To be viagnostic is to know life by living life. It is to be fully aware that we are life by embodying it in spirit or in principle because we are both its existence and its consciousness, and in unison, we are its essence, individually and collectively. But whether we consider this to be God or think of it as the universal truth, underlying order and unifying force of existence, it is already within us. Yet as its sentient expression, we are its conduit and emblem, not the thing itself because it is not something that we can possess or acquire, including ourselves. It can only be something we manifest from being what we already are at the very root of sentient life, and hence, it is important to realize that our essence is no different from the essence tied to all other entities in the universe. Since the whole world comes from the same truth, we share the same source with other things, whether it is another person, a tree or a stone. Unfortunately, many of us work meticulously to separate ourselves from this truth, or to be something or someone else other than what and who we truly are. This is what our divisive societies implicitly teach us and what we then tell ourselves we must be because we are driven by a misguided fantasy to be free from everything that merely confines us to nothing, as our liberation from the most fundamental reality becomes our captivity.

The function of life is to play out the narrative, and the role of the narrative is to reveal the truth. This can only occur if we live our lives and develop our stories far enough to discover that each one of them forms a branch linked to a much larger tree. This tree represents the greater narrative of an insignificant life, which we only begin to grasp when we appreciate that all of the branches we grow are connections that lead to our shared significance. And it is through the connections we make with the world and one another that meaning surfaces between the essence that captures the potential for that meaning and the reality we must engage to express that essence. This is what truly describes the purpose of the viagnostic narrative, where we ultimately know life when we learn that significance arises from five core principles that complete the fifth component or tenet of the viagnostic system, and which closes the final stream of the viagnostic framework. These are the five elementary principles of the viagnostic way, which we already know as (I) setting the foundation, (II) moving into alignment, (III) gaining perspective, (IV) working towards utility and (V) being the connection.

The core viagnostic principles are individually associated with meaning, but their unseen significance lies in how they build upon one another. This is why the first principle is foundation. We need a starting point, a beginning, an origin or a source from which we can develop and expand, and to where we can return. This foundation is the universal truth. We are part of it, and although it may elude us, we can depend on it as we attempt to understand it. In a way, we already know what it is, but we simply cannot articulate it without partaking in life. The second principle is alignment. When things align, we experience the underlying order that foundation represents. Misalignment does not mean falsehood or disorder. It simply reflects what we do not comprehend, which ties us to the third principle of perspective. The whole universe is already in alignment, and it is through our perspective that we come to perceive alignment on some level or from some angle, and this brings us into alignment with the world. The fourth principle of utility helps us to identify which perspectives are relevant based on value. In other words, a meaningful perspective is one focused on what matters in life. The fifth and final principle is connection. While new connections seem to emerge from our utility, we enable and optimize utility through the connections that already exist. Connections underlie everything and they form the blueprint of the underlying order that describes our foundation, which is the universal truth.

We can all clearly see how these principles are interrelated. Foundation makes alignment possible, while alignment is what reveals the existence of foundation. Alignment triggers the need for perspective, but perspective is what allows us to perceive alignment. And although perspective also gives rise to utility, it is utility that places things into perspective. Similarly, utility leads to connection, but connection informs us about the things and events that have utility. And finally, connection or interconnectivity is what underlies foundation, which brings us full circle like a closed circuit where there is no beginning or end once engaged, and yet all of these principles can only be realized through the awareness and experience of life. The secret code we seek presents itself openly and freely, and it merely awaits our vital engagement to decipher it.

We can also compare these core viagnostic principles to five ancient representative elements. Foundation is symbolized by earth and its solidity. Alignment adapts like water, and perspective is as free as the air and can shift direction like the wind. Utility is the fire that can serve to create or destroy; and of the five principles, connection is the ether or the void that permeates and integrates all of the others. It represents the love we have for everything that enriches our experience, whether it is good or bad, because the lessons we learn come from the relationships we identify and form, and it is through the connections we create that possibilities are actualized. But this is meaningless without the other elements. There is no basis for connection without foundation, no demonstration without alignment, no understanding without perspective and no purpose without utility. When we recognize these principles as the primary elements that they are, we are able to meaningfully advance our viagnostic narrative and contribute to the greater story of life so that we may complete our journey as we cross the passage to enlightenment and the wholeness of being. This is our existential transcendence that transforms us back to what we already are at the very core of our essence. Some of us may say that this is like an awakening from a dream that deceived us into believing we were awake. But it is simply an opening for continued illumination that can transpire every single day until we exhale our final breath before our eternal rest begins and the next cosmic voyage resumes with the spirit we all share.

In the final meta-dependent stage of life, we slowly return to a kind of physical dependency as we were as infants, except with a lifetime of learning encoded in the things we have done and the truth that we have explicitly and implicitly spread to every life we have affected. If we are fortunate, we become children once again with nothing to prove except to be alive and find ourselves able to look at the world with a new sense of wonder as we approach the final act of our lives. We may never comprehend the full impact of our presence in the world, but we only need to know that we lived by the fundamental principles of the great existential truth shrouded in all of its mystery, and we usually discover this in the moments when we let go of our ego, desire and fear. This is not something we can teach, and we must therefore learn for ourselves. We can be educated in many subjects or disciplines and trained with a multitude of skills, but we can only know principles through their illustration or exemplification and with the hope that we confirm their veracity and draw our own conclusions. Each of us must undergo the stages of life to grasp the meaning of our sentient existence through our own experience, which is essential to develop our narratives and appreciate the universal truth.

THE FOUNDATION OF THE NARRATIVE

The five phases of the viagnostic narrative mimic the stages of life. We are born into a context that functions to set the foundation for the possibilities of a life to unfold and its lessons yet to be taught. Like adolescent children, we learn to follow the current and move into alignment with the forces of nature as we try to attract and repel its influences only to find ourselves led astray from what we already are. We gain perspective after we fall into the crevice of existence and after ascending to the illusory summit of our ego. We then work towards utility as we are disillusioned about our real journey and we begin crossing the channel that defines who we really are while reality tries to make us recoil back into a shallow yet hardened version of ourselves. We keep returning to the fork in our path until somewhere in the darkness and emptiness of life, we learn to be the connection that brings the stories of our own lives to their closing after we have contributed our meaning to the greater narrative of life.

We begin and end our account of our sentient existence with a deep-seated assumption, belief and sense that there is one all-encompassing universal truth, which we learn as we come to know life by living it. We commonly translate this truth as an underlying order with a unifying force that is not only fundamental to our ability to function, but intuitive to all beings capable of having thoughts and feelings and especially intentions. This is where the foundation of the narrative is set, and we commence the story of the viagnostic way with AMAVAMA, which is a label intended as a palindrome to convey the truth in either direction without a specific meaning rooted in any language. AMAVAMA is an arbitrary term expressed or sounded to simultaneously embrace everything and nothing, and concurrently serving as the basis of everything and referring directly to everything in its entirety as well. This is what many people believe is God, but the viagnostic way does not prescribe a vision of this universal truth, underlying order and unifying force. In accordance with many ancient philosophies and religions, this totality is ineffable. This has long been interpreted as being indescribable as well as being unspeakable in some traditions. To give it a name is to mislabel it and to say its name is an act of blasphemy, and yet the unspoken does not demand faith or obedience because it is assumed to be self-evident. And since it is our challenge to demonstrate its verity through our own trials and mistakes through life, it does not care. Moreover, it knows that we know it is there, much like matter or energy. But what it is exactly and from where do we and all other things originate will remain eternal mysteries for us all to contemplate.

The personification of God actually reflects our need and the only means we have to summon this supreme totality of existence. It is through sentient beings that we can enable a conversation with the unifying force, underlying order and universal truth as the source of and framework for everything. Many of us push this further to perceive God more like some sovereign friend we hope is listening or watching over us remotely when we pray for better times or seek escape from the dreadful conditions we may face. Contrastingly, there are those among us who believe this divine power resides within us and that we are granted the privilege to take action or expect action to be taken based on a pre-existing justification. However, to appreciate the greater truth requires us to understand humility as the balance we strike between our irrelevance and our significance as well as between confidence and insecurity so that we may avoid the pretension of knowing while being at ease with the unknown.

Our lives are opportunities to play out this greater truth through any permutation of events that connects us to who we really are. There is no ideal narrative. There is no true ideal of any kind. There is only our unique story and how it relates to every other story. As our tales unfold, we strive towards an ideal that is engraved with our own biotic signature, and as our narratives individually and collectively come together, that elusive truth is revealed. And after we encounter the wilderness of our nature and shed the dead skin of our culture to grow beyond our contrived identity into the purity of our essence, the senseless suffering of a harsh life finds its way to the unexpected rapture of a meaningful existence. This necessitates foundation, but that foundation only serves us through our alignment with reality.

ALIGNMENT WITH THE REALITIES OF EXISTENCE

As we transition through the five acts of the viagnostic narrative, we experience the unease of life and discover through our firsthand accounts that the critical lessons we learn are intimately linked to our imperfection. Our origins lie in the imperfect state of all things that allows everything to exist and to have a distinct presence in the world, individually and collectively. It is our imperfection as limited and fallible creatures that ensures the realities we encounter, and it is that same imperfection that drives us towards becoming more than what we are. However, we do not strive with the expectation of a perfect state. Instead, we attempt to overcome the constraints we have from the moment we begin by actualizing possibilities that previously were not possible but have come to function as the bridge between our deficiencies and our aspirations. These possibilities arise from our ability to learn and the things we learn when we find ourselves in alignment with the realities of existence.

The first lesson that we learn is that life is incomplete. Our immediate sense of dependency makes that undeniable. We are not self-contained entities, and therefore, we are obliged to depend on the world while adapting to its conditions. This includes competing and cooperating with other living entities to gain the resources required to meet our overlapping needs, and in the course of these interactions, we experience fleeting moments of completeness and a superficial sense of autonomy. This reality sets the context for all other realities we will face with the main lesson being the inevitable end of our personal life story.

We all eventually confront the reality that life is impermanent. It is always changing in a world where every beginning has an end, and where every ending is followed by a new beginning. We come to appreciate the transient nature of existence and our experience as well. However, we discover that what we learn and convey to others as a continuation of ourselves reflects the permanence of our impermanence and that the awareness of the universal truth lives in the perseverance of wisdom. The current of life is always in flux while it remains the same. It is in the flow of things that we find stability, and in the instability of conditions that things keep moving and changing in form and state.

It is the combined complexities of both steady and erratic changes in our experience that ensure uncertainty about a reality we constantly attempt to understand and anticipate. We describe the truth as constructs, relationships or events and when we accept their uncertainty, we learn that life is indeterminate. This reality breeds fear and excitement in our lives because we thrive on our predictive knowledge of the world to safeguard our sense of security and sustain our progress while we equally live for its wonder as we consider the possibilities that may extend the boundaries of what we are. This reality divides the truth into the epistemic and enigmatic realms of the viagnostic system, where we learn to leverage what we know to understand we do not and focus on what we do not know to drive us to learn. Although our curiosity may peer beyond the horizon in search of answers, it is in the crevice of our uncertainty where we raise our awareness to gain insight into the darkness of our existence.

The arbitrary nature in which the circumstances we face and the consequences we endure vary across individuals and between groups of individuals demonstrates that life is impartial. Its neutrality challenges our entrenched belief in a just world, but dares us to live by moral principles that can only persevere if we apply them as a contribution to natural law rather than as an unsustainable imposition of power or as an opportunity to achieve personally favourable outcomes. It is the choice we make between moving towards our potential that minimizes that damage we may cause others and mobilizing in the name of a false ideal that primarily serves amoral interests at the expense of others. Since life does not tend to cooperate with our shared code of ethics, we must each learn to choose our path wisely and cross the channel of our futility to discover that championing the underlying principles of truth in the face of meaninglessness is the only triumph in life.

Unfortunately, we will always struggle to know life until we sincerely learn the final lesson that life is insignificant. This is the deepest reality we need to confront that we bury beneath the cultural bedrock of our socioeconomic existence to suppress our innermost psychological fears and conceal the limits of our confidence regarding the importance of our lives. But this concealment, which points to an instinctual form of the most discreet self-censorship, merely ensures our existential irrelevance because we must first recognize the insignificance of our lives in order to steer our narratives towards finding or generating genuine meaning. Meanwhile, the constant traffic of anxiety and distrust in our lives, which disengages us from the world, also drives us to pursue meaning externally and egocentrically when we have to look beyond ourselves to discover what is already built inside of what we really are. Our essence hides within the dark emptiness of our own meaninglessness until we begin to understand and manifest what truly matters along the greater story of life that directs us to the closing of the viagnostic narrative.

To bring closure to our stories, our review of life seeks an origin story, no matter how farfetched it may appear; this is common across most if not all ancient philosophies and religions as well as their modern derivatives because death demands that we elucidate the source and destination of the living. Even science ponders on the origins of life and existence, and while some of us might be quick to dismiss these theoretical and empirical accounts as stories, they are nevertheless explanations. The role of every origin story is to provide a setting or base framework from where it can begin to take us to where we are presently and ultimately to where we are supposedly going. Knowing where we came from offers us a sense of identity as well as purpose. Moreover, we integrate notions of infinity or endless continuity into the greater story of life to highlight that our narratives are beyond us and reinforce the rationale for an underlying significance to our lives, which we all share. To address any apparent contradictions, we almost arbitrarily establish points of reference and embrace the relativity of things or concepts that are complementary in their nature or meaning as a means of completion. For instance, the terminus represents the endpoint of a journey, but it is also the start of another voyage. This suggests that while we accept all things that start must end, we see that there also cannot be an ending without a new beginning, if we are to account for our overall existential continuity. But if existence is infinite, then it is not the starting point or ending that matters, but rather that something has essentially changed or is relatively different to something else. Hence, while a meaningful ending may require a new beginning or an origin to its story, there is no meaning without change and no meaningful change without alignment.

Existence in the universe and beyond is always changing, and what is changing seems to be aligning to the underlying principles or at least appears to be responding to influences or inclinations of some kind. In the story of the viagnostic way, the unifying force of existence has two sides that function as complementary tendencies. One guides existence to move towards integration, and the other towards equilibrium. We can refer to these propensities or principles respectively as encosmosis and entroposis, where one brings the world together and the other into balance. They purposely share characteristics with physical laws we associate with gravity and entropy, but they are not to be confused with order and chaos or forces of creation and destruction because they are both moving towards two corresponding types of order. The chaos that ensues is relative to each view of order. Encosmosis disturbs equilibrium and entroposis disrupts integration to ensure the disorder necessary to make change possible because without change, nothing would exist. This means that they do not operate as two opposing forces of creation and destruction, but rather form a relationship that leads to cycles of creation and destruction or of order and chaos as they jointly manage change within the whole of existence to enable infinitely growing potential.

THE INTERCONNECTED PERSPECTIVE OF THE UNIVERSAL TRUTH

Change is undoubtedly fundamental to the development of any story. We cannot have a narrative without the occurrence of events, but the significance of a story inescapably depends on having perspective. We need to see or understand something differently that reflects an important change in our consciousness. This is at the core of the narrative behind the viagnostic way, and it includes three views or layers of being that align to the same universal truth as its third elementary principle. Each layer contributes an essential perspective on the greater narrative of life to appreciate its overall meaning, and we refer to them as the biosystem, the egosystem and the taosystem, which are respectively equivalent to the physical, sentient and infinite planes of existence.

The world itself is meaningless without life, sandwiched between the very big and the very small, to experience it. And while the macrocosmic and microcosmic dimensions of the physical universe permit life to exist, the apparent improbability and complexity of life surface as evidence of its necessity as a core existential property. This is why we can aptly refer to this layer of existence, which represents reality and nature, as the biosystem or the life system; this includes the entire biotic spectrum and the whole universe from which life emerges and within which it is sustained. It encompasses all individual living organisms, the interactions between these organisms, and the relationships between organisms and their resourceful environments that are in constant negotiation to ensure the general continuity of life in the face of mortal inevitability. The fatalistic logic of the biosystem means that it follows the operating principle of seminalism, which is the propensity for life to literally and figuratively inseminate the world from which it arises in an effort to replace itself before it ceases to be. Culturally, seminal continuity extends beyond procreation to include any creative contributions or yields by any living thing that gives back to the cradle of existence and adds to its potential to actualize its possibilities.

However, the story of life does not truly translate into meaning without the presence of sentient existence. Although the viagnostic narrative unfolds on the theatrical stage of life, its actors along with the roles we assign to them in the scripts we write come from the egosystem, or the conceptual layer of the self, which falls within the domain of consciousness and the imagination. While the body resides in the biosystem, the egosystem is the field of the psyche or the mind, which runs on the egolistic logic of a world that needs to make sense and determines what is relevant to us from the perspective of the identities it shapes. This field follows the operating principle of optimalism, which is the tendency that moves us towards optimal quality, and it is within this frame where we depict endless versions of reality and generate wholly new fictional worlds that exist within their own realm. Although the physical universe may seem to derive the sentient plane, this imaginary layer has always existed in conjunction with the empirical tier of reality. Its function is to mediate between the material projection of the truth and the basis of reality that lies within the metaphysical plane at the very root of existence. And it does this by letting us interact personally and culturally in the development of our stories that merge events and truths to convey the significance of the relationships we build or discern.

While we conceive all the possibilities of the universe within the hypothetical space of the egosystem, the potential for all things falls within the realm of the taosystem, which is the source or essence of the elusive and ineffable truth. This infinite layer of existence is a paradox because it does not exist in any form we can verify or define. However, we know that it exists through its physical demonstration in the universe and through our sense of something behind our awareness that we try to imagine and that seems to be the origin of our will. The taosystem represents non-duality as the indivisible core of all being and it applies a holistic logic, where nothing is excluded in its purpose to guide the universe. It also follows the operating principle of ethicalism, which is the predisposition to reflect the universal truth through its illustration in the real world while being embedded in our consciousness as an intuition on how to live life. The taosystem is the home of the soul and the spirit of existence, and its mystery lies in its nonlocality by concurrently being nowhere and everywhere.

These three planes of existence highlight the primary domains needed to develop our viagnostic narratives. The biosystem contains the raw material for the script and establishes the space in which the scenes of the story take place. The egosystem elects the actors and roles in the story and how they are performed. And the taosystem contains the message of the story as the significance of the truth we attempt to convey. From the way the world works to how we should conduct ourselves, we need to grasp basic elements of the truth in our efforts to live our lives, and it is in those efforts that we come to face reality and hope to understand it as well. Whether it is out of necessity or curiosity, this is what we all more or less endeavour to do.

Perspective is critical to crossing the barrier of our bias, delusion and ignorance to access less tainted interpretations of the truth. Our rejection or fabrication of reality prevents us from appreciating its key characteristics. Since we tend to be engrossed in how we believe things should be, we often do not see them as they really are. The psyche is the means through which we attain enlightenment, but it also serves as the instrument through which we indoctrinate and manipulate one another. The more we believe that we are aware of our universe and in control of our lives, the easier it is for us to unwittingly decline into the darkness of the illusory ego, which is concealed by the artificial illumination of a socially engineered culture. Our alleged core beliefs unfortunately blind us to the truth. But if we want reality to become transparent, we need to question our certainty and recognize our vulnerability to transcend the desires and fears of our egos. When this occurs, we may begin to see how everything is interconnected.

The underlying order of the world is one integrated reality that is always coming into balance or alignment. The more we openly experience it and take a step back to see the bigger picture, the more obvious this becomes. We can think of this as one all-inclusive truth that is composed of infinitely interrelated fragments, which suggests that the truth grows while it paradoxically remains unchanged since everything in the universe shifts in unison to generate and sustain this cosmic dance. Knowing that there is a common foundation, we learn to better align to the world based on our ability to have and gain perspective. With each view that enlarges the sphere of our awareness and increases the relationships we can identify, we fill in another piece of an expanding puzzle that although we cannot complete, we can see its patterns and possibilities. This is the interconnected perspective of the universal truth that multiplies in its connections without changing its essence.

Having this interconnected perspective helps us to acknowledge that the truth is universal. It is whole or comprehensive in that the truth encompasses all things and applies to everything at all times. This means that it is complete, boundless, eternal and absolute, and this necessarily makes it stable in that it is reliable and always consistent to permit or enable all things individually and collectively to function under its governance. Since we are completely dependent on it, the truth is fundamental, which means that it is elementary, foundational and essential. And since it lies at the crux of our needs, we treat it as something sacred. We cannot resume our lives without at least a base knowledge of it.

However, the truth is also relational in nature. Things have meaning in relation to other things, expressed as codependent attributes such as light and darkness. The truth has to be complementary in order to be whole. Its interconnectedness means that it is associative in its expression as it is composed of relationships and their degrees of association. Moreover, the truth is epistemic or partially known and enigmatic in that it remains unknown no matter what we know. Its mystery makes it ambiguous and paradoxical, and for this reason, we cannot speak of the truth in unequivocal and definitive terms because it is relative and never fully accessible, despite its inherent characteristic of being absolute.

In addition, the truth has a circumstantial and probabilistic nature. It is conditional in that it is sensitive to the conditions of any given event or scenario, which includes the context in which we understand those conditions. This makes things initially unpredictable, but the more conditions we consider and the more control we have over them, the more predictable they become. Moreover, it is consequential in that every condition or outcome affects other conditions or outcomes. But while conditions imply dependencies, the truth itself is independent of our beliefs and we can approach it as independently measurable and verifiable by being objective and empirical. It is also subjective and imaginary, which adds to what is real as potential to become real and to what is true in terms of our own separate and individual experience of things. From a motivational perspective, it is informative and directional in its quality. It informs or instructs us on how things are and how they must and will behave.

If the truth guides reality, then it has to be functional as well in that something is always served in some way regardless that it might be conditional and fleeting or possibly based on a fallacy. The truth has purpose, and although it tends to be practical once understood, it is primarily meaningful. We see it as something relevant, significant, important or valuable, which means it has value. However, in order to be functional, all parts of the truth must also be interdependent. Things must fit together with other things for the whole to operate. Furthermore, since everything is tied together, it is must be neutral or impartial because any partiality except to itself would cause everything to stop working. Although we could argue that its conditional disposition suggests preference, it remains detached from what we believe or expect unless what we think aligns with its principles that explain what succeeds or fails. The truth is what will or will not persist in our shared environment. Yet this does not preclude it from having a moral characteristic. To appreciate the moral nature of the truth, we have to view this from the perspective that we are part of that truth. Since life presents us with choices through our interactions with our surroundings, our own deliberate actions reveal this quality by merely acting upon our intentions to bring a kind of equitable or judicial balance into the world, regardless of their outcomes.

We find another way to view this moral sense in the final attribute of the truth as being pure or quintessential. This means that it is indivisible, inseparable, unbreakable, unalterable and indestructible. And given that it is invariable, any attempt at dividing it only results in more of the same. The truth is meta-dependent in that it is beyond dependency, but this also means that it ties all dependencies to one another, and consequently, unites everything under one system. We can easily exemplify this when we realize that the water in our bodies had previously passed through other lifeforms, or that the same particles that were once part of our ancestors or an earlier version of our universe are now part of us as well. Moreover, no absolute separation exists between the bits of matter and energy that comprise our own bodies and everything within our environment to which we belong. Such distinctions fundamentally reside within our consciousness in terms of how we conceptually divide the phenomena we perceive.

This interconnectivity of existence means all things, events and principles integrate into a pure and holistic truth expressed as one fundamental order underpinning all order. If we can comprehend this idea, we will begin to change our perception of ourselves and of all the things that we have come to know. Even though we may experience a distinct sense of awareness, we also realize that do not exist in isolation from rest of the world. And if we are all connected to one another and to all things, then everything truly forms part of a much greater whole and we are simply a tiny piece of an inconceivably infinite totality, whether we are willing to admit it or not and despite many of our efforts to dismiss this worldview as groundless. We intuitively know thatwe are all part of something greater than ourselves, which we are forever trying to understand and emulate its meaning through the expanded awareness of our experience and the intended actions we take within the shifting range of choices we have.

IN NEED OF QUALITY IN THE CYCLE OF OUR UTILITY

Although our knowledge and beliefs can never be anything more than incomplete or faulty versions of the universal truth, our awareness along with the wisdom we gather over time does enable us to identify the intricate relationships among the things we encounter to slice wider and deeper into this totality of indefinite scope. We do not need to concern ourselves if we misconstrue any part of the truth as long as we are making course corrections based on new and profound insights that are confirmed by their genuine utility. This process helps us to extract meaning from what we observe and consider. However, we actualize the meaning of our narratives through our roles and ultimately through our actions, and although our participation in our stories is crucial if something significant is ever to transpire, it is not simply that we partake but how we engage the world that impacts the meaning of life.

The fourth element that conveys the story of the viagnostic way describes the cyclical stages of existence as essential functions for the universal truth as a unifying force or an underlying order to become aware of itself through our consciousness. This holistic cycle of sentience occurs continually in four phases with each stage playing a critical role in completing our existential self-discovery. These phases include (a) emergence, (b) divergence, (c) convergence and (d) submergence. Emergence is the separation of self as its own consciousness from the will of the whole when we begin to realize our sense of existence. Divergence is the individual expression of that existence through life as we grow and interact with the world and others, which reflects the possibilities of what the truth may actually be. Convergence results from the recognition that we all tied to the same fundamental source and draws us back to where we came from, and submergence is the end process of returning to that source. For many of us, submergence represents death as we approach the finale of our lives.

This sentient expedition runs in parallel to the basic cycle of life where (a) we are born, (b) we learn and grow, (c) we contribute back to the world that created us, and then (d) we die and return to our source. For this reason, we can symbolically compare both cycles to the four seasons: (a) we seed in the spring, (b) we grow in the summer, (c) we harvest and prepare in the autumn, and (d) we rest as we return to the earth in the winter. However, the difference between the viagnostic cycle and the biotic cycle is that the biotic is simply a life lived to be relived whereas the viagnostic is a life played to reveal a life lived. To be viagnostic is to see the story of life as an opportunity to awaken from our unconscious slumber. It is to become conscious of the world behind the world or the truth behind life, which can be difficult to achieve when we already believe that we are awake and surrounded by others who share that delusion. Yet despite this veil of collective self-assurance, many potentially enlightened souls come out of hibernation to uncover the existential meaning buried in our ancestrally amnesic state.

The only way to remember is to partake in the narrative of our lives and rediscover our fundamental utility in this grand cycle of exploration, generation or creation, preservation or protection and restoration, which correspond to the four essential roles of being viagnostic. This is not at all a coincidence since these roles are rooted in the phases of life itself. It is only natural that we feel the need to fulfill their functions. We are inherently motivated to complete the great performance of life itself. It is our immediate compulsion as very young children to explore the world out of which we came to be, and then it does not take long before we want to create, alter or solve something in that world. We also quickly learn what is important to protect and preserve; this eventually includes some of those things we attempt to heal or repair. Ultimately, we endeavour to restore what we were when we were children or manifest what we really are before we return to our existential place of origin, but this all points to an innate inclination towards things of utility, whose attributes we are trying to realize as part of our sentient existence. And it is not simply a matter of value, but the quality represented by that value that enchants us. It is as if we are in need of quality in the cycle of our utility.

Quality is a term with many meanings, which is itself significant. We can explicitly understand it in its descriptive sense as a characteristic or property applied to a thing, person or event, which may or may not include its evaluative connotation that refers to the degree of value or excellence relative to some standard or other point of comparison. However, there are qualities that are not easy to define or measure such as freedom and love either because they have many conflicting meanings or because we can only confirm or infer through other measures or qualities. For instance, when does one form of freedom infringe upon another or how do we know that others love us or that we love them? And yet despite their ambiguity and our inability to adequately conceive or articulate them, these qualities represent expressions of purity that we struggle to capture as we instinctually approach some sense of the universal truth or realize some of its potential in the absence of attaining perfection. For some of us, being aligned with these qualities by working to manifest them in ourselves and projecting them onto the world is evidence that we have achieved unattainable perfection or purity, regardless of our flaws as demonstrated by our absolute and relative limitations.

However, advancing towards purity is like endeavouring to reach a much faster moving target. Our destination is always changing because we continue to expand and refine our grasp of the qualities we seek. In addition, different conditions result in each of us beginning from a different place and ensure that all of our paths will vary as well. This means that we have to understand quality as a process rather than as a destination, and in that process, we discover that our ideal vision or target has no locality or form. Hence, instead of trying to attain a rigidly solid state, we are offered an adaptively fluid way of being, which profoundly affects how we interpret perfection in real life and includes conveying our deficient selves as perfectly unique expressions of life. We touch perfection by being in the process of approximating what are unreachable static states in absolute terms such as autonomy or diversity because we can always be more autonomous or diverse in solving issues and overcoming limits.

Another important discovery we make about purity in our pursuit of quality is its relationship to morality as fundamental values and practices of living. Since the responsibility falls on us to unearth the value of things and reveal their meaning, our concern with utility brings out our sense of morality as we apprehensively realize that we are the conscience of the universe. We may all be part of something greater than ourselves, but it is each of us who potentially makes it greater. Hence, the qualities we seek in life come from our actions, and this means that we need to appreciate what these qualities really are and what they represent. As we face the core realities of life and their lessons, we come to recognize at least five corresponding ideals that matter to us. There is no guarantee that we will develop these qualities, but the universe affords us the opportunity to put each of them into practice and move us closer to the purity we seek. Together, they unveil our existential needs and values that form the deeper morality we share and contribute the meaning we derive from our narratives to the greater story of life.

As children, we are extremely dependent on our parents and guardians and we very quickly learn how vulnerable we really are. We may not yet know how to articulate it, but the lesson that life is incomplete is too obvious to ignore due to our limitations. This means that trust is essential, and that trust is tied to the first quality we naturally demand from others, which is authenticity. Being real or genuine is invaluable if we want to gain assurance, and we achieve this by clarifying our intentions or ensuring we are predictable in a reliable manner. Although consistency is fundamental to trust as well, it is possible to be consistent without being authentic. Some of us try to hide our pretensions through consistent behaviour or language but do so without spirit. Moreover, displaying confidence without any doubt will implicitly disclose insecurity. This speaks to the importance of honesty with ourselves and with others because to deny or reject our true selves is to deny life itself. But as we grow older, many of us mistakenly assume that we exhibit genuineness. And at some point, we shed our childlike traits and abandon much of what we were as we succumb to socioeconomic pressures and try to fit into a system that demands our loyalty to fictitious values. We become the person we are convinced is necessary to survive and to secure a favourable status. However, without the context of knowing that our roles and identities are part of another’s grand scheme, we lose ourselves indefinitely in our characters and become slaves to a contrived reality that replaces significance with ranking. This conflicts with getting at our essence, which lies at the heart of embodying authenticity. Without it, there is no foundation, and without foundation, there is no meaning and we may never realize our authentic stories, where we are naïve actors performing in a true drama on an open stage in a live theatre of a real world.

Consistency is part of authenticity when we are consistent about what is real, but the underlying quality that we seek in things and others, and especially in ourselves, is regularity. If life is impermanent and nothing remains the same, then regularity is our alignment with the current of our experience. And although this second quality clearly relates to our need for consistency, much of our inconsistency stems from our struggles with being unwavering in our thoughts, feelings and actions. The intent of regularity is to regulate how we think, feel and behave so that we can be in harmony with ourselves and in balance with our environment. We learn to moderate ourselves and adapt to the conditions and patterns of change that encompass our reality in order to survive and progress. We develop the discipline to manage the fluctuations in our states to bring consistency to our lives as we respond to what any situation requires of us. However, this does not mean promoting or conforming to norms, where we feel the constant pressure to follow alleged rules of acceptance and success. Instead, it does suggest that we learn to accept and leverage the discovery that we are entangled with all things in the universe to participate in life and experience its meaning because entanglement creates both risk and opportunity.

We can always look to the full spectrum of our experiences, especially the unexpected ones, to remind us that life is indeterminate. And while the reality of not knowing how our lives will unfold may cause many of us considerable angst, it also ensures adventure in our lives, and more importantly, it generates more prospects for us to expand our awareness. Although we may feel trapped by our seemingly immutable circumstances, they also free us to question our thoughts, feelings and actions as well as our intentions. We do not challenge the things that work in our favour and we learn little to nothing without challenge in our lives. This compels us to seek truth or to understand the truth behind the things we experience because it has fundamental value to us, which we capture as knowledge and wisdom. Hence, veracity is the third quality we seek not only to secure our survival and well-being, but also to heighten, broaden and deepen the significance of our stories that define our lives. We achieve this by shifting our perspective and recognizing that we are capable of perceiving the world on multiple levels that unveil the greater narrative of life, and this occurs when we fall into the crevice of our uncertainty as we search for what is real and consistent as truth in our lives. And while for many of us, the truth is everything, this often brings us into conflict between what is and what should be.

Although many of us want to believe in a just world or believe that our moral values and practices align with a better future life, most of us have witnessed intolerable injustices or experienced rationalized inequities in our lives. We all privately know that life is impartial, whether we are willing to admit it to ourselves or not, but it is precisely this reality that prompts us to pursue equity as the fourth quality we wish to see in the world. Not only does it give us a sense of trust as a community by tackling our personal biases and cultural prejudices, but it also provides us an equal opportunity to move our utility to a higher purpose found in expressing the conscience of nature that resides within us. We are motivated by a universe divorced from the fairness fundamentally required to sustain harmony within our communities and across societies, especially where unnecessary poverty and suffering of the many persist in a world of prosperity and self-determination that is restricted to the few. However, these imbalances and differences are part of the cosmic lottery, where we are offered different roles to play in diverse conditions to discover and follow our own paths. Ultimately, this enables us through our own stories to find the right channel that will bring us closer to the truth and meaning of who we really are.

The significance of life is a prospect that rests within us all, but to reify it requires us initially to recognize that life is insignificant. From that viewpoint, we can better appreciate how we are always becoming who we are as we learn to actualize the potential in what we really are. And we intrinsically fulfill becoming who we really are through connection, which leads us to unity as the fifth and final quality we seek in a world of inequity and disorder that separates us. Our identity expands through our connections, and we only become something greater than what we are presently through our unity with others. The universe secretly plays fair by being inclusive of everything, where our stories may begin with each of us but ultimately end with all of us as our concluding stories are added to a shared history. Since all things are part of a greater whole, nothing is ever inconsequential. We affect one another, both bluntly and unsuspectingly, however insignificant our deeds may appear at the closing of our narratives.

These five qualities serve to contribute meaning to the greater story of life in the cycle of our utility that unfolds on our galactic playground. They are not to be confused with some fundamental purpose we all share. While there is something that binds us together, each of us has our own path to follow that is of no importance, except that each becomes the journey we must endeavour to lead in discovering who we really are. Our significance is trapped in our stories surrounded by our hopes and fears in search of value dependent on seeing and seizing the opportunities to manifest our essence while we attempt to overcome the obstacles we encounter, whether they are real or imagined, or purposely created. However, our struggles segregate us in how we shape our narratives to gain value as a choice between connection and domination. If we choose to divide and conquer, the world we shrink will consume us as we expand our territory within it. But if we choose to connect, our stories will grow as part of a greater narrative, where we find the purity we seek in the connection of love. We may derive meaning from connections we perceive, but we demonstrate that meaning through the genuine love we freely express as a conscious decision based on the utility we yield and the lessons we learn.

ONE SIGNIFICANT CONNECTION IN THE GREATER STORY OF LOVE

One of the reasons love is at the centre of so many stories is that it is an expression of the most fundamental existential need we have, which is meaning. However, it is also the most intricate thing to truly find and sustain. We want our lives to mean something. And while both loving someone and receiving the love of others permit us to feel significant, many of us settle for the gestures of love and whether or not they are sincere is a question that we are not inclined to entertain. But when we encounter the real thing, we do not always recognize how important it really is for our lives to matter. When we consider how we as sentient beings feel as much as we reason and privately reflect on life as much we openly experience it, in the end, love may well be the only thing that does matter.

In the film, A Beautiful Mind [25], based on the life of the influential mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., a brilliant man with an extraordinary propensity for making connections suffers from paranoid delusions and hallucinations that compromise his personal life and career. But as he retreats to a quieter existence with the support of his wife and friends, he eventually learns to reject his mental intrusions and confronts what was arguably his most intimate struggle. In the final scene, set at the award ceremony where he receives the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Dr. Nash conveys in this dramatically fictionalized acceptance speech that his wife was the reason and all the reasons for his life. Although he was eventually recognized for his mathematical contributions that were applied to economics and a multitude of fields, it was in the true expression of love, whether it was for the truth or for another living being, where he found the deeper meaning of his life. And it is in the hidden power and complexity of love in both its provision and reception that all of us thoughtful and sensitive creatures find our significance. Our value only veritably becomes value when it generates a connection through its acknowledgement and impact.

As we approach the mortal closing of the viagnostic narrative, we engrave the profound relationship between love and meaning in both our individual and collective memories. This is because we come to realize that love and connection are indistinguishable. When we contemplate whether we had loved others or we ourselves were loved, we are really asking if we actually made or felt any genuine connections. It is only ever about connection in the end. Even our achievements are based on some form of love or on what we contribute as an outcome of that love, which is not limited to our families, partners and friends. It encompasses all types of love, and each intimates our appreciation for what is significant in some unique way as each expression is a link in the infinite web of the universal truth. Our love is the ultimate manifestation of this unifying force and underlying order we intuitively assume is behind everything we experience, and it is through love that we find and express our essence.

Our first love is for being in the world, which is experienced through our bodies. This is the meaning of being alive and the love of life includes both its pleasures as well as its sufferings, which can spur our open participation in the same realm from which we originated or turn our experiences into critical traumas that cause us to fear our environment. This is love based on need or want and provides the foundation for all of its other forms. The second love comes with our awareness of self. Although our nature logically drives us to be self-interested, we begin to care about ourselves as well as others as codependent sentient entities trying to both appease and compete with one another. By this stage, society has already had a tremendous influence on how we come to feel about ourselves, and many of us spend our lives attempting to learn how to love ourselves again given the emotional brutality that we may have endured. As we realize that we are aligning to a world that does not protect us, we equally sense that there is a deeper part to us connected to a greater truth. This becomes our third love, which is the love of the soul or our essence and which necessarily includes the love of our existential source or origin that takes us beyond both our indulgences and obligations. And it is on this basis that we discover our fourth love of the other as we attempt to reveal who we truly are. The other represents someone or something of significance that we support with the hope of realizing its effect without the expectation of its love. When we sustain this in the face of humiliation and broaden it instead of retreating, it means that we recognize a fundamental truth that we must promote or protect, which we ourselves embody by being love. The fifth and final love only occurs when we feel united in the genuine experience of love that translates into an unconditional connection to everything. It is the antithesis of pure evil.

However, we often misconstrue pure and unconditional love as unconditional acceptance or loyalty when it is more akin to a profound plane of consciousness with a transcendent quality, which allows us to extend beyond ourselves to encompass the rest of the world. Pure love transcends the ego. It is constant and stable, but it does not set demands because it comes from a higher, broader and deeper level of awareness. And in alignment with the purest morality, it purports that we offer love willingly without anticipated reciprocation or expected reward and that we do the right thing knowing that we will get nothing materially in return while we risk suffering for our good deeds. However, we do not achieve the purity of love or morality due to or solely by facing misery. We simply exhibit its essence through the awareness and enactment of what we must do, regardless of compensation or sacrifice. That is the difference between being a genuinely principled being and an apparently good person. Nice people who appear to be gracious tacitly expect or hope for something in return whereas the virtuous and incorruptible will always do what is right despite any immediate or irreparable consequences and despite how others among us might respond, especially when the majority disagree with what is right.

Love is also a word we use very loosely because it accounts for any kind of affinity or attraction to something or someone, including ourselves. Some things we love instantaneously, and other things we learn to love gradually or much later in life. However, while the likelihood of what we might love varies, all things that can be loved can be hated as well. In addition, love consists of different qualities placed along a very wide spectrum. For instance, desire is to love someone or something that we want to possess or something we want consume, admiration is to love someone who has demonstrated greatness, affection is to love someone who is part of us like a child or a partner, and compassion is to love someone who suffers or in need of forgiveness. Love is all of these things, but to love what is undesired, unimportant, unrelated or unforgiveable is to love unconditionally as a matter of principle. Such love is not partial except to the truth, and whatever truth it sees is what it truly loves. Given the many forms in which it can be expressed, love is the greatest power we possess as well as the finest display of freedom we can experience. And to love freely without expectation is to be one with life.

Love is the point in the here and now where the eternal and the ephemeral intersect in our vulnerable relationships with the living and the departed, and it arises from the emotional awareness of momentous connections that can instantaneously occur anywhere and anytime. When we love, we perceive something that is of significance in some way. We have a natural inclination to connect with things, persons and settings because we know that we are all one and the same whole, and knowing that life is incomplete, impermanent, indeterminate, impartial and insignificant drives us to love. Love makes us feel complete. It adds stability and eternity to our transient existence. It brings trust to our uncertainty. It provides hope to an unjust world, and it generates meaning out of an insignificant life. Love gives life meaning by seeing its invisible connections, and this is why love is part of every story. We are always searching for at least one significant connection in the greater story of love.

When we truly become enlightened, we not only recognize that everything is interconnected, we also see each of our stories as part of a greater narrative. We can know that they are not isolated, and that we are merely performing in the acts we feel are relevant at each stage of our lives. Whether we are driven by an ecological concern with our collective survival or by an inner nature seeking a creative outlet, we are all trying to find our place in the universe. And while there may be many roles we are obligated to play, we slowly work towards the ones that align us to who we really are. This is all part of our search for what we love, which we find in the truth about our reality, in the quality of what we do or how we live, and in the relationships that teach us about the significance of our lives. The lessons we learn that illuminate the greater story of life are extracted during the phases of the viagnostic narrative, where we discover that meaning comes from setting the foundation, moving into alignment, gaining perspective, working towards utility and being the connection. However, being the connection requires five senses of connection, which are synonymous with the five types of love and which more decisively reflect the fifth and final elementary principle of the viagnostic way.

The first sense is the extracosmic connection with the external world. This occurs through our dependent living body, which is also part of that world, by acting as an interface between our sentient self and our environment through its physical sensors. But since we emerged as life out of the universe, we are also inseparable from the cosmos. This captures the context from which we originate and makes us one with the earth. When we meditate to calm our restless feelings and detach ourselves from our ruminating thoughts, it gives us the foundation we need to reset who and what we really are as an incomplete being that makes us know we are real and alive. And this begins by blending with our surroundings and detaching from our minds as we breathe in and exhale out repeatedly.

The second sense comes with our sentience. This is our intracosmic connection. We know this in the moments when and where we experience the divide between us and the world as we recognize the presence of self. Consciousness and the self are fused together in this codependent alignment. They flow in unison like water in the current of life. Wherever it goes, we go with it. However, this is different from being caught in the mental workings of our preoccupations and distractions. It is not the overactive mind forgetting itself. It is the mind being aware that it is a distinct, but inseparable part of existence. It works as the conscious link between our self-containing body and the ineffable essence that we refer to as our soul. This experience tells us that we are more than our impermanent bodies and that there is something more than the world we perceive.

The intuitive knowledge of our essence comes from our infrascosmic connection. This third sense sees beyond the illusion of the independent self whose identity is bound to a material depiction of our conscious existence. It is like air or wind passing through the crevice of our existential emptiness that elevates and widens our perspective to dive deeper into our indeterminate life. Our disillusionment about the world we fabricate frees us to attain the enlightenment in our conscious connection with the source of our existence comparable to outward unification with our environment, except that it is inward. The interface is with something inside us as opposed to the outside. For many of us, this is our spiritual relationship with God. But for all of us, this can be more generally understood as our visceral encounter with the unifying force, underlying order and universal truth of everything.

For those of us brave enough to explore that invisible and indescribable facet of our being, we are able to surface a fourth sense that draws us closer to all other living creatures with some expression of sentience as well as to the interdependent nature of our utility in this impartial world. This is the intercosmic connection, which occurs when we connect vicariously through the source of all life. And unlike the other senses of connection, this one creates something new. It is the fire whose light illuminates the channel to the manifestation of our essence and whose heat forges the potential that makes our existence limitless. It turns our lives into what they can be by tapping into what they already are and connecting them to one another.

However, it is only when all of these connections align or merge that the fifth and final sense expresses itself as our experience of the ultracosmic connection. This means that we individually and collectively become the conduit between the insignificant world that is in need of a witness and its meta-dependent source in need of a vessel or an agent. It is as if God is experiencing the world through us, and it is in those inexplicable moments that we become God as a natural consequence of an interconnected existence, which is spread everywhere and nowhere through the ether of all existence. When we heighten, broaden and deepen our sense of love in something greater than what we can see, hear or any other sense we possess, we realize that every one of us along with everything else in the world touches or entails some element of the truth and its meaning. This is the significance of being the connection. By the closing of our narrative, where and when everything comes together to as an unconfined whole, we should fully recognize that we live life through ourselves, not for ourselves.

It is through these five senses of connection that we know life by living life. This lies at the very core of the viagnostic way, system and framework, and the viagnostic narrative is the fundamental means by which we decode and integrate these elements to liberate the possibilities of a meaningful life. It is our subtle awareness of an insignificant life that propels us to explore, generate, preserve and restore something of meaning, and this awareness is derived from our capacity to see the truth on multiple levels through the physical, sentient and infinite layers of existence. Genuine meaning requires us to interpret and translate something behind the phenomenal bits of our experience that vacillate between the epistemic and enigmatic realms of reality, respectively embodied by the ability to know and the need to know. They complement each other to trigger both our bewilderment and revelation in the mystery of the universal truth that we profoundly sense, and like the symbolic tree of life, we mirror its foundation, alignment, perspective, utility and connection.

We can essentially describe our existence as being a story or part of a story, but it is a real story where we are real actors performing in a live show that is a blend of reality and fiction. When we realize this, we begin to appreciate that our entanglement with the universe merely compels us to partake in one another’s dramas to find meaning. Our participation serves to differentiate our multiple levels of awareness that help us to recognize that our stories are intertwined and that they feed into the greater or deeper narrative of life. We develop our stories through the roles that life offers us and based on the conditions we face, and this is where we ultimately learn to actualize the potential in what we really are as we become more than we are. This outlines how the viagnostic narrative enables us to experience the meaning of life, which does not arise from intellectual discourse or individual achievement and which we cannot solely define based on personal suffering or social identity. It is through the illustrations and trials of love in caring for what is important that we discover ourselves, and in the process, we encounter the genuine meaning that seems to elude us at times. When we love, we establish the connection that guides us to our utility, and that utility gives us the perspective we need to perceive the alignment that unearths our foundation.

That foundation is what we fear does not exist because without it, we begin to contemplate how our lives may only amount to a set of random or pointless events that return us back to an isolated existence of questionable purpose. We know that we are nothing if we are truly alone, but we are everything when we are united. This is why we only reveal our true essence by loving what connects us. It is not what we consume or produce, but what we experience through our relationships with the world of things, events, ideas and other beings. And it is our natural disposition to foresee and nurture their value, even before their value is demonstrated. Hence, we must live in order to be the embodiment of love by loving and being loved because to be love is to consciously be and know life itself.

The viagnostic narrative is a love story on a much grander scale that is not confined to the passion or compassion expressed between individuals. It is about the love of the universal truth that must be shown because it cannot be articulated. Its message reaches beyond the pain and pleasure we feel as it reduces the intensity of our desires and fears. This love is without reward or punishment. It treats success and failure as part of the same road to discovery, where the primordial battle of good and evil respectively divides into a connective sense of harmony or freedom and a possessive lust for conflict or control. This greater story of life originates from an existential struggle to have presence in the world, and we find ourselves in the abyss and silence of its emptiness to fill in the void. We are its meaning, but not its purpose. It is not about us. Instead, it is about us playing our part in a much greater narrative by making it greater. It is about us advancing towards the one universal truth we all essentially know as a unified force and underlying order, which is divorced from our delusional beliefs, shared fantasies and even our most meticulous reasoning whose logic sounds so impeccable in our heads that not even God could challenge it because what we think does not matter. It does not matter what anyone thinks. It only matters that it matters. The obscurely deep secret behind the meaning of life is that we are here to make life meaningful. That is our essence, and by simply approaching it, we are already there.