Epilogue

The viagnostic narrative never really ends as long as we individually continue to learn. Collectively, it never finishes because as one narrative concludes, another begins. More importantly, all stories flow into one great narrative of life, which always persists in its movement. This is what we sense when we attain momentary stillness. Everything slows to the point where we can reflect upon the profound meaning that is waiting for us all to realize, which is that our purpose is to know life by living life. It is this deeper love for life that enables us to increasingly perceive the underlying interconnectivity of existence, and its awareness changes how we approach the expression of our being as well as how we relate to others and the universe as a whole. In addition, it allows us to see the possibility of things expand as our restrictive boundaries dissolve into liberating guidelines.

The first thing we learn is that life is a story we experience in reality to derive meaning from our essence. Since the viagnostic narrative represents the story of life, it is composed of five acts or parts, and it expresses the truth through our own stories based on some key assumptions that equate life to being in a theatrical performance. Since sentient life actually develops as a story just as our minds make it out to be, we derive meaning through the chronicles of our shared history and the personal accounts of our lives. This aligns with the stages of life, and as we encounter our existential realities as well as learn their lessons and guiding principles, it falls on us to confront them through the roles we play in the unfolding of our stories and determine our place and function in the world. Our stories are paths to the universal truth and we are merely the vehicles for recognizing its meaning. This brings us to our second discovery, which is that we experience meaning through the emergent self as a sentient existence. As we pass through the natural phases of a cyclical life, we come to know quite intimately the inescapable  adversities that materialize with our consciousness and identity. Each of us must face the challenges of life and apprehend them as they relate to our own sets of circumstances, where opportunities present themselves to us to act upon what we learn. Finally, we realize that meaning arises from the way of the truth or will of existence expressing itself, and this offers us a meaningful narrative that explains the basis of all life and reveals the underlying patterns of our fundamentally shared nature.

We can define the viagnostic narrative as a genuine pursuit of empirical, allegorical and ethical truth through our struggles and contemplations without presuming to possess or provide the answers to our elemental questions of life. Being viagnostic is more like a way of life than a philosophy by serving as a reliable and enduring guide for each of us to devise our own philosophy and to seek the meaning of our own lives. Although we can convey our insights to one another and across generations, we must come to understand the principles of life through our own actual experience, which means we must take ownership of our lives and become stewards of the truth. We express the meaning of life through the moral character of our choices and the divine transcendence of our stories. This is necessary to live a truly soulful existence, which makes the difference between whether we will be spiritually content or miserable in this world and especially whether we will promote love or discard it. It is only in the pointlessness of our suffering that the universe can divest us of any meaning, while it is solely in our experience of love that we can restore the significance of our lives and the dignity of any life.

There is nothing novel about The Viagnostic Narrative because it assumes that we all intuitively know the essential principles of a meaningful life and that we have preserved their wisdom through their practice over countless generations in the depth of our individual minds and in the breadth of our collective psyche. This timeless body of work is simply an attempt to design, package and convey those principles in a manner that can unite the scientific and literary realms, where knowledge and narrative merge, and find common ground for atheists and the religious, where wisdom and morality complement one another and where meaning is core to us all. Regardless of what we believe, all we need to know is that there is a foundation and that we share in a belief or hope that there is an underlying order that accounts for our existence. And the deeper we dig, the more we come closer together and see how our diversity is part of its necessary expression despite how our conflicts are being manipulated to serve power-driven agendas through rationalized beliefs, distorted values and counterfeit identities.

Given the degree to which we conflate fantasy with reality, it is important that we distinguish between the stories we tell as lies to ourselves and the narratives we live. Stories often serve to explain things away, but the narratives we live are intended to enlighten us with something significant or facilitate profound transformation. Hence, we describe stories as viagnostic as long as they reflect the realities of life, even if we personally never learn their lessons. In addition, we do not confine these stories to fiction or mythology since they mainly refer to real accounts of actual living beings that can range from specific stages in our lives to the whole course of our individual existence to the history of an entire civilization. These narratives can also include explanations, models and equations as well as any arrangements of ideas, images and experiences in some receptive form, whether it is the story of how the universe came to be or how we personally came to be. For many of us, these narratives extend to the rationale behind our fortunes and tragedies or the qualities and decisions that led to our successes and failures. Without storytelling and the meaning derived from our narratives, we are reduced to biochemical machines, where the flame of the soul never burns.

While being viagnostic is an approach to life that we can incorporate into our core identity, we still need to exercise our capacity to monitor and understand our thoughts, feelings, decisions and behaviours. We are essentially a network of innate and acquired programs that function to respond adaptively to our environment and improve the conditions of life, but these programs cannot change intentionally without higher awareness of our conscious thoughts and the depth of our unconscious motives. As already described, we can refer to this metacognition or meta-consciousness as forepsyche, which is an overall state and ability to see the truth by navigating through the complexities of the psyche, including its biases and illusions. Our psyche is both the road and the barrier to reality, and forepsyche serves as the opening to the truth through the self-examination of our beliefs, intents and reasons as well as through our observation of the world and others that helps us to better grasp who and what we are and potentially influence our choices and actions. As we deconstruct our tendencies, cultures and perceptions, we are better able to receive and integrate the unwavering wisdom of the ages. Forepsyche directly translates to being before the psyche, or to see before the psyche thinks or responds. It is being the mind before or above the mind to see beneath or behind it in order to look ahead. We learn to unlock the psyche by catching its habits and prejudgments and increase our volition and self-regulated freedom by giving us greater insight into ourselves, individually and collectively.

The epiculture, which emerges with sentient life, infiltrates all of our cultures to generate a seductive web of half-truths that we must disentangle to access our essence, uncover its meaning and confront reality to participate in the development, coalescence and performance of the viagnostic narrative. Forepsyche heightens our awareness of this cultural sorcery and maintains our sanity when we escape from the hypnotic dictums of a pretentiously moral society and plunge back into the great mystery of life and our elusive psyche to place ourselves on a path to the universal truth. Forepsyche is the instrument through which we can live a viagnostic existence and decode its multiple meanings.

To be viagnostic and apply our capacity for forepsyche is to exhibit a kind of moral intelligence that is beyond our common notions of right and wrong to serve a greater good derived from our unity with the truth and its demonstration rather than from our unquestioned adherence to social systems of power. The truth includes a moral element because it has will or a motivational quality in its blueprints. But while we instantly respond in accordance with the truth because we are part of it as well, it is our awareness of the choices we possess and the potential impact of those choices before we make them that enables our volition and ultimately surfaces the morality and wisdom of our stories.

We have many underlying fears, which influence the choices we make, and many of those fears are a consequence of our subconscious beliefs and stubborn worldviews that include the feeling that everything is solely in our hands and the suspicion that there is no meaning to our lives or value to derive from our efforts. These fears mostly stem from our sense of being alone in the universe, but we exacerbate them by using either our segregation or dissociation as a shield from the world and our perceived relationships, which affect how we contend with our existence. This may unfortunately place us at odds with our connection to life that guides our intrinsic nature, especially when we follow a strict set of end goals directed by a perversion of our values that is caused by our finite sense of being. But the truth is infinite; it has neither an introduction nor a finale. This means our actual purpose lies not in our success or status but in the way in which we live our lives, the way we conduct ourselves, and the way we play and dance with the cosmos. The more we attune ourselves to this inherent function as we once did as children, the more we experience synchronicity in the events that unfold around us as if we are bound by a kind of unified spiritual contract that gives us access to this one seemingly elusive truth.

This brings us to the concluding depiction of the viagnostic narrative, which we can illustrate by referring to the image below as three concentric circles representing the existential layers of the universal truth as planes of reality with an underlying order. A dividing line across three layers reflects the duality of being as well as the two sides of a unifying force, and the centre is black to signify both the darkness or emptiness of life and the ineffable property of existence. And it is between the lines and the white spaces that we can imagine the four phases that a sentient entity undergoes, and this includes all five of its core connections. This simple drawing provides a view into the truth that we cannot describe, but we can confirm and strengthen our connection to the universal truth when we realize that nothing we learn fundamentally changes our general sense of existence. Nevertheless, as the bearers of meaning through the narrative, we must individually engage our surrounding world in order to experience life and dive deeper into our consciousness to discover for ourselves what constitutes the truth. If we all do this, then collectively we will converge on the same source of our lives.