PROLOGUE
No words can adequately describe the unease many of us sense about the times in which we live. Yet we can feel our implicit fears vibrating through the partially mended cracks in the skeletons of our biosocial order as they tighten the perpetually entangled knots in the bowels of our technologically mesmerizing culture. As we gradually see the contradiction between the life we were taught to dutifully follow for our own good and a world that has become progressively unsustainable, we realize that we are waiting to awaken from a dream within a nightmare, which we are in no hurry to face. However, as we are obliged to take longer and longer breaths under unfavourably changing conditions of stress where we move forward with shorter and shorter steps, it becomes increasingly clear to us that a great mythical storm is forthcoming and it will alter everything that we know cannot last. Nevertheless, feeling that something is inherently misaligned in the nature of things and the reality we observe every day should be somewhat reassuring because it simply means that we are still sane unlike the rest of us who may have already gone completely and unknowingly mad.
Undoubtedly, there have always been tumultuous periods in our ancestral past where the absurdity of life reached critical mass and demanded a fundamental change in the way we think and in how we go about the course of our lives, individually and collectively. However, we may very well be at an existential point of no return that may pre-emptively evict us from our planetary home much sooner than any of us would have ever imagined. We have allowed gratification, status and ingenuity to hijack meaning, morality and insight for far too long to our own detriment, biologically and spiritually. And yet we continue to be swindled by our deeply repressed insecurity and seduced by the false promise of being something greater than what we are to become anyone other than who we were meant to be. There is no progress in self-denial. But while paradise may be lost once again, it hardly seems to matter since most of us never initially found it. What does matter now is to realize that we have, in place of a perverse belief in either engineered or divine salvation, an opening in our shared history to convey something genuine and intact to personally reset our own paths and to jointly restore balance.
This unassuming work provides a biblical alternative for both the devout and nonreligious by making a more contemporary attempt at drafting a reliably constructed map for each of us to consciously retrace the routes we have previously taken to find meaning and avoid the dead end we are unwittingly approaching. However, it will not offer any advice or consolation in explaining away our troubles. It will not suggest resolutions to the ills of humankind. It will not describe the shape or movement of the universe, and it will not make a case for or against the existence of God. This is a uniquely assembled compilation of intuitively familiar precepts, which have persevered long enough to be renewed. This means that we will note nothing original in its statements except in their arrangement as a journey to discover hidden patterns within this ontologically distinct framework. Moreover, there is no proposed theory or philosophy. There is neither research referenced nor argument devised because these written messages are very likely incontrovertible based on our own experience, but it is important to focus on the significance of its language as a whole rather than dissecting isolated truths that predictably turn into fallacies once they are removed from their broader context.
We should treat this merely as a reminder of what we already supposedly know but with the added benefit of being packaged in a manner that will enable us to venture into ourselves and to appreciate the eternal wisdom of the ages that we all carry with us and hopefully manifest in our lives and in those of others. The intent is to open up a safe, nonjudgmental space in which to explore the meaning of life as an abstracted story for us to fill in our own details and to converge on its gravitating principles and enduring lessons. We can therefore think of this as foundational guidance for those of us interested in rethinking our sentient existence without giving up anything that is pivotal to defining and expressing our most sacred values. Nothing fundamental should be deliberately or unthinkingly discarded or ignored. It only demands that we remain cognizant of our bias and indoctrination as we attempt to refine what we culturally choose to expand within the corporal and societal boundaries of our biographical influence as conscious participants in the world.
We know that we cannot continue to live life personally and mutually as we have, but we also need to invent another way to confront the philosophical wilderness of our minds where we encounter the dangers of an unbalanced life, a fractured self and a dispirited will. Most of us want our lives to have meaning, but not at the expense of others. And while many of us are angry with the exactly identical system that we all depend on to sustain our livelihoods, we would prefer to be in harmony with our neighbours and our surroundings. The injustices we witness affect much more of us than we know, but nothing will change until the good among us reach some common ground that we can steady by simultaneously applying both ethics and logic. Science, religion, politics and all traditional and liberal cultures need to reconcile their differences by returning to the same fundamentals from which they all arose. We have to find faith in ourselves and in each other as spiritual or moral creatures who can cooperatively overcome the frailties and improprieties of our humanity. We cannot fight something malevolent in its own arena. We have to do this on our own terms as humanely enlightened beings, but firstly, we must remember who we truly are and what the simple point of life really is.
We have to return to being comfortable with an evolving process of awareness regarding a truth we innately know that we must defend because the empowering mechanistic darkness of the world buried in ourselves deceives us into forgetting. Our challenge lies in how we can retrieve the truth we hold when we cannot seem to recall or express it, and this is why we need to access our breadth of experience together as individuals and as communities through our memories, symbols and records to facilitate its recognition. We need one another everywhere in the past, present and future to ensure the ubiquity and continuity of the eternal answer we seek to our shared conundrum. Unfortunately, it is not what we learn to expect from the edification we receive as civilized members of materially advanced societies, but it is undeniably something primitive and deep-rooted that we all instinctively know and convey in our daily lives: we transmit and appreciate meaning through stories and storytelling.
Meaning is encoded in stories, which can be our own or that of others. This is because we think of our lives as stories, and we need to feel a part of them as leads, contributors or observers. By being in the story or relating to one on some level, we create a sense of belongingness. And although this is open to many interpretations, we find meaning in stories that serve something, whether it is a purpose, goal or struggle. This can be an obstacle to overcome or a journey of discovery to experience the unknown or what has yet to transpire or exist, but it can also be some lesson to learn and deliver to others through the pairing of our triumphs and failures. And while this generally implies the occurrence of a significant change or transformation such as undergoing some form of transcendence from what we are to what we were inherently meant to be, it does not necessarily have to be transformative. Often, it is merely a rediscovery of what most of us probably understood when we were children but could never articulate or generate in the public theatre of life. But ultimately, we find closure in our stories by revealing their relevance, which at times produces a humbling moment of enlightenment that seems to suspend time.
The value of oral traditions and great literature, including religious scriptures, is the underlying and sometimes concealed meaning we find embedded in the content of these texts and teachings. This is also rooted in art, music, fashion and architecture that leave us with remnants of our attempts to exhibit our shifting values and sentiments as we do during the course of our own lives. But we have lost touch with their significance as we have with our own because we are being compelled to lean towards their misinterpretation and misdirection, where the moral of the story seems to be so diluted that it has no meaning at all. Stories are not synonymous with entertainment, where we judge them in terms of their power to excite us or validate our feelings. They should not act as companions that echo our static beliefs but rather as shepherds that steer us back to the realities that we should not ignore.
Given how far we have gone off course, we arguably need to update the ancient wisdom we managed to salvage to help direct the results of our modern discovery towards the true essence of our conscious existence. Since we have progressed to the point that we are capable of our own annihilation, we need to strip away all of the senseless debate and tone down the dissonant noise of our pathological self-interest caused by our servitude to the false gods of conquest and prosperity before we mutate to the very thing we secretly fear. We live inside our heads unable to find our way out except as the pretensions we have become, and while we seem to desire refuge from our innermost thoughts, their subjugation only leads to our addiction to a reality we cannot control or escape and to our desperation to instate our mental remedies as truths. To overturn this propensity, we need to be equipped with a sense of ownership over our lives where we can draw a path forward to create our stories and reclaim the lessons we left behind in both our individual and collective histories. We need to regain our spirit.
Our humanity is a true expression of the soul, which is enabled by our consciousness of the world and our own self-awareness and by our mutual recognition of that consciousness in one another. It gives rise to questions that go beyond our rudimentary biological programming to a purpose we do not confine to brute reproductive survival and the pleasures of the flesh or to our obsession with power and autonomy. Even after we satisfy these drives to varying degrees, we still feel unfulfilled due to some emergent sense that comes from our sentient quality. As long as we are able to ask questions about life and feel this emptiness that haunts us all, we will demand at some stage in our lives to apprehend our raison d'être for our mental health as well as for our moral well-being because we are less than animals without its sustainment. Consequently, our stories act like coded instructions to remind us of this verity.
Unfortunately, narratives are typically used to sell convenient lies as facts because we know that we need stories to make sense of the world and of ourselves to the point that we fabricate reality and embellish tales of our experiences. This makes it especially critical that we remain faithful to the truth by examining for ourselves what we are told to be true through our direct observation and by seeking honesty in our feelings and surfacing our underlying motives. But by being truly genuine, we also realize something deeper is at play within us that goes beyond our greed or desperation and that feels like an ineffable kind of freedom calling out for our attention. And while we may regularly try to express it in our personal beliefs and political affiliations, we do not capture it well due to our preconceived notions of liberation as well as our segregation of identities, which are often negating identities such as atheism. Although the latter may be necessary to distinguish ourselves in interpersonal and intergroup settings, they promote division more than purpose. But if we had a straightforward identity that told us simply to live and let meaning generate itself in the process, we would more likely focus on life as an open adventure we share in unison with others rather than a cruel game we play against one another.
The indescribable motivation that we can all intuitively sense is our spirit or essence, and it is about regaining what is already rightfully ours. No religion or philosophy, no science or profession and no government or family has the supreme authority to take that from us, and that is the capacity to live and know life with the freedom to become what we really are in order to reflect that truth. This is the basis of being viagnostic. Its value rests on the idea that we can have a means by which we can all personally identify without abandoning all other ways that matter to us such as our roles as parents or as partners. While we could argue this is a new label, it is not a new identity. It is something primordial we share that is neither secular nor religious. There is nothing to worship except what we choose to venerate, and there are no tenets except for what we choose to uphold. But if we are all sincere, we will converge on the fundamentals that unite us while we diverge as we really are into our potential.
Although there is no thesis presented, it is important to note that this modest collection of inscribed thoughts makes elementary claims about the truth we wish to solidify about life that may be reassuring for most of us while being provocative for some. It does not aim to offend anyone, but it does challenge the ways in which we may have been led astray because one of its functions is to deliver an inclusive package that outlines key components of a universal identity from which we can build our own understanding of the truth and decide how to live our lives. In addition, it serves as a textbook on the elementary principles of meaning in life, and much like a textbook, it will be revised in future editions as needed. However, there was a deliberate attempt to contain the length of this amalgamated work by providing very few examples. While we can assume that much of the content is self-evident from our own direct experience, the intent is to minimize the degree to which we might narrowly interpret the definition and application of a principle by means of exemplification while accepting the risk of more misunderstanding. This includes words such as ego, self, mind and soul that will likely require more effort to appreciate their distinctions, which may or may not vary with their contemporary use.
One of the trials undertaken by this project was to address the subjects of meaning, wisdom and morality while averting specific political and religious references. However, if much of the content seems to mimic common sense or concepts we have heard or read before, then it is probably because they qualify as culturally accepted truisms. Nevertheless, the overall goal is not to introduce wholly new ideas, but to identify nuances we may have missed or simply never integrated. And although several novel terms were coined to avoid confusion with other pre-existing conceptual notions, the uniqueness of this work lies in its compilation and the general path it sets out for personal discovery or rediscovery, where we hopefully come to recognize or reinforce the basic principle that life is not something to be won, but something to be experienced. It is the continuity of the story that matters above all else.
The book divides into five parts or acts to represent the biographical structure of the viagnostic narrative. Each one builds on the next to conclude with a set of realities, lessons and principles, which ultimately highlight the fundamentals that we may want to consider further individually and as a whole. And although it will expectedly accentuate some of the precarious views and unquestioned assumptions that continue to plague us in how we approach life, especially in terms of what we believe gives us meaning, the distinctiveness of this work is found in its design as a grid of five rows and five columns. This means that we can consume its content as a whole or as independent pieces. And while we can treat each row, column and chapter as its own complete work, it is recommended that we read it in its entirety to fathom the meaning of the viagnostic narrative. In addition, we will uncover the fact that there are two diagonal shortcuts embedded in this matrix to define the core tenets of being viagnostic as well as the base concept of having forepsyche. Finally, we can also read it in three layers like concentric circles that descend into the centre chapter, which is the most original section of the book.
The value of this multidimensional framework is that it enables us to engage as a traveller on a journey or as a participant in a labyrinth to question the reality of who we are and what we believe. If we jump to the end, we will neither comprehend the breadth of this work nor appreciate how much is interlaced behind and across its chapters. Even if we read it in its normal sequence, it is meant to be a nonlinear experience like life itself. The book is supposed to be the embodiment of our stories, and its multi-year construction based on several decades of contemplation and engagement with life is itself an intimate illustration of a transformative narrative.
The final unique feature of this work is its reference to films, and specifically one per chapter as if each chapter is a scene of a movie. In an attempt to represent a soundtrack as an integral component of a motion picture, this book has a filmtrack embedded within its base template to elicit some of the feelings we may arouse when we listen to music. The films vary in genre and extend over multiple generations to underscore something beyond our own lifespans, but they were not intended to reflect the central theme of their respective chapters. They merely emphasize specific ideas or images expressed in various segments of this book. Any of these films along with numerous others could have been cited to convey many of the points depicted in this text. However, regardless of this fact, it would be advisable to view these films beforehand if they have not yet been seen since some of their descriptive references may stress details that could possibly remove any suspense or revelation intended by the director, or by the author for those movies that are based on a novel or a biography.
We can think of this book as a faithful confidant who routinely reminds us of what we know in those moments when we neglect our own advice, including advice we give to family and friends, due to the emotional turmoil caused by the difficult circumstances in which we find ourselves. In the absence of a trusted colleague, this accessible memory tool provides a reasonable alternative. But where it clearly fails to be as interactive as a relationship, it sufficiently compensates by never refusing to communicate, and more importantly, by never changing its message. The viagnostic narrative prompts us to manifest our essence in a reality that requires meaning. And while it can or does translate to being the story of knowing life, it is not as much as about the story of life as it is about the narrative behind the story. This is solely a guide because it is actually our own individual stories that reflect life.