Awakening From the Meaning Crisis

Myths are not false stories about the ancient past. They are symbolic motifs that represent and dramatize perennial patterns, the structures of meaning that are always with us. Myths allow us to bring these intuitive, implicit patterns into consciousness to make them shareable and allow us to internalize, ritualize, and apprehend them in more revea

Foolishness occurs when your capacity to engage your agency or pursue your goals is undermined by self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior. This behavior is a perennial vulnerability in your cognition.

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, whereas foolishness is a lack of wisdom.

There is some controversy about dating Homo sapiens, but conservatively we have existed since at least 200,000 BCE. Around 40,000 BCE a radical change occurred within this evolutionary continuum. We have come to call it the Upper Paleolithic transition. Human beings began doing things they were not doing before. They began to make representational

We will begin with the Upper Paleolithic transition, which occurred around 40,000 BCE. Many people think of this period as the time when humanity—as we now define it—came into form. While we wouldn’t be able to relate to these ancestors culturally or linguistically, we would nevertheless recognize their kind of humanity as akin to ours, a humanity

We cannot just treat the Meaning Crisis as a scientific problem, but we can certainly argue for it in a highly plausible way.

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, whereas foolishness is a lack of wisdom. Foolishness occurs when your capacity to engage your agency or pursue your goals is undermined by self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior. This behavior is a perennial vulnerability in your cognition.

As C. G. Jung once wrote, one of the perils of having a soul is the risk of losing it.⁠14

flow,⁠11 a state of heightened attention that sharpens our consciousness and competence while deepening our participation in the world—the feeling of “being in the zone.”