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

the decentering of human life from its cosmic significance, a decline in our sense of purpose, and a sensation of having lost the soul that gave earlier human societies their adaptiveness and vitality. It seems we are left with a feeling of having lost our place in the world along with a sense of who we are and what we ought to do with ourselves.

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.”

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

Wisdom is ultimately about how to generate and enhance this meaning. Wisdom is about realizing. This means that cultivating wisdom generates realization in both senses of the word: becoming aware and making real. Wisdom is about realizing meaning in life in a profound way.

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

As a cognitive scientist, I think this is a doomed strategy; overwhelming evidence says mind and consciousness are emergent from your brain and dependent on it.

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

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