Meaning is the substance of life. What constitutes wholeness is a sense of meaning and purpose not reducible to the compartmentalised elements of life, and what constitutes transcendence is a sense of all meaning flowing through you like light through stained glass.
We exist in mind that we cannot place in time or space. Consciousness flows through reality like a river, touching everything and always passing. The whole is composed of parts but no whole exists without itself to make reference to itself, a construct both contained and not limited to a reality that forms us.
So as we pass through time like pilgrims and satellites we brim with stories that tell us what it means to be alive, stories that place us in a moral world, a world alive with colour and meaning. At the same time out of the necessities and vicissitudes of reality we also seek tools that enable us to survive and to seek control over the world around us. To do this we order, make hierarchies and distill patterns, seek to divine the course of nature so that we might know it and possess it and be free from it.
In the modern world we have come to call these tools “science”. A word that simply derives from a word for knowledge, sciences codifies our observations and divinations of the patterns that order a material reality. It is an…
