Finding Opportunities In The Meaning Crisis

In this episode Dr. Sally Adnams Jones and Dr. Jen Peer Rich explore these opportunities that arise out the meaning crisis. 

Transcript

0:55 Sally welcomes listeners back to the year long conversation about transformation. Episode 15 is on the meaning of life (as opposed to just the meaning of words), which has obsessed mankind since the dawn of humanity. Sally makes a disclaimer – they’re not going to give any answers, but they're going to give an overview. They too are in a lineage of ‘meaning making’, by making this podcast. Meaning ‘making’ is what's driving everyone’s lives, the search for love, value, work, purpose, connection, and belonging. Sally often spends time with individual clients after there's been a meaning collapse. There's a lot of suffering. But when clients start to rebuild, there's profound transformation. So 1) collapses of meaning, 2) suffering, and 3) rebuilding - is transformative meaning making, a critical skill for well-being. This is a normal process, especially at midlife. It's very painful. But when you see the pattern, you can deal with it. It's an enormous strength. It builds resilience. Sally talks about Viktor Frankl and his book “Man’s search for meaning.” This same pattern occurs collectively too, as we are fractals. And right now there's a collective meaning collapse. This is the normal prerequisite for a profound transformation. Our old belief systems have been deconstructed by post modernism. Sally recommends John Vervaeke’s Youtube series “Awakening from the meaning crises”. Many disciplines have looked at this issue of meaning ‘making’ - philosophy, psychology, cognitive science. Following every collapse of meaning, whether it's in the individual or in the collective, there’s period of darkness, followed by reconstruction. It’s deeply reassuring to notice this is a pattern. The field of transformation reorganizes, deconstructs and then reconstructs.

9:47 Jen agrees that meaning is meant to collapse. It’s natural and part of our development. The podcast explores how we can recognize ourselves as fields of constant transformation within a larger field of transformation. Creating meaning gives us a sense of well-being, and purpose, and allows us to grow. It gives us frameworks to live in a complex world. And it’s different for all of us. Opportunities arise in crisis too. It's hard to keep up with information and disinformation. Our survival as a species is uncertain. Different systems are collapsing right now. How can we create personal and collective meaning in a creative synthesis, that allows us to heal the subject-object split that we discussed in a prior episode - the tension between inner meaning and outer meaning, so that we can actively participate in this meaning crisis, in conscious and constructive ways. We're all experiencing more mental health issues and loss of connection, loss of community. The systems that we thought were unbreakable are being questioned right now. Vervaeke points to the positive things that are also arising out of this meaning crisis - all the traditions and practices that we've talked about on this podcast. We can exist within this breakdown with these same tools. We have the opportunity to create meaning in new ways that have never been seen before.  

19:29 Sally says the crises is based in a disconnection from previous meanings, as well as disconnection from our own body, other people, the land, traditions, and the environment - a poly crisis. If it's dis-connection that gives us a collapse of meaning, then the antidote is re-connection. Previously, meaning was held in religion, and for many, that has collapsed. The arts generate meaning, whereas philosophy deconstructs meaning. But the arts have been devalued and diminished by capitalism. How do we make global meaning through shared narratives of value? That's the next meta modern move. It’s creative. Sally describes this process, of buying into a bigger picture that will emerge. There's been a devaluing of the subjective, and an overvaluing of the objective, in modernity. With science, we became more and more objective - looking ‘at’ the world, as opposed to ‘feeling’ it, and ‘imagining’ it. Iain McGilchrist suggests we need to re-value the right brain. This is the answer to connection. Sally describes how hyper-Yang turned the world into an object that we can ‘use’ as a resource and destroy, and this attitude is now destroying us. We reconnect through the arts, intuition, imagination, or the feminine. By bringing the masculine and feminine back together, and we integrate the left and right brain hemisphere. The work is to reconstruct value for everybody. Meaning is both individual/subjective (fulfilling pleasure, needs, and desires) and collective/objective (truth, beauty, goodness), - intrinsic and extrinsic values that work for everybody. 

27:14 Jen says we are saturated in the old, reductive, binary thinking. It's so important to heal this split because we are making meaning together all the time. That's how we evolve as a society, which is a set of shared agreements, that are alive, and constantly changing. We connect with others who share our values, and ideals. We infuse meaning into our messages, because we want somebody to ‘hear’ us. We're sharing that meaning. And then we find our tribes and imbue meaning into our creative expressions. So we're constantly creating meaning together, in service to each other, in taking positions of leadership, to address the alienation and disconnection. Jen cites Joanna Macy.

32:26 Sally describes how the opposites arose on the Savannah. Our gendered specializations helped us survive. Yet we all have these qualities, and we can integrate them. This is a massive shift of meaning. Our old idea of distinct roles or God may have died. But there's something emerging - our understanding of a field of intelligence. Some people have called God the ‘hyper-object’, but its also a hyper-subject, too. It's a sentient hyper-field. That changes everything. And we need to integrate our own brain to receive a new level of consciousness, integrate the masculine and feminine, the left and right brain, the internal and the external, noticing that the field is in constant change. Parmenides said life is changeless. But Heraclitus said life is constant change. These are the two polarities, the universal and the relative. What are the permanent unchanging values that give us meaning? And what are the changing values that we need to update? Philosophers have generally either focused on changing-subjective or unchanging-objective meaning making. She gives examples of how they focused on one or the other. But Hegel unites these opposites - in a ‘dialectic’, a higher synthesis. This is the next shift in consciousness. This is a process of ‘meaning emergence’. When we synthesize, we get a larger perspective or narrative. This is complexification, and evolution. 

40:05 Jen says there’s something so fruitful about this breakdown of ossified structures so that new meanings can arise. Our capacity for meaning making is miraculous. Perhaps our internal world and our external world might one day operate in harmony, with no tension between the two, just a steady flow of information, that we interpret, into ever changing fluid meanings, not holding on to any particular meaning beyond its relevance. We can't deal with a very complex, many-systems crisis with the reductionist and binary old thinking, that got us into this predicament to begin with. The solutions are found in the things we talk about all the time on this podcast - complexity, paradox, nuance, the hallmarks of conscious living, being open to those new solutions, to deal with the problems that we face. So ‘meaning’ is always going to be a “both/and” project. And when those two things come together, healing happens. That's how we evolve as a species. We can reimagine and recreate not only who we are, in our sense of identity, but also our minds, hearts and spirits. Then we can access this deeper wisdom that is alive within, in order to survive in these chaotic times, where meaning and transformation really intersect. This is a profound transformative opportunity every single day. 

45:09 Sally describes some of the old beliefs that are now dissolving in a postmodern world, and asks How do we create new meaning that works for everybody. It's going to take time to integrate these new meanings, into the biggest, widest perspective that we have to date, one that is meaningful for everybody. And its exciting that we get to co-create this new, more inclusive meaning. Sally then describes episode 16 – models of development, and adult maturity. They will look at models that map our full human potential.