Our minds are very limited when it comes to understanding Reality, namely because every worldview provides both a useful lens onto the world, but also comes with its assumptions and limitations, but also because the mind itself, the generator of all worldviews, is limited by its spatio-temporal capacities, which again, allow us to make sense of Reality within it, but also blind us to what is beyond separation (space) and causality (time).
But it is nonetheless possible to understand aspects of Reality, the same way that birds 'understand' flight, through one's own being and one's own experience. Then, and only then, does the mind come up with beautiful metaphors and intelligent concepts, because the insight has come from a direct contact with Reality. A bird might not have the elaborate theories of aerodynamics that physicists do, but nonetheless it is able to fly, and likewise all of nature, and all conscious people, are able to understand aspects of Reality through this effortless contact with it. Being, experiencing, whatever you want to call it, is deeper than any faculty of the mind. The mind does not contact Reality, it interacts with a represented, or we could say 'virtual', version of Reality.
A very useful process no doubt, but still misleading. If you take ideas too literally, and start to believe for instance that all of Reality is just a bunch of atoms causally interacting with one another, or that a literal God (one that is a describable thing and that compels us to obey to its literal rules) is behind it all, or that it's all happening in your mind, then you will be lead astray. As Darren Allen puts it in this note:
Science no more knows what things are, because of what they can predictably do, than someone you live with knows who you are because of how you predictably behave.
Beware of worldviews that don't ask you to live fully in order to understand them.
Likewise the meaning of life cannot be understood intellectually. Some people look at the countless failed attempts to reduce life into a literal, mind-graspable set of ideas, and conclude that life is therefore meaningless, but that would be like a blind man looking for an auditory description of colors, and who ends up concluding that they simply don't exist.
Just like a great story cannot be contained in a mere summary, which not only leaves crucial parts of it, but more importantly, its totality across time, likewise life cannot simply be summarized, it has to be experienced. Just ask yourself this: if you could choose between mere ideas about life, and life itself as an experience, which would you choose? Ideas and knowledge are quite shallow things at the end of the day, which is why only a fool would choose the former over the latter.
The reason why more and more people feel like life is meaningless nowadays is because life within the technological system indeed is meaningless. We spend our entire life navigating a sea of complexity, just so we get the chance to work at meaningless tasks to provide for ourselves within a cultural wasteland, and we are supposed to be grateful for all of this. But just because the wildness of life is beaten out of us in this modern zoo doesn't mean that freedom, adventure, mystery and meaning do not exist.
The meaning of life comes through its totality, which like a story is presented to us through rhythm and quality. The system doesn't allow rhythm however, it tries to squeeze as much of our energy as possible through a set of predictable, repetitive tasks which are beneficial to it. And conscious quality, like the mood of the sky above us, or the atmosphere of the room, or the vibe of your partner, or artistic quality of a song, is at best useless to the system, at worst completely antithetical to its focus on quantity.
Thus we live in a tedious world that demands constant, pointless activity from us, and which punishes us for not meeting its absurd demands. Such an ersatz world is very keen on telling us that whatever we fancy doesn't exist, that there is actually no such thing as love, because we are all selfish primates trying to outcompete one another, or that freedom doesn't exist, because everything is downstream of causality and biological imperatives, or that beauty doesn't exist except as a subjective (and thus naive and useless) notion, or that meaning doesn't exist, because we are cosmically insignificant and destined to die anyway.
There is meaning, but again it is experienced through the totality of life. The system, and the automatons who maintain it, only understand parts, which is why they never know what anything is. Seriously! Ask a scientist what something is, and he will always give an answer that depends on other concepts. To define part A, he talks about part B and part C, and to define part B, he talks about part D and E, etc.
Everything is defined relatively when you view Reality as a set of parts, which means that nothing actually matters on its own. System-people never invite you to sit with something in its entirety and experience it from within, because first of all that is completely useless to the system and the self, and second of all, they do not know how to do that, which is why they often feel so comfortable within the system, because they do not have to betray their conscience to fit in it.
Thus, to be a connoisseur of life, one must learn to softly attend to wholes, because hard attention always turn experience into a set of separate things, which also means learning to not judge anything, or at least not letting the judgement overwhelm your experience. Learning to softly gaze at the clouds, or listen to the quiet songs of the birds, or savor the taste of a homecooked meal, or feeling the delight of a good night's rest after a busy day, or being tickled by the overwhelming astonishment that anything exists.
All of those are fairly easy when things are going well, when life is easy, but how many of us can say that we are delighted in our experience when things aren't going so well? When we are under a real threat of losing our job, or when the money isn't so good, or when our partner is moody and we don't understand why, or when we feel a strange pain in our body that doesn't seem to disappear. Then all of sudden, it's like those events aren't supposed to happen, and that life is unfair for subjugating you to any kind of suffering.
But because the meaning of life is found in its totality, then that obviously means that the parts that we reject, the pain, the uncertainty, the loneliness, the confusion, the boredom, all of those are also part of the ride, part of the symphony. To live well is to be able to savor any experience, to find the hidden hilarity in a personal tragedy, and to find the surprising truth in a throwaway joke.
Beware of people who proclaim to have great answers to the questions of life, if they are not interested in its totality. This is like saying that you love someone, except for some aspects here and there. You don't get to selectively choose life, you embrace it as a whole, or you don't, and end up 'living' like so many people do, constantly arguing with life about how certain things are unfair, or how they wished that they could keep the good without having the bad, on and on. Those people are not really living, which is why they feel that life is so meaningless, and try so hard to convince others that it is so.
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Mind Limitation Understanding Meaning Nihilism Being
2026-08-16