Stories, Aims, and the Search for Meaning

I think the reason that we have a culture war raging in the West, why there's so much instability, is because something new is struggling to be born or reborn. And I want to explain the reason for that first. And the reason is that the Enlightenment view of the world, which has guided our technological and scientific endeavor, our conceptual endeavor, our philosophical endeavor for a few hundred years, is there's some something about it that's wrong. [00:04:13]

Why can't we orient ourselves in the world with the facts? Well, the simplest explanation for that is that there are too many facts. There's as many facts as there are phenomena. More, actually. There's as many facts as there are possible combinations of phenomena. You drown in the facts. [00:07:30]

When you're confused in your own life, and things are chaotic, and you're anxious, it's because a plethora of possibilities is making itself manifest in front of you, and you don't know which way to turn. You don't have a clear direction. You don't have a clear aim. There's no way of simplifying the world so that you can act in it. [00:07:57]

The description of the structure through which you see the world is a story That's what a story is okay, so now this explains many things that are otherwise left as mysteries or or Side effects I read a book by Steven Pinker once Pinker's an Enlightenment Rationalist from Harvard and a good guy and very smart and much of what he says is extraordinarily useful but he believes for example that our proclivity to enjoy and tell stories is like a side effect of Something more fundamental cognitively. [00:11:59]

If this if you get the story right for a child you can capture the child's interest and you can Integrate almost any form of learning into the story and the child will be captivated by that when children play Pretend play which they do spontaneously they spontaneously dramatize the world they spontaneously make stories out of their roles and their and their destinies and that that Captures them that forms the basis of their friendships. [00:13:13]

And you want to practice that in a way, if you can, that isn't in itself fatal. You want to expose yourself to the catastrophes of existence so that you're prepared when those catastrophes come along. You want to expose yourself to the predators that lurk everywhere. You want to inure yourself against what's disgusting and contaminating because you're going to have to deal with it. [00:14:41]

And you watch how they prioritize their actions. And from that, you derive an understanding of what's important to them. As soon as you understand what's important to them, you've got their aim. You've figured that character out. This is what you do when you learn to know someone. What's their aim? [00:19:08]

We see the world through a story. The world resists. The world's objects reveal themselves in relationship to our aim. The landscape of emotion presents itself as markers on the pathway to our aim. The world reveals itself in accordance with our aim. That's how perception works. [00:20:27]

And to transform ourselves so that our aim becomes ever more precise and efficient and delivers us a world that's ever more abundant and beautiful. And that's all a function of aim. [00:22:01]

The biblical corpus provides a multidimensional characterization of the fundamental aim of man and cosmos. That's the claim of the book. So I'm going to walk you through some of the stories and show you what's being revealed. What's being revealed is the proper object of worship. Okay, so what does that mean? The proper object of celebration. [00:35:30]

The emergence of order out of chaos that makes itself manifest in the form of your life. How is the stage set? The Spirit of God hovers over the water, over the deep. You hear that in the Judeo -Christian tradition, God engenders the world, ex nihilo, out of nothing. That's not how the story sets itself up. [00:38:09]

Are you going to establish the order that's good in the course of the day? Because that's what you're called upon to do. And it's your re -creation of what God himself does at the beginning of time. That constitutes the action of your conscious on the possibility that's in front of you. You have a microcosm of plenitude and possibility right in front of you at any moment. [00:41:33]