Quote:
As simply as possible:
In what does craig1120 find meaning?
In what could an atheist find meaning?
Let me try to explain why it’s not this simple by comparing life as a game to a typical video game. In life, unnecessary exertion is costly and evolution has selected against it. In other words, we default to playing the game of life on the easiest difficulty setting. In a typical video game, you can beat the game on ‘easy’, but in life, you can only get so far (meaning) without increasing the difficulty level.
The sticking point is not identifying rationally what we should find meaningful. It is more about realizing it’s not that simple while deciding whether or not and how to increase the difficulty level.
So let me go back to the beginning and try to be more clear. Think of the young child who is completely engrossed in the environment and commits some type of transgression. An adult responsible for socializing the child will reprimand or punish the child. Perhaps the initial punishment is not severe enough to change the child’s future behavior at all. The adult should then incrementally increase the level of punishment. Eventually, the punishment will cross the threshold where the child feels shamed which will induce a wake up call for the child. The shaming experience is sufficiently threatening and painful enough to cause a momentarily transcendence or disruption between the child and the environment.
Now, the child will strongly dislike the break in engrossment and will probably cry. In this moment, the child will be able to intuit a choice between two realities. The first option is always to re-enter and be re-absorbed into the status quo reality. However, when the child makes this choice, they will be in the same state as when they initially transgressed. That means their behavior won’t change and they will later find themselves back in the same place of transgression + shame + transcendence + choice. Except part of them will remember that they have been in this spot and they will begin to feel frustrated.
At this point, they can recognize that choosing the status quo reality does not just simply equate to comfortable re-absorption but also shame, frustration, etc. Usually this results in a concession of choosing the second reality where they change their behavior properly. Still, just because they now recognize the choice they need to make, that doesn’t mean they have properly committed to that reality. There is a part of them that actively resists leveling up in this way and uses deception.
The next progression is the child back in the same position of punishment with even more frustration. Eventually, the child realizes that choosing the new reality is not enough and that they have to commit to it fully by cutting themselves off from the status quo reality. After this commitment, there now will exist a permanent separation between the child and the environment. That is the required sacrifice for the child to enter into the reality where they no longer repeat the same transgression. Soon enough, the child will transgress again in a different way and face the same situation. Each cycle that separation between child and environment gradually increases.
Again, I am claiming that this happens intuitively at the periphery of awareness. If you cannot accept that children have this level of sophistication, and you have a different model for how we progress, then nothing else I have tried to communicate that stacks on top will land with you. To be clear, it is not essential at all to consciously hold this model in order to make the proper moves. Children progress with no conscious understanding of what I have explained.
Meaning
As we mature through the socialization process I just detailed, we become more permanently alienated from the cover and protection of the feminine. An initial response to this vulnerability is often to try to re-absorb back into cover and protection. The call of the Sirens in the Odyssey represents this pattern.
A better response to the vulnerability and suffering from the alienation is to counter it with meaning. This will work for a period of time until the meaning we are using inevitably becomes hollow and we are thrown back in lack. This puts us into a similar position that the punished child was in previously except instead of being punished and shamed by an adult, we are being punished and shamed by reality. Or, to personify it, we are being shamed by the feminine ideal, which is the highest form of meaning and a version of God.
Again, shame -> transcendence -> choice between status quo reality or sacrifice for new reality. Initial response is almost always to re-enter into status quo by doubling down on familiar and accessible meaning sources, often leading to forms of addiction(s). Analogous to the punished child situation and as I mentioned earlier in the thread, the move of progress is to commit to the new reality by cutting yourself off from the status quo reality, which means cutting yourself off from familiar sources of meaning that worked in the past.
Once in the new reality, higher levels of meaning will become salient. The problem is that we will try to avoid making that permanent commitment and permanent separation from the status quo. We will try to identify higher levels of meaning while keeping one foot in the status quo reality with the misguided intention of merging them somehow.