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Meaning and Truth

Meaning is emotive. It represents the capacity to convert work and difficulty into flow, love, and direction.

Truth is the reason you do it, cognitively. You can have a sense of meaning, without being able to, or needing to, explain it.

What both do, though, is simulate order. Your world is never fully orderly, internally or (of course) externally, by which I mean there is never complete congruence between will or desire and outcome. There are always rough edges, and breaks in the texture.

As I look at a life of freedom, it is a mystery. You can do anything you want. Think about that. You can go left, or you can go right (to borrow a dialogue bit from Battle:LA). You can walk into a bookstore and buy ANY book in there. You can walk into a clothing store and buy anything in there. You can drop everything, and join a commune. You could defect to North Korea, so that someone will always tell you what to do, and you will be more or less fed and housed.

Freedom is a seamless ocean, in constant motion, which is limitless in its possible permutations.

This thought tends to make peoples heads explode, so they need to retreat into codes of behavior, moral systems, religious systems, philosophical systems.

What a sense of meaning provides is a direction of movement. This is the most important element phenomenologically. It is the task you feel compelled to accomplish, because it needs to be done.

What a truth system does is determine the limits of the meaning system, the boundaries. You do this, but not that. It provides the principles by means of which the chaos of freedom is tamed, roughly.

These are out loud musings. I’m not sure if this makes sense or not, but it feels like this is about the right direction for this line–wave, cloud, funnel–of thought.