On “Maps of Meaning"

I was given the book Maps of Meaning on the day I was setting my mind on what would be my next journey. A special thank to a special person that appears in the right timing :)

Human probably the most complicated creature on earth where we don't know how to navigate our fate but still wanna set the course and control the next journey.

What is meaning? Are we the machine of rationale or are we the machine that know how to think? Or we are a body of a messy emotion that learns to rationale?

I ask myself many many times that questions. From the movie of Black Mirrors, In Time, I'm Robot, Bicentennial Man etc. I couldn’t feel more. But still, the moment where I learnt that as human visualizing the coming future of immortality, we still love to be human and be fear of death. Because we find the most beautiful thing on earth, of being human: The unbearable lightness of being and the ending of life: death.

The book Maps of Meaning is hard to read. Very hard to read since the information provided and the interpretation of the “components" of philosophy, religions, history and the “narratives” are blended. Still, it provides great “navigation" towards the most previous things of human: Meaning.

a. Meaning is created. That's the first and foremost thing that keeps striking me up until now. Formerly, I was a creature of faith and “mission/purpose in life". Little that I know I was the writer of my own story. The complexity lies in the way how meaning would be manifested and bringing to life, and the vision how it would be is both excited and terrifying.

b. Although the book was written in 1999 but it resonates a lot with recent authors such as The Things You See When Walking Slowly, or the movie Soul. In this, we are the one who “choose” how meaning control us in a sense that we control the meaning in our life. How many times we tell ourself that this doesnt make sense but still doing it anyway? How do we hold dear the love, the relationship, the job, the unfortunate events of yesterdays or the vision of being abandoned of tomorrow and carry/repeating till the future ends? We didn't know “how" something means so much for us and how to cut through the attachment, yet we keep on creating the attachment itself.

c. Peterson focuses on explaining how individual suffer and bring about the social conflict and explain why some person can cause such events like Holocaust. And that set the fundamentals on the belief systems. As machine, human runs on beliefs system. That system is bot the shield and the cell to human's life. We establish our own walls just to wish someone or something will set us free someday. I have been seeing people claiming that they don’t need anyone in life. Is it really the truth? Is it really what their hearts telling them? Or it is just another rule in the system to prevent them from being hurt? “Something we cannot see protect us from something we do not understand.”

d. We are all traveling through the unknown sea — The Unknown or Unexplored Territory; to The Known or the Explored (but to me is the perceived zone) via The ship of Knower (interesting, knower is the medium between Unknown and Known). We know what we know. How can we know what we don't know? Still, we make meaning for both the known and the unknown, to avoid the void of not-knowing. Hahaha. We don’t want the chaos we don't want. But we do bring the chaos to other people life by “thinking" we understand how people might. Since we are capable of destroying ourselves to avoid the uncomfortability, why do we choose to destroy other with the same or even more effort with also to avoid the uncomfortability?

Since “…belief make the world, in a very real way — that beliefs are the world in a more than metaphysical sense". How can we tap into the beliefs for a more beautiful and less hostile world? Will alternate the belief system of an individual in short term and long term helps? At his or her childhood is better? I couldn't wait. I could not being able to control myself from questioning the reality and possibility of the application of the knowledge written by Peterson. What if the most fearful answer is that, we can understand, we can try our best but the way life is, is far from what we can influence? Hahaha.

e. What helps us the most in this life, is what we receive. We receive the information and interactions around us, ranging from materials like movie, arts, books etc. to “reality” around us, the interactions with the world of beings and our own thoughts. Emotion is what cause us to think and rethink how we should react. But rarely emotion tells us what to do. Something makes you do but can’t tell you what you think.

Those are also the narrative of other people's beliefs. So as you can see, we live in the world of matrix of beliefs where we are supposed to function harmonized with the surroundings and living our own very unique life based on the interaction of the unique combination surrounding us.

Welcome to the world of “Experience". What the past has created and influence the future.

f. “We fight with the stranger over what things mean, not what they are”. We are made of information and the connection of information towards our emotion. Hence, that's “emomation” is our reality. We have our subjective reality and inter-subjective reality. Rarely, we see things in their objective reality. Because we hardly become objective. The world of objective is very vast. It consumes the object completely but gives the object the full control of being itself. We, as human being with the capacity of the brain, hardly can function as the world. We can capture and imagine as closest to the “truth" but we can’t be the truth itself.

Our brain is a poor creature. It has to multifunction so that we are in a great dynamic balance: of biologically and ideally. Hence, it has to create such process to run automatically and do some of the “hard things about hard things” every time it encounters. And yet, we want to have all the perfect solution for the Unknown, only to learn that life is the process of embracing the “Knower" through the struck of emotion. Emotion is what makes us human. The ability to recognize the emotion, embrace it and resolve it is not a simple ability. It requires more than just skill set but the situational awareness, people awareness and a good intention to set the consequence free. From time to time, we learn to walk on our feet, between the Normal Nothing Life and the Revolutionary (but please sometimes) Life. To be able to remember the “whole thing", we give it a narrative and using the “language of the known" to explain it to other people, but first to ourself.

g. It’s very interesting that when I learn more, I realize more about the child and how childhood has influenced me up until now. The concept of the child within you needs healing is also true, but it’s also very confusing how to “bring up” the man I need cause I have been a grown up in this society where I have to figure out how to be an acceptable and above man.

As a child, the acknowledgement of the society and the close circle seems to be at ease. There is not much to “think" and act. Now there is so many things to think about and think about the thoughts also. How tired! Also, there is nothing guarantee the acceptance and praise once the behaviors and the interactions varies from time to time and the expectations also varied, which make prediction comes useless sometimes or the fun part gone.

And the predictability is the surface or the below layers? Will it be superficial to give people what they want instead what they need? Who am I to give myself the privilege of deciding what others might whereas I am not told? The interaction, the culture, the belief system I embodied, will it be able to protect me from the unknown of the future? How can I constantly update and in the right way?

h. If we were able to “map" out the map of meaning of ourselves and the entire human kind, will it be helpful to bring that thing out of the dark and into the light? Will it be great to put all of that knowledge and model to narratives and put extra suggestions for generations to learn and to move it up and down from the chain of abstraction and into real world? Will it be helpful to predict the behavior of others and then control ourselves from manipulative behaviors just because the others are so easy to predict?

If we are continuously stay in the known, and be struck by the anomaly, of the unknown to us, then how can we grow our awareness? If life continues to give us the signal but we treat them as noise or vice versa? The limitation towards our knowledge, ourself and the fear of not being able to “sense" and “respond" to the “limitations" make our life on the move all the time, and we know for sure there is an unknown that waits for us at the end: death. What makes death interesting is the known of the unknown and informing us how we should handle short term unknown only to unlock the known and manage the process better, via the interference of the anomaly.

i. As human, to make our life more interesting and put more adrenaline to our life, we often make it more “heroic". In life, every one is waiting for the spotlight to shine on them, to make them the hero at some point to feel good with sacrifice the things they have, to explain the unbearable things they are suffer and to lessen the part of the existential crisis — the fear of being in significance, which may arise from the hidden belief of being accepted by the Higher Force such as the spirit of Love, Worthiness, Fear, Power or God. In such spirit, people can turn to the opposite of what they crave for, in search of meaning they long for, and becoming the part they hate the most. A person who craves for love may become the rushing person who damages relationship just to get the sense of being consumed by the love of an abusive person or he is becoming the abusive person himself to feel the love of others. In the Unknown, everything is possible just not as the Known may offers. The Adversary and the Hero, they live and exist through each other only to realize how they can settle with each other, in the Middle Path.

j. At the end of the book, I am not that happy to learn more about the limitation of Meaning and Life. I wish the author can share more about living a life of embracing the “unconditional meaning” or “Vô nguyện" (Maybe Im mixing things up and expect too much for the things I put meaning to hahaha). Clearly, there is an importance part of the suffering in life itself and self-suffering and the willingness to expand such suffering in life. But what if we can someday become immortal and have such power close to God, where is our meaning in life when limitations become less limited? Where will be put our faith in and create new meaning in life?

It's clear that the subjective experience/maps of meaning is important and valuable, still, how can we pass the map on and get the maps read and updated? As in One Piece, the spirit of entering, conquering the Grand Line and the Spirit of being the Pirates make the journey worth traveling, although there is still shadow and darkness that create battles and wars.

Will human kind solves their own mystery in the future? Or using whatever they have to leave themselves in the great mystery — of extinction.

HCMC, 2021.05.16

E.T