Sense and Nonsense
_I: For two days I have felt a strange emptiness, as if without strength, listless. As if nothing he was doing made sense. Still, I know it has it, the monotony dulls the intensity of the facts, of the purpose, stripping it of content.
_AM: The natural loss of meaning. Do you know why it occurs?
_I: No...
_AM: Where does the word “Sense” come from?
_I: The word Feelings comes to mind, which comes from the Senses, the 5 senses: touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing.
_AM: Exactly. The 5 senses of your body are the biological tools through which the brain captures the information around it through electrical pulses, signals that it receives through the nerves that branch throughout your body, especially in the nerve endings of the senses. This is how feelings are born, due to the sensations that your brain perceives from the outside world.
_I: So the senses give meaning to what I perceive about the world...
_AM: And they determine what you project onto it. Everything you touch in the world is registered in your brain as the boundaries of the external world. Everything you hear gives you balance to recognize where you are. Everything you see helps you perceive the depth and therefore the directions in which you can move in the environment. Taste allows you to determine what is good and what is bad about everything you consume from the outside world. And smell allows you to confront risky situations or attract yourself to positive circumstances, as it captures the smells of other humans and animals or positive or harmful gases from the environment, which improves intuition. All of this generates an image of the world around you, generates a pre-established design, a map of reality, and memory is responsible for guiding you through the corridors of the labyrinth of reality. So we can, through our senses, foresee circumstances through smells, colors, sounds, through taste or touch.
_I: The senses give “meaning” to my life. They define my paths, where I go, where I move. It is a mental map, like a video game with an established design that can be perfected as my senses perceive new things, but they can only add walls or hallways and rooms to this enormous network of memories.
_AM: This great mental map designed by the perceptions of the external world is what we call “the Meaning of Life”. In Latin languages, Sense comes from “sens”, which means precisely “perception”, “feeling”, “feeling”. In the Saxon languages we base ourselves on the Indo-European “men”, which means “to think”, the Latin origin of the word “mind”, which has given rise to the English: “mean” (mentalize), and from there “meaning” ( sense). Thus, for both linguistic origins, meaning is a perception constructed by the mind, so it receives and constructs from the feeling.
_I: So what would it be to make sense of things?
_AM: Giving meaning to something means placing it in its rightful place within this pre-existing mental map. Locate the logic you have in relation to all the ideas and feelings pre-established by the mental map. When something makes sense, it is usually felt in emotion, as if it fits within personal parameters, designed after millennia of genetic inheritance and personal experience in this life as an individual. So everything to which I give meaning will not actually have it by itself, but will have it only because my mind feels it. Hence truths are subjective.
_I: So searching for the meaning of life is a personal, individual and not a collective search...
_AM: There is no single meaning to life.
_I: My friend explained a biology joke to _I: “What is the meaning of life? From 5 premium to 3 premium.” It is very specific, but it is because the construction of DNA and RNA is given by carbon structures, based on carbon 5 nucleotides connected to a phosphate group and carbon 3 connected to a hydroxyl group, and it is in that order and sense direction in which enzymes assemble DNA strands. That is, the path of Life, the direction that biology takes to generate all the information about what we are.
_AM: Meaning is precisely that, a direction. The 5 senses configure an assembly, a mapping of reality that allows us to find the correct path. This is how the structures of everything that exists, the ideas we have about the world around us, are organized.
_I: And... What happens when we lose consciousness?
_AM: Meaninglessness is precisely getting lost on the map, not knowing the direction, losing track of things, not having a point of reference. This brings us to the question I asked you: do you know why it happens?
_I: Why?
_AM: Because you have expanded your mind, you have seen beyond what you were used to seeing, you have left the map, you have flown over it, and you no longer have references on which to base yourself. The 5 senses tirelessly search for a way to give direction, to find the way in the labyrinth of the mind, but they cannot find anything like it, nothing known, it is a new terrain on which we must build from scratch. The inability to perceive previous paths, pre-established structures, means that the brain does not receive the same nervous signals, and does not know where to place the new ones. Therefore, you feel empty, there is no reference, and the sensation is of floating, of having nowhere to cling, without axis, leading the entire body to feel insecurity, which leads the brain to a state of lethargy, a small hibernation until he can recover, build some wall, some path to stand on. And that feeling is often confused with emptiness and depression. In reality, you are reconstructing a new meaning.
_I: So, losing meaning, meaninglessness, is not opposite to finding meaning, but it is precisely what shows me that I have found it and my mind is adapting to it!
_AM: Exactly. Nonsense is the symptom of the process of discovering new meaning. You also know this as an “existential crisis.” The first time you lose meaning and interpret the world as meaningless is when you step outside the cultural parameters and have a spiritual awakening. It does not have to be related to something extrasensory, it could simply be having stepped out of the box and seeing that it made no sense to live in a work system of 8 hours a day to take a 15-day vacation in the summer. At first it looks like depression, and then you start trying to fulfill your dreams. And you have a new awakening, recognizing that what you were looking for outside was inside, and a new depression comes, in which it seems that everything I did until now had no meaning. In reality, you are resignifying it at another level of consciousness. And then you realize that you are multidimensional, and your own personality loses its meaning, you are no longer anyone, because you are many more. Until you see multidimensionality as part of a whole that is not separate, and existence itself loses meaning. Every time you lose the meaning of things, you are building a new one. Making sense of a reality is nothing more than the comfort of the mind finding a new comfort zone in which to move with ease. The leap towards transformation occurs when I jump into the abyss where I lose security, where there is no longer a path or indicators, where meaning is lost. Well, none of the 5 senses can help me map my context. The 5 must stop comparing everything with the previous to begin to perceive and design a new one. Then, that's when suddenly: Eureka, you find meaning again.
_I: That is to say that, in a certain way, the Universe does not have meaning, but is composed of all possible meanings.
_AM: What you said makes sense, because it is nonsense, hehehe.
_I: I understand, giving meaning to things is nothing more than a way to move forward, to find ground, to generate a purpose, a direction for life; but life changes, adapts, expands, and when we do the same, our mind loses the previous path, it loses the meaning to build a new one. Thus, I will never be able to find the true meaning of things, since meaning is only created from perceptions, not from realities.
_AM: Therefore, dare to live nonsense, to really understand the meaning of things. Do not be afraid of losing meaning, of feeling that small step of losing it, because that is the moment in which you are really giving meaning to your existence.
_I: I allow myself, then, to make sense of the nonsense, and thus trace the eternal destinies of my mind, designing the purposes of my life.