LES MATHESON

Imagine that you’re playing a board game like Monopoly.

The game is a given — something we are born into — and our existence is framed such that it’s only meaningful in the context of the game’s rules and elements and processes.

That’s how the ego relates to life: “life is a g...

What if someone becomes aware of their own production of the meaning that gives them their identity?

You’d be on the way to being the owner of the game, because naturally the author is the owner… the one who put the walls up owns the room they live in.

People sense that being the own...

To be the owner is truly being, and to understand and sustain that relationship to your own existence is where the “coherent” bit comes in:

• like a candle that can make its own wax, owning yourself as the source of meaning in your life empowers you to light it up as yo...

Let’s just assume that you understand that you’re not defined by your reflection in the physical mirror, or at best that’s a limited definition of “me”.

Well… it turns out that there are other kinds of mirrors:

• Not the physical glass kind, though...

The reflective self-definition that is generated automatically by ancient psychological processes, the machine that seems to want to turn everything into “it’s about me” in some way.

That’s the first kind of identity or the first existential mode: reflective, in that there’...

You really are “a thing in a given context”: your life is bound to your body and you will die and that’s the end of any useful meaning of “you”.

If we understand that the Monopoly game metaphor does not refer to the physical universe, it refers to the “realm of meaning” which gives the self...

When you only know yourself by reflective self-definition, and don’t appreciate the vast possibilities and natural freedom that comes from being the owner or source of the gameboard, you’re stuck.