[charlesupton]

Existence is MADE of meaning; according to the Qur’an, “Allah created the world with nothing but the Truth”. Physics now knows that the origin of everything that exists is INFORMATION, which means that the big metaphysical question in physics right now is “where does information come from”? Nonetheless we have to MAKE this meaning our own through creative action. Thus the human being is a trouvere (“finder”) first and a poietes (“maker”) second; if we put our role as poietes first we fall into a titanic hubris, but if we shirk our duty to MAKE something for ourselves out of what God has already given us, we become the helpless puppets of fate. The very act of perception, which is the act of finding the form or meaning that pre-exists as a given, has a creative element to it, as in the phrase “to make something out.” Without CONCEPTION there is no true perception, only the passive reception of pre-existing norms and ideas that have no life to them because we haven’t really engaged with them. It is possible to say “Christ died for my sins, by His sacrifice he paid my whole debt.” But unless we know how to actualize “take up your cross and follow Me,” the Atonement is never realized in our lives. We don’t “invent” the Jungian archetypes; they are already there as primordial and universal meanings. But without conscious engagement with them, we have not emerged from the meaningless of the shallowly-lived life. A library of 5000 books is meaningless if we never read and ponder them.