The methods of philosophers are not those of empirical science, since their methods are a priori rather than a posteriori. This means that philosophers evaluate information that is independent of experience, not that which they have already observed. The aim of philosophers is therefore to state analytical truths. And the truth or falsity of an analytical proposition is subject to its meaning. In the other camp of thought, if a proposition is not empirical, i.e. it cannot be understood by observation of the observable world only, then it is said to be meaningless. But to be self righteous in the stance that something is not true simply because we cannot see it would be a naive absurdity.
Meaning, therefore, is a very subjective experience. It is the fabric of an attempt to answer the questions, what are we doing here and what’s the point? The experience becomes a life-long process. And one’s life cannot be disassociated into separate parts to explain how you’ve become the person you are today. It’s a collective experience of thousands of contributions and thousands of decisions. Without the process, you would not be… you. It’s this process of the collective experience of all things which has evolved your state of being in the world. The process has imbued your mind and body with the potentiality to affect not only your own life, but the lives of everyone around you. It is a sense of vitality that puts out a field to change the world around you. This is non duality: you, and the world around you, are not independent. Who you’ve become, your sense of vitality, and how you choose to participate in the world as choices are presented to you, creates its own field that affects everyone and everything.
The essence of vitality is that we are more than just the sum of our parts. In growth as human beings we wish to experience life in all its fullness and this requires vitality. Vitality is an idea that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry alone. Vitality is a subjective experience. It is the domain of spiritual awareness, consciousness, life and existence itself. If you were to ask someone what the three most valuable things in their life are, generally it boils down to: Faith, family, and business. But without true vitality, one cannot fully experience any of these and they become meaningless.
Meaning can be derived through better expression of man the spiritual. D.D. Palmer (founder of chiropractic) once wrote that physicians deal with the physical while chiropractors deal with both man the physical and man the spiritual. Often people think that they’re being driven by their past decisions, when really they’re pulled into their future. This is potentiality becoming actuality. For instance, if one were to plant a sunflower seed and watch it grow day by day. No matter how much you bay and bawl at the small plant, raising clenched fists to the heavens, commanding God to create a tomatoe plant, a sunflower will still become the actuality. However, what the sunflower needs to achieve its potential are the right conditions: a little sunshine and a bit of water, and the sunflower is perfect in its own right. Reconnecting man the physical and man the spiritual requires the right conditions and extends beyond the empirical understanding of the world around you because you are not independent of it. The universe is non linear, it is only one’s perception of sequential events that makes one think it’s linear – a this causing a that. Your thoughts don’t have any meaning, only the meaning of that which you give them. Therefore it comes down to spiritual choices, pulling you into the future to which you were destined to become. And in the abundance of our universe, we are only limited to that which we choose to give, or not give meaning.