The Art of Meaning-Making: How Your Mind Shapes Reality
How Your Stories, Beliefs, and Attitudes Shape Your World
Alejandro Martinuccio had fought for years to get back on the field.
After a litany of injuries, surgeries, being doubted, and written off, he finally made his comeback.
In 2016, he signed with Chapecoense.
Chapecoense was a small-town Brazillian soccer team with a long history of losing.
And then, against all odds, Chapecoense went on a magical Cinderella run.
The underdog made it all the way to the Copa Sudamericana Final, which pits the two best soccer teams in South America against each other!
This was the biggest match in their history.
Alejandro was part of that dream.
Days before the final, disaster struck: his leg gave out.
The injury was so devastating that not only would he miss the game, he couldn’t even fly with the team.
“I was devastated,” he said. “It felt like the world had ripped it out of my hands.”
On November 28, 2016, the team boarded LaMia Flight 2933.
The mood was electric. Finally bound.
History in the making.
He hugged his teammates at the airport, wished them luck, and watched them disappear through the gate.
Then he turned and left- alone.
He hurried home, turned on the news, and waited for updates on the match preparations.
Minutes before landing in Medellín, the plane ran out of fuel.
It crashed into a mountainside, killing 71 people: players, coaches, journalists, and staff.
All gone. In an instant.
“I was feeling so frustrated that I couldn’t go,” he said. “Then everything changed. My injury saved my life.”
The worst thing that had happened to him… became the reason he’s still alive.
In an instant, the meaning of his injury changed.
Understanding Meaning
We often believe that meaning is found in the world. That information has meaning, and all we have to do is comprehend and understand the information, and the meaning will be self-evident and clear.
But this is not at all how it works.
Alejandro’s story shows us that meaning is not pre-determined, that it is not objective or based on the data or information, but instead, that meaning is interpretative, created, and can change.
We don’t just find meaning; we also create it.
The rest of this article is a deep dive into how we do this, the process of mean-making.
How We Create Meaning
We attribute meaning to everything.
In fact, as you read this article, how you interpret it and understand it, as well as what meaning you give it, might change from paragraph to paragraph or even sentence to sentence. I urge you to notice how active this process is and what your role is in it.
So what is the mean-making process, and how does it work?
Meaning-making is our ongoing process of assigning interpretations and significance to our experiences. Even ordinary objects, like a cup, a chair, or a photograph, aren’t neutral. They carry personal and collective stories that define their significance and role in our lives.
In this way, we don’t actually live in a world of dead, dumb objects but instead in a world of meaning.
Every moment, we experience this meaning through our inner narratives and imagination.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
We live in the moment; however, most of the time, our mind tells stories and plays out scenarios of past and future.
The stories tell us who we are, what the world is, and how we ought to behave in it. They reveal our values, beliefs, our identity, and assumptions about the world.
Our own stories are like dlivery system carrying deep concentrated archetypal drops of meaning.
And this deliver system runs all day long, as we have roughly 60,000 thoughts per day and 95% of them are repetative.
These thoughts often tell the same types of stories over and over again. They interpret people and events from the same worldview. In the end, they produce a coherent world of meaning.
In this way, our stories give meaning to our world.
Meaning & Our Relationships (Attitudes & Actions)
The meaning we give defines our relationships. Our relationship with our conflicts, with our friends, foes, and with life itself.
Our relationship with the world is our life.
We don’t just live in the world, but instead in our own world of meaning and are in a relationship with it.
The meaning we give our world produces our attitude, and our attitude becomes an active force.
Our attitude colors, shapes, and influences how we interpret and respond to people and events.
And so now we have a double whammy.
First, our attitude interprets and gives meaning to our experiences; it colors them and then, through imagination, experiences its own simulation.
Then, our mind reacts to its own simulation and turns them into self-fulfilling prophecies.
It takes its perceptions and stories to be true and accurate, and it uses the story as a guideline for behavior, thus embodying the story through action, and by acting on it, it brings it forth in the world.
In this way, we actively shape our lives in the image of our stories.
This is how we give meaning to our world.
The Collective Creation of Meaning
In the conventional worldview, you are a body, a collection of flesh and bone, riding atop a spinning rock that orbits a burning star. This view casts you as a subject inside a universe of objects, an observer navigating a world that is "out there," solid, external, and objectively real.
Here, reality is measured in size, mass, velocity, time, temperature, etc, and explained through third-person facts. Meaning is presumed to be embedded in things — in tables, trees, planets, and people — because it can be agreed upon by consensus and verified by measurement. It is a world obsessed with what is seen, not what is seen.
This framework is logical, empirical, and deterministic.
Yet, it rests entirely on a hidden paradox: It ignores the very thing that makes experience of the world possible at all.
It forgets the first-person.
It forgets that before anything is known, there must be a knower. In order for an objective world to be known, there must simultaneously be a subject - a witness to confirm its existence.
It misses the first-person perspective of what it is like to experience the world, and this is a massive miss because experience is the foundation of everything that is knowable.
The conventional worldview totally ignores and thus misses the subjective and psychological.
Ecology of Meaning
Experience by default is a subjective phenomena, and is all we ever really know.
In reality, the primary point of view is not an objective ‘3rd person’ view of the world but instead a subjective 1st person experience.
What the world is made of can’t be reduced to just a collection of facts and objects, but instead, it is a collection of 1st-person experiences that are meaningful.
Collective World of Meaning
The world of meaning arises from our collection of 1st-person experiencers, which collectively produce the broader world of meaning.
The broader world of meaning is then shared through collective frameworks such as language, history, myths, worldviews, and so on.
In this way, we are both a co-creator of the culture and a byproduct of it.
We are like a little carrot in a massive pot of soup. In the same way that the flavor of the soup is infused within the carrot, culture seeps deep within us, and yet the carrot simultaneously contributes to the overall flavor and taste of the soup.
We are inside of culture, and culture is inside of us. We are both a byproduct and contributor to our collective world of meaning.
We can move the culture, and the culture can move us.
Relational Meaning
The nature of the experience of our world is a world of meaning where we are in a relationship of meaning with both our personal world and the broader world.
In meaning, the collective and personal meet, they contribute to our overall experience and state of affairs.
Much of this is invisible to us in the same way grammar rules are invisible language structures.
Aspects of the invisible become visible through the conflict between our inner world and the outer world of meaning.
The conflict can be between being (how things are) and becoming (how we want things to be in the future).
Co-Creation & Culture
As we move towards bringing our vision to life, we attract other people from our circle of influence who are looking to co-create a similar world.
As the vision grows, it can resonate with other people, can ripple out start to impact and influence the broader culture. As it really grows, it can lead to a movement and begin to transform the culture in its own image.
This is one-way culture is transformed and changed by small sub-cultural movements, and at the same time, the movements are also transformed and changed to meet the culture.
Consider this example: Christianity was started by one person, Jesus, who attracted 12 disciples and now has 2.4 billion followers. Along the way, the meaning of Christianity changed multiple times, and today, there are some 45,000 denominations globally, each with its interpretations.
The Paradox of Meaning
Since meaning is not objective, but an evolving relationship between the personal and the collective it can’t be pinned down. It’s fluid.
Furthermore, meaning is pervasive in that we project meaning onto everything; thus, even labeling something as meaningless is a meaningful statement.
Read this famous poem:
An old silent pond...
a frog jumps into the pond - splash!
Silence again.
Matsuo Bashō
It has no story, no plot, and no message, yet it still evokes something vast, present, and ungraspable.
It’s meaning without a message.
The Artists Presents takes this even further by plunging one into profound meaning beyond words, concpets or a message.
This paradoxical nature of meaning is contributing to the Meaning Crisis.
The Crisis of Meaning
Over the past few hundred years, we have had a number of fundamental shifts in meaning-making.
Not long ago, we saw the world from the point of view of a ‘Creator.’ A ceramic model of reality, where the world was made by ‘God’ in his image and meaning was ever present, self-evident, and objective. This model provided a clear metaphysics of what reality is, who you are, and your role in the world. It was a functioning system of meaning that often was too rigid and dogmatic.
Then, the Enlightenment brought us science, rationality, empiricism, and the mechanical view of the world. The Universe here is seen as a large, giant machine where everything follows the laws of physics and can be reduced to a deterministic set of laws. Here, materialism became the dominant worldview, and with it, the human is reduced to being a cog in the machine, a commodity, and meaning is trivial. Everything is reduced to the objective, observable world and the focus is on measurable results and the value you bring to the market.
Following Two World Wars, the counterculture of the 1960s brought us the cultural revolution, where we started asking questions about the human element again. For the first time, we took the subject and psychology into account.
As we dug deeper into the psychological, we began to see how meaning was co-created, constructed, relative, and relational, and this brought meaning itself into question.
For example, we’ve all had thoughts like:
“If everything eventually ends, does anything really matter?”
“What’s the point if, in the end, none of this lasts?”
“If meaning is something I invent, isn’t it just make-believe?”
These thoughts are more common than we might realize. They’re almost inevitable when we live in a culture that merges a materialistic worldview (“everything is just matter and eventually turns to dust”) with a postmodern sense of relativism (“everyone has their own truth, and none is more valid than another”).
On the surface, these ideas seem logical, almost obvious. If reality is purely material and temporary, and if there’s no absolute narrative or universal truth, then nothing truly holds lasting significance. Without realizing it, we slide into Nihilism, the feeling that life has no objective meaning, no deeper value, no real point.
To escape Nihilism, modern culture often suggests Existentialism as an antidote. Existentialism tells us: “Sure, life itself might be objectively meaningless, but you have the freedom (and responsibility) to create your own meaning.” At first glance, this feels empowering. We get to decide our own truth, our own purpose.
But there’s a subtle trap here as well.
If meaning is just something you choose, if it’s purely personal and subjective, then choosing meaning feels arbitrary—like picking a favorite flavor of ice cream.
And if it’s arbitrary, how meaningful can it truly be?
Existentialism’s promise quickly unravels when we realize our self-created meanings lack grounding in something deeper, more real, more universally true.
Finally, to complicate matters even more, Technology amplifies our Materialistic Nihilism and exaggerates this sentiment, making it appear more real, self-evident, and obvious. With it, we are thrown into a world where everything is possible, and nothing means anything.
How Technology Amplifies the Crisis
If our culture already struggles with Materialistic Nihilism, imagine what happens when you combine that mindset with an overwhelming flood of information and Technology that is designed to monetize attention by actively reflecting, reinforcing, and exaggerating our biases and beliefs.
What happens is a collective self-fulfilling prophecy, a distorted mirror that confirms our Nihilism and further disconnects us from genuine meaning.
Consider social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, or YouTube. Here, reality takes a backseat to simulations and appearances. A beautifully filtered Instagram post seems more valuable than the actual moment it depicts. Our online identities are meticulously curated, designed to showcase only the ‘best’ versions of ourselves. Sharing our true, authentic self feels uncomfortable, even absurd.
Jean Baudrillard famously called this phenomenon “Simulacra and Simulation”: a world where artificial copies don’t just represent reality; they replace it entirely. The simulation becomes more vivid, more convincing, and ultimately more compelling than real life.
Reflect on our online environment:
We carefully craft online personas that project success, happiness, and fulfillment. Influencers regularly package lifestyles designed primarily to capture attention and sell products.
Algorithms feed us personalized content tailored precisely to our biases and desires, creating a feedback loop that confirms our distorted views and biases about the world.
Information sources prioritize emotional engagement over accuracy, flattening complex realities into oversimplified, clickable narratives meant only to trigger emotional responses.
As a result, our sense-making breaks down. Truth and fiction blur seamlessly, reality becomes indistinguishable from carefully crafted illusions, and our entire informational landscape becomes superficial and hollow.
And this is just the beginning.
Soon, AI, Virtual Reality, and Robotics will be able to create a personalized world just for you, AI friends that are always on your side, and, of course, all of the “pleasure” you can handle.
In such a world, we are in a race to the bottom. The focus of life becomes totally externalized; it's about getting results, fame, fortune, and pleasure, and in the process, we completely sell out. We do things not because we enjoy them or for the love of it but instead because of what we will get in return. We sell out and commoditize every part of our lives, and in the end, we’re left feeling disconnected, lonely, confused, and ultimately starved for genuine meaning.
We may not know what or who to believe. It seems that every option is available to us, and the wisdom of the day is to follow our own truth while the world of meaning crumbles around us.
At best, this leaves the majority with the empty calories of meaning through parasocial relationships and digital entertainment.
Those who crave deeper fulfillment often don’t even know where to begin, but they will always have “HER”.
At the heart of this meaning crisis lies a fundamental misunderstanding, confusion, and contradiction that has led to the pathologies of meaning.
We have mistaken the Relative (the temporary, subjective, and conditional) for the Absolute (the timeless, universal, and foundational).
Clarifying the difference between these two types of reality can guide us out of the crisis and back towards a meaningful life.
Resolving the Crisis: The Relative & The Absolute
At the core of the meaning crisis lies a misunderstanding about what makes something truly meaningful. We often fall prey to the belief that for something to matter, it must be universally true, permanent, unchanging, and absolute. However, this assumption confuses two distinct but intimately connected aspects of reality: the Relative and the Absolute.
On one end is the Absolute, a ground of reality that transcends time, space, energy, and form.
The Absolute is unconditional, limitless, changeless, eternal, timeless, and formless. It is pure potential and simultaneously the ground from which all manifestation arises. Think of it like an ocean: vast, limitless, and ever-present.
On the other end is the Relative, the conditional world we experience every day, filled with form, energy, relationships, and meanings that constantly change and evolve. The Relative is the realm of matter, thought, emotion, and experience.
It’s the waves rising from that vast ocean, temporary and impermanent but undeniably real in the moment.
Today, much of our confusion arises because we mistake the Relative for the Absolute. Philosophies like Materialism, Relativism, Nihilism, and Existentialism fall into this trap:
Materialism claims the physical, temporary world is all there is—treating matter, energy, and form as absolute reality, even though it acknowledges these things are transient and impermanent.
Relativism and Nihilism declare “there are no universal truths,” ironically making an absolute statement that contradicts their own claim.
These views carry the hidden assumption that meaning can only matter if it is absolute and universal.
But what if everything matters?
What if both the Relative and the Absolute are equally real, two sides of one beautiful symphony?
The Relative: The Conditional World
The Relative is the everyday world we live in:
Relational: Night and day exist as a pair in a relationship.
Relative & Conditional: In the relative, everything helps define everything else. Short and tall define each other, and their existence is determined by their opposite.
It’s dynamic: continuously changing, evolving, becoming.
Meaning here is real but temporary, contextual, relational, and deeply experiential. It’s meaningful because we experience it fully in the present moment.
Each moment, each experience, each interaction is a gateway into something more profound, into the Absolute itself.
The Absolute: The Real, Unconditional Ground & Ultimate Reality
The Absolute is that deeper reality which contains and transcends the Relative:
Unconditional: Its existence is not dependent on anything else.
Changeless: Beyond change; always stable and ever-present.
Formless: Cannot be reduced to any form, concept, or object.
Timeless & Eternal: Beyond space, time, and conditions. It always was, always is, and always will be.
Limitless Potential: All possibilities emerge from it and return to it.
This is the fundamental ground of being, what Lacan called the “Real,” and in Eastern philosophy, often referred to as “Shiva,” "The Tao," "Brahman.", etc.
It’s the silence behind sound, the stillness beneath motion, the emptiness that holds all form.
It is pure awareness itself.
The Confusion & How It Happens
Our confusion arises when we attempt to define or reduce the Absolute in terms of the Relative:
Asking, “What is the meaning of life?” tries to capture something infinite and unbounded (Absolute) into a finite definition (Relative).
Assuming life can’t matter because the Universe will eventually end mistakenly applies temporary conditions to define ultimate meaning.
This confusion keeps us trapped in Nihilism and despair, as we mistakenly believe the impermanence of the Relative makes it meaningless.
The Path Forward: Integrating the Relative & Absolute
The path forward is one in which you appreciate the Relative and approach the Absolute.
You are like a magician that can create any experience you want. In this way, your life is your work of art:
Art of Living: Consider how you would have to live from now on so that all of the suffering you have experienced would be so worthwhile that you wouldn't change a thing. How would you have to live your life so you would gladly relive it 1000x over?
Appreciate Impermanence: Everyone and everything you love will soon be gone, so enjoy it and love it while you can. Knowing all of this is temporary makes each moment inherently meaningful precisely because it doesn’t last forever.
Choose Wisely: Remember that every experience and meaning is available to you, so you can either Consciously choose your world or the world will choose it for you. Morality starts with deciding what you pay attention to and what meaning you give it.
To approach and know the Absolute, one needs to enter fully into the present moment:
Observe the silent spaces between sounds.
Notice the empty space around objects, the stillness underneath movement.
Stay present in awareness itself.
Turn your attention back on itself and on the one who perceives.
To know the Absolute, one has to transcend and go beyond the Relative. This does not require doing anything because the Absolute is ever-present.
Practical Morality & Embodying Meaning
Consider the famous image of the Three Wise Monkeys—“hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.”
This ancient symbol isn’t about denial or ignorance; it’s a profound teaching about morality rooted in conscious perception, understanding, and unconditional love.
We live in a world that contains infinite possibilities and freedom. Virtually every conceivable type of experience and meaning can—and does—exist within it. This boundless freedom to create, interpret, and choose meaning arises directly from the nature of Absolute Reality itself.
The Absolute, the ultimate ground of being, allows everything to exist exactly as it is.
It provides space for every experience, every state of being, and every act of becoming.
It offers total freedom—without conditions, without judgment, and without restriction. It allows all things precisely because it fully accepts all things.
This acceptance is not partial or conditional; it’s absolute, unconditional acceptance. And unconditional acceptance is, by its very nature, unconditional love.
Thus, the essential quality of the Absolute is unconditional love itself.
It accepts and embraces every possibility, every expression of existence, every moment of suffering or joy.
It does so effortlessly, infinitely, and it knows that none of it can ever diminish or disturb its own unchanging peace and perfection.
Our morality, therefore, begins by consciously embodying this unconditional love—this fundamental aspect of the Absolute—within our everyday lives.
Practically, this means carefully choosing what we pay attention to and intentionally deciding how we interpret and give meaning to our experiences.
If we see through a lens of duality—of “good” versus “evil”—we inevitably invite evil into our experience. This dualistic view tempts us into endless cycles of conflict, confrontation, and suffering.
Seeing 'Evil' will tempt you into a confrontation with it, and oftentimes, when you fight monsters, you become a monster yourself.
To rid the world of Evil, you become a devil.
The road to hell is often paved with good intentions.
The Three Wise Monkeys point to a higher path:
First, consciously choose what you give your attention to. Each day brings billions of possibilities—you cannot possibly engage with everything, so choose wisely and intentionally.
Second, recognize the profound power of interpretation. Every event can be seen from countless perspectives.
Labeling someone or something as inherently “evil” locks us into judgment, preventing true understanding, transformation, and healing. Instead, understand that even “evil” has something vital to teach us. Suffering highlights precisely where we need to heal and grow.
By fully digesting and transforming these experiences, we move beyond simplistic dualities.
This is how the Three Wise Monkeys truly embody morality: they “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” not through ignorance or denial, but because they’ve deeply understood, integrated, and transcended duality within their meaning-making.
Morality is thus rooted in consciously choosing what we pay attention to and how we perceive reality. When our perception becomes unconditional acceptance - unconditional love - evil no longer holds power over us. We perceive the world clearly through the lens of love itself.
In consciously aligning ourselves with the Absolute’s unconditional acceptance and love, we become living manifestations of its peace, depth, and wholeness.
We embody the Absolute (Shiva, pure consciousness) in the dynamic, ever-changing expressions of our daily life (Shakti, dynamic manifestation).
We bring forth Christ Consciousness, Agape, and unconditional love in every action, every interaction, every moment.
In doing this, we transcend yet fully embrace both realities, anchored firmly in the timeless peace of the Absolute, while joyfully participating in the vibrant dance of the Relative.
Now for a moment of joy: