{"id":36992,"date":"2024-03-21T23:45:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-22T06:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=36992"},"modified":"2024-03-21T23:45:00","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T06:45:00","slug":"meaning-of-suffering-meaning-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/meaning-of-suffering-meaning-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Meaning of suffering, meaning of life."},"content":{"rendered":"

Here I come, you ready for it, I\u2019m going to stretch myself here and go off my topic\u2026Okay, no I am not, I\u2019m going to talk about the meaning of suffering.\u00a0 Why not? I work right in the middle of it and it\u2019s the human condition.\u00a0 Jordan B. Peterson is a psychologist who wrote a book on meaning called Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.\u00a0 <\/em>While reading this book in any inspectionary way is, in my opinion, IMPOSSIBLE I did find a few concepts that were fascinating, especially when it comes to finding meaning through suffering.<\/p>\n

In summary, there are 9 key points Peterson addresses in this book: \u00a0\u201cHumans explore their environment out of a fear of the unknown, stories help us navigate the world a s a place of meaning, all myths follow the same basic structure, myths provide a model for how societies should work and how individuals should behave, growing up means learning how to identify with the group and the hero, anomalies threaten the stability of our psyche and society-and force us to adapt, our limitations are the precondition for a meaningful existence, evil means rejecting creative exploration, and we\u2019re all capable of it, and in order to reach our full potential, we must chart our own path.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0 I found this summary on a website in order to get the most simplified breakdown of this book.\u00a0 Some arguments made against the author is his arrogance in using large and complicated words that make his approachability very challenging.\u00a0 When looking at his writings, and views on the world, I am drawn to his trying to approach meaning making.\u00a0 I mention all of this as a way of gaining a basic understanding of the book before I microscopically write on a small portion of the book.<\/p>\n

Peterson states in his early in his first chapter when determining the meaning of meaning \u201cwe need to know four things: What there is, what to do about what there is, that there is a difference between knowing what there is, and knowing what to do about what there is and what that difference is.\u201d[2]<\/a>\u00a0 Understand?\u00a0 When entering into his chapter, Maps of experience,<\/em> or as the summary above distilled it down to-Humans explore their environment out of a fear of the unknown, Peterson broke it down even further into 3 subqueries around the significance of meaning. He wrote:<\/p>\n