Home

Introduction

  • An appetizer: purpose
  • Preview: eternalism and nihilism
  • Misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable
  • Acknowledgements
‹ Meaningness up An appetizer: purpose ›
  • Printer-friendly version
  •   Tweet   Tweet

Book contents

Find your way around.

  • Meaningness
    • Introduction
      • An appetizer: purpose
      • Preview: eternalism and nihilism
      • Misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable
      • Acknowledgements
    • Stances: responses to meaningness
      • Stances trump systems
      • Stances are unstable
      • Fixation and denial
      • Nebulosity
      • Confused stances come in pairs
      • No middle way
      • Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning
        • Not a general dialectic
      • Confusion, completion, misery and joy
      • Pattern
      • Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating
    • Resolving confusions about meaningness
      • Schematic overview: all dimensions
      • Meaning and meaninglessness
        • Schematic overview: meaningness
        • The puzzle of meaningness
        • Meaningfulness and meaninglessness
        • Extreme examples, eternalism and nihilism
        • Eternalism
          • Kitsch
          • Armed eternalism
        • Nihilism
          • Spam from God
          • Wavering nihilism: emotional dynamics
        • Meaningness: the complete stance
        • No cosmic plan
      • Unity and diversity
        • Schematic overview: unity and diversity
        • The Big Three stance combinations
        • Monism
          • Critiques of monism
            • The dualist critique of monism
            • The nihilist critique of monism
            • The complete stance’s critique of monism
        • Dualism
        • Participation
      • Purpose
        • Schematic overview: purpose
        • Mission
        • Materialism
        • Enjoyable usefulness
      • Self
        • Schematic overview: self
        • The true self
        • Selflessness
        • Intermittently continuing
      • Personal value
        • Schematic overview: value
        • Specialness
        • Ordinariness
        • Nobility
      • Capability
        • Schematic overview: capability
        • Total responsibility
        • Victim-think
        • Light-heartedness
      • Ethics
        • Schematic overview: ethics
        • Ethical totalitarianism
        • Ethical nihilism
        • Ethical responsiveness
      • Authority
        • Schematic overview: authority
        • Reasonable respectability
        • Romantic rebellion
        • Freedom
      • Sacredness
        • Schematic overview: sacredness
        • Religiosity
        • Secularism
        • Kadag
      • Contingency
        • Schematic overview: contingency
        • Causality
        • Chaos
        • Flow
    • Appendix: Terminology
      • Terminology: Complete
      • Terminology: Emptiness and form, nebulosity and pattern
      • Terminology: Non-dual

Metablog

A blog about the book.

I seem to be a fiction
Spiritual smugness
Dr. Bronner’s monist soap
New Earth, Big Lie
SBNR: system-free monism?
The New Age: appeal and limits
Acknowledging Romantic Idealism
An improbable re-animation
Bad ideas from dead Germans
Pop spirituality: monism goes mainstream
more...

Search

Find your lost page.

Topics

Subjects of interest.

  • Atheism
  • Authority
  • Buddhism
  • Causality
  • Conformity
  • Dualism
  • Essentialism
  • Eternalism
  • Ethics
  • History of ideas
  • Materialism
  • Meaningness
  • Mission
  • Monism
  • Nihilism
  • Nobility
  • Ordinariness
  • Purity
  • Purpose
  • Rebellion
  • Religiosity
  • Responsibility
  • Romanticism
  • Sacredness
  • Self
  • Specialness
  • Starting points
  • Terminology

Get updates

Notification of new pages.

  • Subscribe by email By email subscription
  • Syndicate content By RSS feed
  • Follow Meaningness on Twitter Follow me on Twitter

Recent pages

Hot off the Interwebs.

  • I seem to be a fiction
  • The Big Three stance combinations
  • The puzzle of meaningness
  • Spiritual smugness
  • Pattern
  • Wavering nihilism: emotional dynamics
  • Spam from God
  • Schematic overview: all dimensions
  • Dr. Bronner’s monist soap
  • Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating

Discussion

Read comments and join in.

  • Spiritual But Not Religious - monists?
  • Nihilism and its discontents
  • Questions on the "meaning" of your points
  • The whole book, for printing
  • Can we have the whole book
  • Chapman said "Monothesism"
  • Tolle and monism
  • I'm guilty too, probably
  • probably guilty as charged
more comments . . .

Elsewhere

Writing from my other sites.

  • Making a kangling for chöd
  • Tantra is anti-spiritual
  • Your self is not a spiritual obstacle
  • There are no spiritual problems
  • The power of an attitude
  • Diversity, generalization, and authenticity
  • “Now you something say”
  • Why I should shut up
  • Automata in Tibetan Buddhism (&c.)
Copyright © 2010–2012 David Chapman