Category: Meaning

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How is a War Won?

How is a war won? Two years into the war, the chief psychiatrist of the Rehabilitation Center “Unbroken” in Lviv, Ukraine, said to the volunteers who wished to work 12-hour shifts:

“If you work yourselves to death for twelve hours a day, you’ll end up in the psychiatric ward as my patients.”

These people were driven by the most natural instinct we all feel in times of crisis — to prioritize duty over joy. When you see so much need and suffering around you, you think: “I will put off joy and first do what must be done.”

And yet, according to the Ukrainian philosopher Alexander Filonenko, this is a grave mistake. Those who make duty their first priority never truly fulfill it. Duty is never accomplished from a mere sense of duty. Those who try to “white-knuckle” adversity inevitably fail.

Interestingly, after the war began, bookstores in Ukraine quickly ran out of books by the Stoics. The common misconception about the Stoics is that they teach how to endure adversity through willpower. It is not true.

Stoicism is more about joy than willpower.

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.16

Stoicism is not so much about self-denial as about changing your thoughts. Stoics are not the stone-faced people. They’re those who actively work on changing their thinking.

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things.” — Epictesus

The only way to endure a crisis is to do the most counter-intuitive thing — prioritize joy over duty. The only way to survive hell is to keep enough visions of heaven before your eyes. Those who focus on duty never fulfill their duty. Those who focus on joy cannot help but fulfill it.

What do war-injured people need the most? Medical care? Supplies? Prosthetics? “UNBROKEN” answers: beauty. Beauty is the only force that revitalizes the soul and helps the body heal. It is the only power that can lift a person from the ashes. That is why UNBROKEN invites orchestras, ensembles, and individual musicians to perform for patients right inside the rehabilitation center.

So far, they have hosted the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Lviv National Philharmonic, held various concerts connected to veteran and wounded-soldier rehabilitation, and, in one 2023 performance, classical musicians played beside wounded soldiers. And more continue to come.

To survive, one must thrive. Survival can never be achieved by aiming at survival. When our world crumbles, we must do the most counter-intuitive thing — turn our gaze to Beauty. Beauty is the only thing that truly “changes our thoughts.”

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.” — Marcus Aurelius

What is the color of my soul today? It takes on the color of my thoughts — always. No war is won by endurance alone. It is won when I immerse my soul in the colors of joy and allow meaning to transform my thoughts.

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What is the Spiritual Significance of Food?

What is the spiritual significance of food? Physical food is but a shadow. It points — to the real food. Eggs, bread, meat, butter, sauerkraut, turkey, apple pie, wine, and chicken curry are a foretaste of spiritual nourishment. That’s why in so many cultures, taking food has become a sacred ritual.

Tea ceremonies, birthday meals, feasts, festivals — people have always sensed that unless you eat spiritually WHILE you eat physically, you do not really eat. You may feel full, but you remain famished. To eat only physical food is idolatry — separating the image from the reality it foreshadows.

What does it foreshadow?

It foreshadows spiritual food hidden behind every physical phenomenon. Everything — not just food — can become spiritual nourishment if we glimpse the reality behind appearances. Anything in the physical realm can nourish us spiritually.

For example, when you are deeply engaged in something meaningful — like creating, playing, or helping someone — you rarely feel hunger even if you haven’t eaten. Why? What is your “food” when there is no food? Real nourishment is concealed behind EVERYTHING in the physical realm if we only penetrate the phenomena with our spiritual vision.

Curiously, the Greek word for idol, εἴδωλον (eidōlon), meaning image, likeness, apparition, or phantom, comes from εἶδος (eidos), meaning form, shape, appearance, or idea — the same root Plato used when speaking of Forms or Ideas, the invisible essences of things.

Eidos — Idea — is derived from the root verb εἴδω (eidō), “to see.” Literally, eidōlon means “a visible form.” An idol is anything visible we refuse to see through — to perceive the Idea, the invisible essence behind phenomena. When our vision is arrested at the level of the “visible form,” it is anti-vision. We are blind.

We never truly see unless we see through. Unless we eidō (see) the Eidos (Idea) behind the form, we perceive only the eidōlon, the idol, an empty image. But when we eidō (see) the Eidos (Idea) behind the visible form, we truly see. Eidōlon becomes an icon. Idols can be redeemed if we see through them.

To see an Idea is to get nourished — with food from above. That’s why Jesus said to his disciples after they brought Him bread:

“I have food to eat that you don’t know about.” — John 4:32

He had just talked to the woman at the well and saw through what was really happening in the spiritual realm AS THEY TALKED. That’s why he didn’t feel hungry. The disciples thought someone had brought Him food, but He had just feasted on the heavenly banquet.

Every time we glimpse Meaning and engage with it, we get nourished. We are not hungry. We have food others don’t know about. We are fed from above. We are not trapped by shapes and apparitions, nor deceived by phantoms. We pursue Eidos — Idea — and participate in the Feast that is unfolding even now.

The Feast is unfolding this very minute. No one is excluded. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we are in. As Viktor Frankl poignantly said,

“People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”

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Is Hermeneutics Related to Hermes? How to Reunite the Chards of Babel

Is hermeneutics related to Hermes? The word hermeneutics comes from the ancient Greek verb ἑρμηνεύειν (hermēneuein) — “to interpret, explain, translate”—which is etymologically and conceptually related to Hermes. True hermeneutics comes from Hermes.

The ancients believed that the messages of the gods were too cryptic for humans to grasp without an interpreter. Hermes—Mercury in Roman lore—was seen as the god of speech. In him, the transcendent meanings were translated into human language.

Hermes was a liminal figure—someone “in-between” worlds, times, and meanings. He embodied the idea of interpretation as a journey across a threshold. To truly understand a divine message, we must be carried from one realm into another—borne on winged sandals.

Without this journey, there is no understanding. Understanding is less a matter of data analysis than a passage between worlds. We must be transported across the threshold by Hermes himself. This ancient personification of understanding was, in its way, a prefiguration of “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

The Logos becomes a felt Presence so that we might understand God. Echoing the descent of the Logos to earth, C.S. Lewis describes the descent of Mercury in That Hideous Strength in terms that are almost Pentecostal:

“There came an instant at which both men [Ransom and Merlin] braced themselves… All the fragments—needle‑pointed desires, brisk merriments, lynx‑eyed thoughts—went rolling to and fro like glittering drops and reunited themselves. It was well that both men had some knowledge of poetry… For Ransom… it was heavenly pleasure. He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the white‑hot furnace of essential speech… For the lord of Meaning himself, the herald, the messenger, the slayer of Argus, was with them.” That Hideous Strength, “The Descent of the Gods.”

It was the felt presence of Mercury that brought celestial clarity to Ransom and his friends. And it was his felt presence that ultimately overthrew that hideous strength whose power chiefly came from perverting essential speech. What is essential speech? It’s the “reunited” speech that slays Argus—the giant with a hundred eyes, a fitting symbol of the ever-watchful N.I.C.E.

Broken speech can only be made whole in Pentecost. The fire of Pentecost reforges language, gathering the chards scattered by the confusion of Babel. It is the felt presence of the Lord of Meaning that enables us to understand. Yet in our own day, hermeneutics has been severed from Hermes—through the assumption that meaning can exist apart from Presence.

Unless the Word is enfleshed, it remains intangible and therefore hidden. There is no hermeneutics without an encounter with Hermes. Hermeneutics is often treated as an objective method of extracting meaning from a text, as if meaning resides solely in the words. But true meaning can only be found in the felt Presence of the Word.

During Covid, most of us met online, and for a while we thought it was no different from meeting in person. Yet after a couple of years of staring at screens, we realized how much meaning we were missing. We craved flesh-and-blood people. We longed for the eyes, the touch, the embrace. But why? All the words were conveyed just fine. The words were there—Hermes was not.

Without the descent of Hermes we can’t feel the heavenly pleasure of being “in the very heart of Language,” which is true hermeneutics. We hear words through headphones, see faces on screens, yet our hearts yearn for more. For what? For embodied Meaning—for the “Word made flesh.” And then, at last, the Covid restrictions were lifted, and we saw real human faces again.

In that moment, many of us realized—in a flash of Platonic anamnesis—that meaning cannot be digitized. It can only be read in the living contours of a real human face. Words without a body may denote, but they do not mean.

“We should not forget that there is more to the world than what we can interpret. The materiality and immediacy of our experiences are just as important.” Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence

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What is the Truth Behind Optical Illusions?

What is the truth behind optical illusions? “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law” is a well-known optical illusion that presents two different images in one. It was created by the British cartoonist W.E. Hill in 1915. The drawing cleverly shifts between two perspectives: you can either see a young lady looking away or an older woman with a large nose and chin.

The paradox of all optical illusions is that the viewer’s mind cannot see two images simultaneously. It has to switch. This presents a huge philosophical conundrum — if people can look at the same thing but see two different pictures, how can we tell if there’s an objective reality? It all depends on what you focus on.

The “aha” moment comes when we discover the two pictures. Of course, we can’t see them simultaneously, but we can switch between them. The very act of switching seems magical in and of itself — after all, we see that every line in every image is exactly in its place. Yet, the brain cannot perceive two things simultaneously — no matter how much we try.

So, what is objective reality? Can I look at something and definitively say, “This is…”? Unless I question how I see before I decide what I see, I don’t really see. The “how I see” always precedes “what I see.” Unless I question my semantics and see how I see, I will be under the illusion of seeing. As Jesus said, “Though seeing, they do not see.”

If I absolutize my way of seeing — my semantics — I will create an idol. I will say, “There’s nothing else to see here besides what I see.” The absolutization of one perspective is the end of true seeing. It is semantic idolatry. An idol always arrests our gaze and does not let us see beyond.

The opposite of semantic idolatry is semantic transcendence. The moment I realize there are at least two pictures to see, I stop absolutizing my own. I start switching between the two. But I don’t absolutize the second one either. Both are but shadows of reality, not reality itself.

When I realize that the “real switching” is not between the two pictures (or two cultural semantics) but between shadows and Truth, I start seeing. My eyes open. It’s not just a young lady or just an old woman. These are but shadows of reality. They are symbols that must be transcended. When I realize that my way of seeing is symbolic, I realize that all the symbols are real inasmuch as I see through them, not at them.

Shadows are not absolute. The Absolute lies beyond the shadows. In the Absolute, opposites converge.

“God is the coincidence of opposites.” Nicholas of Cusa

In God, all contradictions converge and are reconciled. Now we see partially, as in a mirror. Then, we will see face to face. In God, we see two (or more) pictures at the same time without having to switch between them because we see with the heart, not the mind. The heart perceives an old woman in every young lady and a young lady in every old woman. It doesn’t mistake a symbol for reality. It transcends the shadows and becomes sane.

“The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic… He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland… If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.” G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

In God, we see two things simultaneously. The mind cannot grasp the Whole — it has to switch. The heart can. Mystical vision is stereoscopic. It allows me to see the Whole without sacrificing either part. The moment I see God, I start seeing The Face behind every face.

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What is Satan’s Plan for Deceiving People?

What is Satan’s plan for deceiving people? I remember watching a lecture on YouTube by a KGB professor who taught a class on how world elites rule over societies.

He said, “Imagine there is a truth and a lie. It’s a huge mistake to place common people between the truth and a lie and let them decide which is which. The truth will always prevail. It is too self-evident. The way to rule the masses is to always keep people between two lies.”

When you keep people between two lies, they will be distracted enough not to see the truth. They will split into two groups and start fighting each other. Each group will clearly see the lie of the other. Neither will see their own. Human nature is such that people never see problems with their own position but always find fault with the opposite one.

When I heard that, I thought, “How viciously insightful! If it isn’t the very definition of diabolos, I don’t know what is.” In Greek, diabolos means “the one who throws apart.” The devil invents two lies and places people in between them. The more we stare at the lies (which always contain some truth), the more we are drawn apart.

The devil keeps fanning into the flame and polarizing people until they start demonizing each other. When people fight, they are too distracted to see the truth. All they think about is how wrong the other side is. This is the best scenario for ruling over the masses. They will want a ruler.

St. Augustine said,

“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”

According to the KGB professor, it is a grave mistake to place people between the truth and a lie. The truthfulness of the truth is too obvious to miss. It doesn’t need any defending. When you see it, you know it. Seeing is enough. That’s why the devil’s goal is never to let people see it.

Truth is too obvious to miss. When you see it, you know it. It’s not propositional — it doesn’t require proof. It’s experiential — you simply encounter it. When you encounter it, you can either embrace it or turn away. But you can’t help recognizing it. That’s why when the devil tries to trap Jesus into taking sides, he always refuses. Truth doesn’t get polarized.

When people encounter Jesus, they forget about their differences and see the truth about themselves. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” If Jesus had taken sides, he would have lost. He answered in such a way that everyone was lost. He left them dumbfounded, “Hm… what belongs to Caesar and what to God?”

The issue of whether to pay taxes to Caesar or not was not the real issue. These were the two lies people were placed between. Neither was right. The real issue was that they couldn’t see in their hearts what belonged to Caesar and what to God. If they could, they wouldn’t have been polarized.

When we encounter the Truth, we quickly realize,

“Let God be true, but every man a liar.”

As John of the Cross said,

“In the divine union, all contraries are reconciled, and the soul experiences the peace that comes from the resolution of all opposites.”

The devil creates a strong illusion of seeming contradictions. He places us between two opposites, and we think they are absolute. We don’t see the Absolute. When we encounter the Absolute, all opposites are resolved instantly. We know it by the peace we feel.

“Love… binds all things together in perfect unity.”

Contradictions cease the moment we encounter God face to face. As Meister Eckhart said,

“In the ground of the soul, there is a unity where all opposites coincide in the eternal now of God’s presence.”

Without the vibrant experience of this presence, we will always be between two lies.

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Why is Göbekli Tepe Mysterious?

Why is Göbekli Tepe mysterious? Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, the archeologist Klaus Schmidt made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time — a temple complex Göbekli Tepe datingabout 11,000 years old.

The most striking thing about this discovery was that the temple complex dated before the advent of agriculture and a settled way of life. In other words, several tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers decided that they needed a temple and settled. Why?

In the traditional view of societal development (influenced by Marxism), economic factors always precede and predate culture and religion. Economy is the basis, the structure; culture is secondary — it is the superstructure. Culture and religion always flow out of the economy, not the other way around.

Schmidt came to the opposite conclusion. The main motivation for building Göbekli Tepe was not economy but religion — which was a huge blow to the traditional understanding of societal development. The hunter-gatherers settled because they had acquired some strong religious belief which substantiated building a temple.

This gave rise to the development of agriculture — they needed to feed all those people involved in the construction. And ultimately, this led to the creation of a “settled” way of life. How we live always flows from what we believe, not the other way around. We create an economy around our strongest beliefs, which are usually metaphors.

Metaphor is the structure; how we live it out is the superstructure. The further back we go in history, the more we find vestiges of metaphor-driven consciousness. That’s what Owen Barfield discovered in studying languages: the further back we go in history, the more metaphorical the language gets. Ancient consciousness was metaphoric. Modern consciousness is literal.

Man himself is a metaphor. Before the fall, Adam and Eve were acutely conscious of being vessels of the Divine — images of God. They were icons (“image” in Greek). Looking at each other, they saw God. They were walking metaphors — microcosms reflecting the macrocosm. After the fall, this metaphor-consciousness started disintegrating. Adam and Eve started taking themselves “literally.”

Over time, they started seeing themselves as separate beings — not as icons but as idols. An icon is a metaphor of God. An idol is a metaphor of nothing. It doesn’t show anything beyond the visible. Idolatry is the loss of metaphor-consciousness. Our gaze no longer penetrates the images; it is arrested by the images at the level of the visible and literal. This marks the rise of literalness-consciousness.

Why is Göbekli Tepe mysterious? The children of Adam and Eve always vacillate between metaphor and literalness. When we forget about God, we take ourselves literally. We idealize our earthly existence (economy) over the metaphor (religion). When we get fed up with the meaninglessness of the “literal,” we wake up to our true nature — we are metaphors of God. We experience a shift from an idol to an icon.

The moment we realize we are icons, we start building temples. We see everything as sacred. We take off our sandals for even the ground we are standing on is holy. We reconnect with God and ourselves as The Metaphor.

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How Do We Understand What a Text Means?

How do we understand what a text means? How do we know what Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, or Tolkien meant? Is it enough to read their books? How do we elicit meaning?

Isn’t it curious that God didn’t come to humanity with a book? He came with a body. The ultimate knowledge of God is enfleshed in the Son of God. He walked among us, and we saw his glory. The Logos became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen, touched, smelled, and heard, and tasted Meaning. It affected us bodily. We dwelt in its Presence.

Apart from the body, Meaning is impervious. It is ungraspable at the level of the mind.

As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht says:

“What we need is a form of thinking that is based on the possibility of presence and on the possibility of presence being related to meaning.”

Is meaning related to presence? It is. And our ability to perceive meaning arises from our contact with the Form. Meaning is read off of that Form in which it is embodied.

“That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”

The Logos must be incarnate to be perceivable. Knowledge without a body is misleading at best. We don’t arrive at Meaning through interpretation; we arrive at meaning through coming in contact with its embodied Presence.

Interpretation is misleading without Presence. It is a form of narcissism — we tend to reduce the Meaning to the lens through which we choose to see the world. When we see, touch, and taste the Presence, we don’t need to interpret. We grasp the Whole.

Interpretation is necessary when there’s no Presence. Interpretation is the child of absence. In the absence of the body, texts require interpretation. In the presence of the body, they come alive. They walk, talk, and dwell among us.

We see the text, talk with it, laugh with it, eat with it — we have a relationship with it. Meaning is what happens to us as we engage in that relationship. We know without interpreting. If we have to interpret, we don’t know.

“By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.”

To know God means to touch his flesh. When we touch the Body, we know, and all texts come alive. When we interpret the text without touching the Body, it is a dead letter.

The Spirit loves forms. It loves being in the body. It creates “felt presences.” Whatever we encounter in a text, whether it’s Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, or the Bible, already exists in this world as a Presence. Something that we can touch, see, and experience.

The moment we discover that Presence and engage with it, we discover that the text is not outside us to be interpreted. It is inside us to resonate with. We start looking for those resonances everywhere because we fall in love with the celestial Music they reveal.