Another invitation to ask with more than just our head

Last week, we explored the question, “Who Am I?” — and how inward curiosity might hold more answers than outward striving. This week, we turn to a question even more ancient and universal:

What is the meaning of life?

It’s a question philosophers, mystics, scientists, and schoolchildren have all wrestled with. And it’s easy to assume it’s purely abstract or out of reach. But what if the question isn’t just philosophical? What if it’s also neurological?

What if we’re more equipped to explore it than we’ve been taught?

A Question Worth Returning To

Before we can ask what life means, maybe we need to first ask what life even is.

Traditionally, life is defined as the ability to grow, reproduce, and maintain biological function until death. But on a human level, life is more than that. Life is the ability to experience, to think, feel, learn, wonder, grieve, love, and become aware of becoming.

And how we experience life is radically shaped by our senses, our upbringing, our environment, and the information we’re exposed to.

A Tale of Two Twins

Imagine two identical twins, separated at birth.

• One is raised in a quiet jungle village, surrounded by nature. Their experience of life is relational, shaped by the seasons, stories, and sensations of the natural world. Learning happens through natural rhythms, listening, watching, and feeling. There is time for reflection, stillness, and intuition.
• The other grows up in a fast-paced city, constantly connected to screens and systems. Life is algorithmically curated, news, entertainment, and ads, all filtered through digital preferences. Learning is structured, timed, and measured. Thoughts often override feelings. Speed overrides silence.

If these twins met 40 years later, their understandings of life would likely seem worlds apart. And yet, both would be valid. Both are shaped by what they perceived and what they were taught to notice.

The 0.000005% Awareness Ratio

Neuroscience tells us that our conscious minds process just a fraction, around 0.000005%, of the sensory data our brains are actually processing at any given moment.

Which means we are not perceiving life in its fullness. We’re perceiving the edited highlights, selected by the filters of our nervous system based on survival, conditioning, and what we’ve been trained to notice. That leaves 99.999995% of potential experience unaccounted for.

Just let that land.

If that’s true… what might we be missing?

Is it possible that phenomena we once dismissed, intuition, synchronicity, and unspoken knowing, are part of this unseen landscape? Are we brushing past the extraordinary because it doesn’t fit the filters we inherited?

Take The Telepathy Tapes, for instance, a podcast exploring whether some nonverbal children with autism may access a deeper form of communication. Whether or not you share or are open to a fresh perspective, the point is not to argue, it’s to ask:

What becomes possible when we stay curious, even when the evidence doesn’t fit our current map of the world?

And if we only trust what others have previously believed, and what our five senses can perceive… are we ignoring the parts of life that whisper instead of shout?

Life as a Curriculum

Let’s consider another hypothesis, one I’ve personally found true:

Life is a school.

Not a classroom. Not a place to prove yourself. But a place where every experience is a kind of lesson… designed to help you grow.

• Our challenges? Coursework.
• Our detours? Rewrites.
• Our breakthroughs? Integration.

And just like in any good school, the meaning of the assignment often isn’t clear until after it’s complete.

We don’t always know the “why” in the moment. But in hindsight, we begin to see how one experience prepared us for the next. How the thread we couldn’t make sense of was actually weaving something stronger.

Life invites us to learn. Not because we’re broken, but because we’re evolving.

A Reflective Exercise: Learning Through the Lens of Time

A powerful way to see this more clearly is to plot our life’s challenges on a timeline. Take a blank piece of paper or create a new document, and plot out your life's challenges in chronological order along a timeline. Now, revisit each challenge and ask:

• What did that experience teach me about myself, others, or life? What did I learn?
• Was there something I needed to let go of in order to move through it?
• Can I now see how that challenge shaped a strength I rely on today? How did what I learned help me work through subsequent challenges?

You may begin to notice a pattern: each experience is preparing us for the next, like lessons building on each other in a deeper kind of school. Because the meaning doesn’t always emerge in the moment, sometimes, it’s only through looking back that we understand what life was really teaching us.
 

A Quiet Conclusion

Just because we don’t understand the reason why yet… it doesn’t mean we’re not learning it.