Into the Deep: The Art of Making Meaning

Two people can stand in the same room and walk away with entirely different worlds. Why? Because meaning is never just given to us — it’s made, in the space between raw experience and the stories we tell about it. Over six weeks, Into the Deep takes you from a jazz bar in Kansas City to the opening verses of Genesis, tracing how feeling becomes thought, thought becomes language, and language becomes a life. Along the way, you’ll uncover what’s quietly dulling your own capacity for wonder — and practice getting it back.

This course does not promise to hand you new answers to replace the old ones. It promises accompaniment — six weeks of good company for the work of finding out what meaning looks like on the other side of certainty.

01 — The Territory

What you will explore

We begin with the nature of meaning-making itself: not meaning as a fact to be discovered, but as something humans construct, inherit, and quietly maintain — usually without noticing we are doing it.

From there, we look honestly at what happens when those frameworks break down. This is the part most traditions rush past. We will not rush past it. Collapse is not a malfunction. It is often the beginning of something more spacious.

We draw on contemplative traditions that have sat with this exact territory for centuries — not as museum pieces, but as working maps, still legible, still useful.

And we end with reconstruction: not a rebuilt version of the old certainty, but something more honest — a relationship with meaning that can hold complexity without collapsing again the next time life gets complicated.