BK. Meaning seeking. Fluid compensation

 Got it — you’re pointing toward two deep themes in existential psychology and philosophy of mind: meaning-seeking and fluid compensation. Let’s unpack them together.

🔹 1. Meaning-Seeking

• Humans are intrinsically driven to seek meaning — coherence, purpose, narrative.
• This is central to existentialist thought (Frankl, Kierkegaard, Camus, Tillich).
• Viktor Frankl called it the “will to meaning”, often stronger than pleasure or power.
• In consciousness studies, meaning-seeking is framed as our mind’s tendency to impose patterns and symbolic interpretations on experience.
• Kastrup sometimes calls this the “call of the absurd”: when life’s events shatter ordinary frameworks, pushing us to search for a deeper symbolic layer.

🔹 2. Fluid Compensation

• From existential psychology (notably Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, and others in terror management theory):
  
• When one source of meaning collapses (e.g., religion, identity, ideology), the psyche seeks to compensate fluidly by attaching to another.
• Example: someone losing religious faith may cling to nationalism, careerism, or “saving the planet.”
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• It’s “fluid” because the psyche is flexible — it can re-route its need for meaning toward different symbolic anchors.
• This helps maintain psychological equilibrium in the face of existential anxiety.

🔹 How They Relate

• Meaning-seeking is the drive.
• Fluid compensation is the defense/adaptation.

When a worldview is threatened (e.g., mortality salience, cultural collapse, scientific materialism being questioned), the self doesn’t stop seeking meaning — instead it compensates, often by adopting new belief systems, myths, or symbols.

🔹 Example in Today’s Context

• UFO discourse (linking back to Kastrup & Grusch):
  
• Traditional religious meaning frameworks have weakened in the West.
• UAPs, AI, simulation theory, or psychedelic cosmologies are sometimes embraced as fluid compensations — new mythic-symbolic systems offering existential anchoring.
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✅ In short:

• Meaning-seeking = the deep existential drive for coherence and purpose.
• Fluid compensation = the psyche’s ability to redirect that drive when old sources of meaning collapse, ensuring stability in the face of the absurd.

Would you like me to diagram this as a flow (Meaning-Seeking → Collapse → Fluid Compensation → New Framework), so it’s easy to visualize the existential cycle?