The human being is the only creature capable of pushing back chaos—the destructive force of human civilisations—and recreating order. Yet the human being is also free to turn order into chaos and destroy the world. A person can revive a dying forest, restore a sick animal to life, plant a flower with their own hands and water it until it blossoms. They can create poetry from words and fantasy from images of their own making, and even recreate these images in the world of reality. The human mind can decipher the mysteries of existence and, with the numbers it knows, realise the magic of guiding an object—or even its own species—to another planet. The human being is not only what they are, but everything they are not yet and can become. The existence of the world is astonishingly open to human ascent and transcendence—open to becoming more conscious and more free.

In this view, the human being is not only a radically free being but a transcending being: a being capable both of transcendence and of bringing transcendence into being. In the Sartrean view, human freedom is the meaning of life. In this view, however, it is not “freedom” but “transcendence” that is the meaning of human life, while “freedom” is the inexhaustible power that keeps the human being “open” toward existence. Freedom is the singular essence that makes imagination and transcendence possible in the human being. Freedom is not itself the meaning of life; it makes the discovery of meaning possible. Along this path, “individuation”—understood as the person we can become on our horizon—becomes the meaning of life.

We are free to become what we can become through realising the Self. In this view, as in Sartre’s, we human beings open our eyes and stand up in a desert called life. We remember nothing about how we opened our eyes in this desert, but we believe we are here for a mission. In the Sartrean view, we are free to choose a direction, and whatever we discover and build along that path becomes the meaning of our existence.

In a transcendence-oriented view, however, the continually present question of our life is this: if there is a path for me through this desert whose meaning has not yet been disclosed to me, how can I take each step in a way that brings me closer than the previous step to the final aim that lies at the end of the road? In this view, it is not we who rise in search of the meaning of our lives. Rather, the meaning of our life is hidden and always present within us; we will see it only when we are ready to encounter it.

The great question of life, then, is not: Where will I find meaning? The greater question is: How can I recover the readiness to receive the meaning that lies within me? With every step toward living in truth—toward transforming chaos into order, and ugliness into beauty, within ourselves and in the external world—we reduce the density of the fog before our eyes. With every step toward the transcendence of ourselves and the world, we give our vision greater clarity and increase our readiness to meet our destiny... until one day we find the meaning of our life—our destiny—standing before us, and can accept it with pride.

At every moment we are radically free to choose between darkness and light, ugliness and beauty, chaos and order, falsehood and truth; and in the depths of our being we know and see that the two sides of the choice are never equal. With every choice, we give birth to the person we will be in the next moment and to the world that will stand before us in that next moment.

The meaning of each person’s individuation is unique. Across the vastness of this world and the whole known and unknown history of humanity, only one “I” may be born at this time, within these particular limits written by my family, country, language, and capacities. There will be only one of me in all history. In our hands, this magnificent uniqueness can be transformed from limitation into liberation and from ignorance into knowledge. Every step we take inwardly toward the light carries the external world one step further toward light as well.

In this desert, each step will bring us closer than the previous one to the sun on the horizon of the road. Over the years, we will feel that we have not wandered like a displaced person from one lodging to another. Along this path, which I have freely chosen at each moment of life, we will discover a meaning that is mine alone, and my meaning will not be the meaning of any other individual. My shoes will be too tight for another person, and the most beautiful picture I can offer of my personal path will give others only a caricature of what I myself have lived.