Trust / Meaning Orientation

Everything is trust. All human existence is trust. Trust is fundamental even to the will to trust.

Trust orientation is an addiction to being. Something appears in front of me. Is this thing trustworthy for me? Is it safe for me? Or is it poisonous for me? I get anxious about myself in trust orientation. And I see things in how they affect me, how things are for me, how they enter in and affect me, not how they are in themselves. Trust orientation lends itself to solipsism.

Meaning orientation is trusting something other than the desire to escape pain and betrayal, to trust simply for the sake of the other. So the truth is known through courage.

The deepest meaning is a casualty to the success of trust orientation.

A life in which every event has significance is not necessarily about everything working out for good, "according to plan" (trust orientation), but about communication from God (meaning orientation).

Sufficiency

Sufficiency is when you live in a place of having enough.

Here are three kinds of insufficiency:

Inadequacy: "What you have is not enough." Without inadequacy, it is impossible to be spoken to on the deepest level. Inadequacy is quiet-hearted, mourns, waits and listens, is modest in demands, is alive.

Dissatisfaction: "What you have is not good enough." Dissatisfaction is annoyed, entitled, bored, greedy, blank-eyed.

Inferiority: "You are not good enough." Inferiority is self-attacking, worrying, panicking, feels no right to make demands but may crave to make them, vulnerable to self-pity, envy, feelings of worthlessness and despair, but alive.

We try to fight dissatisfaction and inferiority with an overall sufficiency and make that our picture of human flourishing (even thinking in terms of "human flourishing" begs the question toward sufficiency). By this we quench our inadequacy.