Dr. K

So there are a lot of these like words that we use, but all of these words tie back to some internal sense of what is happening in your life.

So that's how I would describe purpose.

In terms of spiritual practices, what my experience is is that if you look at human beings who say they have purpose and human beings who don't have purpose, their lived experiences in life are different.

So when I work with survivors of trauma, they have certain experiences.

Like literally we can scientifically sort of measure this.

You have a particular experience which destroys your sense of meaning in the world.

I had a patient once who was attacked in a bathroom for about five minutes.

And in five minutes, this person had a sense of what they were doing in life, was dating, was doing well in college, had loving parents.

And in five minutes, their compass for navigating the world was shattered.

So if we sort of think about experience can lead to a loss of purpose, experience can also lead to a gain in purpose.

Now, the spiritual tradition that I come from is all about particular practices that evoke certain subjective experiences.

And as people have those experiences, their sense of purpose increases.

And this is where I think there's a major shortcoming of science.

So science can tell you what you should do, but it doesn't create experiences in and of itself, right?

So we can scientifically understand that the highest risk factor for pornography addiction is having no meaning in life.

But even if we know that, that doesn't help us like fix the problem.

And there's always a question of how.

Like so we can discover something with science, but then there's a question of how do we actually like move from point A to point B. And that's where I find spiritual practice is incredibly helpful.

So my first question is, what's the point of this conversation?

So for y'all, I'm curious when y'all show up here, like what is the purpose for y'all showing up?