A grand God’s-eye view of human cultural history can be edifying, if you read it as a kind of poetry. So in that spirit, let’s say that human guidance systems have evolved from cosmologies to technologies to intimologies.
Cosmologies offered an overview of the context in which we live, and thus of the meaning of life. But when cosmologies collided, conflict ensued, because the one assumption common to all was that there could be only one true logos of the cosmos. Then we realized that cosmologies were mythologies and that there were many of them, determined by cultural and psychological factors. Now a poet could say Let Us Compare Mythologies (the title of Leonard Cohen’s first book).
At that point we could turn to technologies for the meaning of life, since by this time we had surrounded ourselves with an artificial cocoon, insulating ourselves from the natural context. If life is meaningless, we can damn well make it mean something, make a cultural context. But the long-term result of manufacturing context, as Thomas Berry (1988) pointed out, is to turn wonderworld into wasteworld.
Berry’s solution is to restore cosmology to its proper place, using the technics of science to make it more realistic. My argument here is that we can only do this if we see cosmologies (and other belief systems) as intimologies, practices of dialog by which mythologies can self-modify. From the inside of such a practice we aim at describing an external reality; from the outside, we see an act of meaning in formation.