The Meaning of Life – How do we connect to it?
Asking the big questions of life is natural. We are “meaning making” machines. We want to know our place in the order of things, and to make sense of our lives. Therefore, we journey on the wings of big questions – like, why am I here, what is my purpose, and why do things keep happening to me? To get the answers, we read books. We attend workshops. We sit in therapist offices pondering. Some of us attend church services while others sit for long hours in meditation.
Meaning of Life – what others say
I searched the internet to see what others had to say and found so many different perspectives.
Franz Kafka wrote “Meaning of life is that it ends” it is a rather dark perspective from a man who suffered from lifelong clinical depression. However, there is some truth here. That we die calls us to reflect on the time that we spend on this earth.
Socrates, the great Greek philosopher said that “ an unexamined life is not worth living”
Victor Frankl, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor and the author of Man’s search for meaning said that: “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day-to-day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”
In my book “Soul-making: Return to the heart” I am exploring the practical and immediate experiences that contribute to meaning in our lives. How do we connect to the lived experiences that create meaning?
Ultimately, the answer is an interpretation.
Does life have meaning or do we make it meaning-full?
Joseph Campbell wrote “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
The answers to meaning lie in the stories that we tell and in our soul-making reflections. Human beings are the only species that tell stories. We tell the stories to make sense of things that happen to us. Fairy tales and myths are ways that we as a species make meaning out of human experience.
C.G. Jung came to understand “meaning” from his long life, rich in experience, and over 50 years researching and studying the human psyche. For Jung, “meaning” was intimately linked to awareness and consciousness. We have a consciousness that not only perceives and reacts to what it experiences but is aware of perceiving and understands what it is experiencing. It has the faculty of reflection and insight, and, through its recognition of the outer and inner world, of self-extension and self-transformation. It is “consciousness” that gives the world a meaning.
Jung wrote to a longtime colleague in March 1959 “Without the reflecting consciousness of man the world is a gigantic meaningless machine, for as far as we know man is the only creature that can discover ‘meaning’,”
Every answer is a human interpretation or conjecture, a confession or a belief. Consciousness creates its own meaning. I think that this is the essence of soul-making.
- Is the story that you tell yourself about the meaning of events disempowering or empowering?
- Does your interpretation lower your mood or does it support your growth and learning?
- Do the stories come from the interpretation from your childhood or from a sense of soul purpose?
Felt Sense of Meaning
It is the SOUL that connects us to meaning. We feel it when the things in our lives that are meaningful. Philosopher Eugene Gendlen coined the term “felt sense” in his explorations of meaning. He came to understand that there is a felt bodily experience—endlessly describable and ultimately intelligent.
“A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event. An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time—encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail. Think of it as a taste, if you like, or a great musical chord that makes you feel a powerful impact, a big round unclear feeling. A felt sense doesn’t come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling. (1981, 32-33)
Examples of ways to feel meaning
I experienced a profound moment of felt meaning when I was on Safari in Botswana in January 2008. In the vast landscape of the Botswana plain, I felt connected to a self organizing system of predator and prey. Life and death existed in their purest form without emotional sentimentality. The weakest animals did not survive. I felt in the depth of my being the expanse of the landscape and the smallness of being human. In this highly-protected area of the country, where human negative influence is tightly controlled, there was a purpose to everything that supported the eco system. There was an system of things including who ate who, and a sense of purpose to everything that supported the eco system. Nothing felt out of place and nothing was wasted. It was a deeply felt experience of meaning.
Questions for Reflection
Take a few minutes and reflect on the moments in your life that are full of meaning – time with your children, in the garden, working on a creative activity. Connect to the felt sense in the body and describe it either in your journal or give some other expressive form.
Christina Becker
December 2018
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