Meaning Matters
In Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a colossal supercomputer is designed to solve the “ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.” But the computer takes seven and a half million years to do this, and by the time it delivers the answer everybody has forgotten the question. The answer, which turns out to be 42, doesn’t mean anything because without meaningful questions answers cease to be answers.
In a similar way, we are increasingly turning to technology for answers: the internet, smart phones, GPS, social media, genetic engineering, robotics, nanotechnology, to name a few. Yet as the modern world increases in technological knowledge, the exponential delivery of this knowledge is making the world a lot more unpredictable. This increased uncertainty is making it much more challenging to meaningfully navigate this emerging alien landscape of self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, gene therapy, social media cocoons, and the ascendancy of the Internet as a surveillance state.
An exceptional education requires not just academic excellence but also meaning and purpose. Recent research is confirming the central role meaning plays in our lives. In fact it has been demonstrated that it is healthier than happiness. As Emily Esfahani Smith has reported in The Atlantic, “People who are happy but have little-to-no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity.” Smith goes on to explain that, “Being happy is about feeling good. Meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way.”
Living with meaning and purpose, i.e. having an orientation toward something bigger than the self, starts with identifying your own beliefs and your own values. At the heart of the philosophy and world religion classes I teach is the intention for students to explore and cultivate meaning in their lives.
Throughout most of human history, when people wanted answers to life’s ultimate questions — Why are we here? What does it all mean? — they looked to their sacred texts or to their traditional myths if they were an oral culture. However, since the rise of modern science, we have been increasingly turning to science for answers to life’s ultimate questions. In many respects this is understandable. Science is clearly one of the most potent methods that we have developed for discovering truth. While science has revealed a thrilling evolutionary tale that stretches back almost 14 billion years to a flaring forth of time, space, matter and energy, it doesn’t have much to say about what it all means. Religion has been, and remains, the greatest force for generating meaning. Yet religion has fallen on hard times in those parts of the world deemed most Westernized: secular, liberal, and steeped in scientific and technological literacy.
The forces that produced liberal democracies also started to erode the influence and role played by religion in Western society. Historians have debated the origin of this decline, and some have found the rise of scientific rationalism during the Renaissance to be the primary cause. Others have pointed to the skepticism and secularism of the Enlightenment. Still others say the theory of evolution and the industrial revolution provided the tipping point. While the origin and cause may be debatable, the declining role of religion in Western society is agreed upon. The impact of this decline can’t be overstated. The moral, intellectual and spiritual heart of our culture began to dry up under the empirical gaze of rationalism. As the lifeblood of our culture became desiccated, a vast emptiness took its place.
The emergence of modernity, with its emphasis on rationality, science, bureaucracy and secularism, lead to what the German sociologist, Max Weber, called the “disenchantment of the world.” Myth, ritual, and the sacred were slowly eclipsed as we fell under the sway of scientific materialism. While science may be able to map neuronal connections and the electrical activity in the brain with remarkable precision, it is silent about what this all means from a subjective perspective. We don’t experience our synapses passing electrical signals to other neurons. We experience beauty, love, anger, anxiety, reverence, despair, laughter and loss. Our ability to generate meaning from this mental and emotional “electricity” is profoundly significant for our wellbeing.
In many respects, my classes aim at re-enchanting the world for students on both an intellectual and experiential level. While I have immense respect for the spectacular achievements of modern science and technology, I believe that truth without meaning is inanimate. This is why the world’s religions have value in our scientific and technological society: they are a rich repository of stories and practices that shed light on perennial themes of suffering, peace, love, death, freedom, oppression, joy and meaning. My intention isn’t to proselytize a specific religion, but to foster an authentic relationship with the literal meaning of religion, which, in Latin, means to link or bind together. So I want students to develop meaningful bonds to their community, to social justice, and to the cosmos as a whole — from the golden spirals found in nautilus shells to galaxies containing billions and billions of stars.
The Christian existentialist philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, believed that it is the responsibility of the individual, not society or religions, to give meaning to life and live it authentically and passionately. In our age of individuality and mass customization Kierkegaard’s sentiments capture the ethos of our time. Meaning shapes and directs our lives. But there aren’t ready-made answers to life’s ultimate questions. Rather, in today’s world, the answers must be customized to the heart and mind of the one asking the questions. This is why I have students contemplate and articulate their personal creed at the end of my world religions class.
Twenty-five hundred years ago Diogenes said, “I am not an Athenian or a Greek but a citizen of the world.” One of the challenges of today is to make those words our own. I provide scaffolding for this challenge by examining the philosophies and theologies found in the world’s sacred texts: the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Buddhist Sutras and the Tao Te Ching. Like the ancient Jews, can we find meaning in suffering by not falling prey to its pain but in learning how to creatively respond to our circumstances? For this transformation to take place we may need to acknowledge the psychological insight Buddha pointed to in his first Noble Truth: that much of our suffering arises because we crave and cling to impermanent states and things. Suffering may be an inevitable facet of life but so is love. Can we learn to rise above our differences and love our neighbors and enemies as Jesus counseled? This transpersonal calling may be more likely by taking a clue from Bhakti Yoga, the practice of love and devotion to a personal god, whereby the aspiration of oneness and harmony with the Divine may encompass all life.
After a year of interpreting sacred texts and determining what passages resonate, we then have students express what beliefs or aims guide their actions by responding to a number of questions they find meaningful, such as: What values have a centering power in your life? Where do you find the sacred? What makes life worth living? What does it mean to be a good person? It’s truly gratifying to read such thoughtful, creative and heartfelt responses. At this stage many students recognize that as they will continue to grow, change and evolve, their responses to life’s ultimate questions will likely evolve with them. Meaning develops embryonically, by learning to live the question. As the poet Rilke advised, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
This article was original published on Medium.