How do you answer the question of meaning?

“I don’t think [the meaning of life] is what we’re seeking. I think [it’s] an experience of being alive” – Joseph Campbell

Asking big life questions is natural. The search for answers is understandable. Human beings are “meaning-making” machines. We want to know our place in the order of things and to make sense of our lives.   At the same time, in the absence of information, we make our own meaning up – sometimes negatively.

We ask ourselves, “Why am I here?” and “What is my purpose? Why do things keep happening to me?” We read books. We attend workshops. We sit in therapists’ offices pondering. Some attend church services while others sit for long hours in meditation.

Meaning of Life – What others say

I searched the internet to see what great minds and scholars had to say. I found it interesting to read the 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.

The great Greek philosopher Socrates said that “an unexamined life is not worth living.”

Victor Frankl, psychiatrist, holocaust survivor and the author of Man’s search for meaning, said: “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.”

I have long searched for practical and immediate experiences that contribute meaning to our lives. How do we connect to the lived experiences that create meaning? However, in the end, each 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.”

Human beings are the only species that tell stories. We tell 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 the experience of being human.

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, the 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, insight, and, through its recognition of the outer and inner world, of self-extension and self-transformation. “It is consciousness that gives the world meaning.”

Jung wrote to long time 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 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

I believe that there is a feeling of meaning which is where the SOUL connects us to the things in our lives that are meaningful – that is full of meaning. The term “felt sense” originates from philosopher Eugene Gendlen. In his explorations of meaning, he came to understand that there is a felt sense that is a bodily experience—endlessly describable and ultimately intelligent.

Quotation from Gendlin

“A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. Physical. 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)

Gendlin believed that our felt sense is our sense of meaning in the body. The connection to feelings we feel in the body informs our experience of life and living a life full of meaning.

Examples of ways to feel meaning

I experienced a profound moment of felt meaning while on safari in Botswana in January 2008.   In the vast landscape of the Botswana plain, I felt part of the 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 negative human influence is tightly controlled, there was a purpose to everything that supported the ecosystem. There was a system of things, including who ate who and a sense of purpose to everything that supported the ecosystem. Nothing felt out of place, and nothing was wasted. I connected to a deep sense of meaning.

Exercise

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.

Christina Becker
November 2022

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