“People cannot stand a meaningless life. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. It is only the things we don’t understand that have any meaning. We woke up in a world we did not understand, and that is why we try to interpret”   C.G. Jung

WHAT DOES THE MEANING OF LIFE REALLY MEAN?  

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.   

When we don’t understand something, we search for answers, we fill in the blanks, and we find meaning and we interpret. 

We ask ourselves questions like, 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 therapist’s offices pondering and asking. Some of us attend church services, while others sit for long hours in meditation.

 

Meaning of Life – What Others Say 

Great minds and scholars have a lot to say. Reflecting on various philosophical perspectives broadens our outlook.   

Franz Kafka wrote, “Meaning of life is that it ends”. It is a rather dark perspective from a man who suffered from life long clinical depression. 

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, “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.” 

How do we connect to the lived experiences that create meaning?  However, in the end, each answer is still 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 tells 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 of 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 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.  

• 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?

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Felt Sense of Meaning 

This is the feeling of meaning when the SOUL connects us to the things in our lives that are meaningful – that is full of meaning. Philosopher Eugene Gendlen explored meaning and he came to understand that there is a “felt sense” that is a bodily experience—it is endlessly describable and ultimately intelligent.  

The experience of what Eugene Gendlen’s “felt sense” hit home recently for me when a client of mine made a connection between her unconscious pain and her subsequent behaviour that acted out that pain. As she reflected on the heartbreaking loss of someone close to her, the meaning of the experience arrived in her body like a thud. It was as if every cell in her body felt the connection.

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 – that we feel in the body informed our experience of life and living a life that is full of meaning.

 

Exercise 

Take a few minutes and reflect on the moments in the last year where you felt meaning – time with your children, in the garden, working on a creative activity etc. Connect to the felt sense in your body and describe it.

 

Copyright Christina Becker
November 2020

 

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