Note: As always, if you’d like to book an online appointment with me, click here or respond to this email and I will be more than happy to connect.
Tonight, I will be teaching a new meditation class at 7 pm EST. As this is my first time teaching this material, I want to invite anyone interested to join for free. Please join if you want to explore some different approaches to meditation and spiritual practice, or if you are simply curious about what I have been up to lately (I recently finished an extended period of retreat). The class will include teaching as well as short periods of guided practice. If you are interested, just respond to this email and I will forward you the link.
Today, I have been reflecting a lot on the challenge many people face in finding deep sources of meaning in
their lives. Many aspects of mainstream American culture can feel lacking in depth, and a strong sense of existential unrootedness is widespread.
Many people today struggle due to a lack of satisfactory engagement with very basic themes relating to meaning and purpose. This is made all the worse by a widespread view that engaging in deep contemplations about such themes is a waste of time. For this reason, many never truly allow themselves to seriously ask the question: what is the meaning of this life?
Questions about the meaning of life have become something of a cliché in our time, even a joke. Questions like 'Why are we here?' and 'How are we meant to live our lives?' are distinctly out of fashion and are often even mocked with derision. Many do not entertain the legitimacy of such questions, for their scope seems daunting, and because such questions often lead to more questions and contemplations than to clear and simple answers. We live in a time when questions that do not have clearly articulable answers, that cannot be 'solved' with the same clarity with which one solves a math problem, are often assumed to not be worth asking at all. Questions like 'what is the meaning of life?', when not treated as a worn-out cliché, can even seem threatening—for if we actually entertain it as a legitimate question, warranting real consideration, we may have to admit to ourselves that we don't really know the answer. Questions that so quickly reveal to us our lack of existential certainty can sting a bit, and so it seems easier to many to simply dismiss them as illegitimate word games, instead of acknowledging them as invitations into deeper contemplation.
A profound uncertainty about life's meaning lives just beneath the surface of modern culture. Curiously, one of the most common ways humans try to cope with a lack of certainty is to feign that they possess it absolutely. We can observe such a tactic in three of today's most common ways of answering the question 'what is the meaning of life?'
The first way of answering is to assert, with contrived confidence, that such a question is not even worth asking. Only questions that have provable or disprovable answers are deemed coherent and worthy of attention, secular, positivistic thinkers will respond, side-stepping the question altogether. The second response is simply to throw up one's hands and say 'Nobody knows!', acknowledging that although it may be a coherent question, it is ultimately unanswerable, so not really worthy of sustained or serious consideration. Although this response admits ignorance, it admits it with absolute certainty. Thus, just like the first response, this answer maintains a sense of absolute confidence about the impossibility of answering such a question and so, again, avoids real engagement with it. The third response is to dogmatically assert a belief, whether derived from a religious doctrine, the doctrine of another intellectual source, or a self-created doctrine. Thus, the third type of response is to answer the question definitively, posturing that one possesses complete and total clarity. In so doing, again, the question does not really need to be considered, for one already has a pre-made answer to hide behind. All three of these responses to the question of the meaning of life shirk the question's existential weight, avoiding facing it squarely and directly, meeting it face-to-face. For its part, the secular ethos of modern medicine reflects the first two responses, and the question of the meaning of life is relegated to irrelevancy.
This is a problem, however, because whether we entertain the legitimacy of such questions or not, we alllive as thoughlife is meaningful in some way. Even if we refuse to contemplate such matters, we still navigate our lives with certain implicit, even if unarticulated, notions about why we are here and how we are meant to live our lives. We all live as though our life has a meaning, even though it may not be a stable one, and may change and fluctuate significantly at different times in our life's journey. Even those who claim to be nihilists, and do not believe that life has any meaning whatsoever, still experiencetheir life as meaningful in various, pre-theoretical ways. We cannot will ourselves out of finding our life meaningful in some way, for even to think that life is meaningless is to ascribe to it a certain meaning: the meaning of "meaninglessness."
Those that answer the question of the meaning of life by feigning certainty and delivering pre-set 'beliefs' based on doctrine alsodo not squarely face the question, do not let it touch them, and do not let it unsettle them in any way. To base one's life's meaning on a literalist interpretation of scripture or some other doctrine also allows one to ignore the depth of the question by clinging to an already-made answer from a source external to themselves.
Generally speaking, we experience our life as meaningful in ways that are dictated by the dominant worldview of our culture, and this is especially the case if we do not contemplate the meaning of life for ourselves. Different cultures throughout history have held different understandings of what the meaning of life is, as does ours, and to the extent that this worldview remains unexamined, we will generally live out our lives according to the dominant narrative.
However, the more aware we become of the implicit assumptions contained within our own worldview, the greater agency we have to discern whether or not this way of understanding the world actually makes sense and feels right for us. It is my contention that many people today would benefit greatly from more deeply investigating, and in some moments interrogating, their own assumptions, for sometimes our own assumptions can impede healing—both our own healing, as well as our work healing others. Whether we like it or not, we will find our life meaningful in one way or another, and if we do not engage with the question of our life's meaning for ourselves, we will simply live according to whatever meaning we have been conditioned to ascribe to our life.
That said, simply contemplating the meaning of our lives intellectually often does not do us very much good. For our struggles with meaning are not merely cognitive, but are felt in very deep, even bodily ways.
It is for this reason that engaging in contemplative practice—learning to access deeper layers of one's own being through meditative methods—can be essential. Speaking for my own life, it has been through my own practice of meditation and related arts that I have been reminded, again and again, of just how deeply meaningful this human life can be.
Strong cultural forces exist today that are trying to convince each of us that our life is not particularly meaningful—in a consumerist society such as our own, we are taught from a young age that the purpose of life is to buy things, to own things, to be likable and thus desirable and consumable by others, whether by amassing power, wealth, or other means to acquire a positive social identity.
Although there is nothing inherently wrong with buying things, or building wealth, influence, or social clout, if these aspects of life are engaged without a deeper sense of the reason why—that is, what they are in service to—they will lead to a deeply unfulfilling existence.
It is my plan to write about this topic more in future newsletters, as it is perhaps the most widespread form of illness I see at work today, and it is quite clearly contagious. What is so often missed (including by myself) is that if we are seeking a substantive, stable, and sustainable source of meaning in our lives, we will not find it by looking outside of ourselves. Rather, it is from within the depth of our very awareness that each and every one of us can access a profound sense of well-being, love, and goodness, and it is from connecting with these basic qualities of our own being and the being of others that the depth and meaningfulness of our lives can progressively dawn more and more.
Until next time,
Aidan
Aidan Keeva, DACM, L. Ac.,
Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine