#search for meaning

[in-tenebris-et-in-solitudine]

Is this what life is supposed to be? Is it just full of pain?

[zeewipark]

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

[diaryofadoctor-kreativeangle]

Humans have this amazing ability to smile and joice even amongst the darkest times and the suffering their own race inflicts upon them.

[annotatingdays]

Notes from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning

Frankl is fond of quoting Nietzsche, "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how”.

In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is "the last of human freedoms"—the ability to "choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances." This ultimate freedom, recognized by the ancient Stoics as well as by modern existentialists, takes on vivid significance in Frankl's story. The prisoners were only average men, but some, at least, by choosing to be "worthy of their suffering" proved man's capacity to rise above his outward fate.

Don't aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as "delusion of reprieve." The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad.

I think it was Lessing who once said, "There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose." An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.

At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.

Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defence. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were cantered on one task: preserving one's own life and that of the other fellow

"Et lux in tenebris lucet"—and the light shineth in the darkness 

Humour was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humour, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. 

No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.

Death in Teheran -  A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, "Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?" "I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran," said Death.

Whenever the degraded majority and the promoted minority came into conflict (and there were plenty of opportunities for this, starting with the distribution of food) the results were explosive. Therefore, the general irritability (whose physical causes were discussed above) became most intense when these mental tensions were added

Dostoevsky said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings”.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

The Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach.

It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future— sub specie aeternitatis.

What does Spinoza say in his Ethics?—"Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam." Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man—his courage and hope, or lack of them—and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friend's death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body's resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness—and thus the voice of his dream was right after all.

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

Whoever was still alive had reason for hope. Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society—all these were things that could be achieved again or restored. After all, we still had all our bones intact. Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future. And I quoted from Nietzsche: "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker." That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.

Again I quoted a poet—to avoid sounding like a preacher myself —who had written, "Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben." What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.

Logos is a Greek word which denotes "meaning." Logotherapy, or, as it has been called by some authors, "The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy," focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is cantered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term "striving for superiority," is focused.

A public-opinion poll was conducted a few years ago in France. The results showed that 89 percent of the people polled admitted that man needs "something" for the sake of which to live. Moreover, 61 percent conceded that there was something, or someone, in their own lives for whose sake they were even ready to die. I repeated this poll at my hospital department in Vienna among both the patients and the personnel, and the outcome was practically the same as among the thousands of people screened in France; the difference was only 2 percent.

Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of id, ego and superego, or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment. 

What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call "nod-dynamics," i.e., the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfil it. And one should not think that this holds true only for normal conditions; in neurotic individuals, it is even more valid. If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life. 

The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is understandable; it may be due to a twofold loss which man has had to undergo since he became a truly human being. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). 

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.

Such widespread phenomena as depression, aggression and addiction are not understandable unless we recognize the existential vacuum underlying them. This is also true of the crises of pensioners and aging people.

The Meaning of Life

question posed to a chess champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfilment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

"The self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfil or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways:-

(1) by creating a work or doing a deed; 

(2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and 

(3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. 

The first, the way of achievement or accomplishment, is quite obvious. The second and third need further elaboration.

We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation— just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer —we are challenged to change ourselves.

But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering—provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.

Anticipatory anxiety

It is characteristic of this fear that it produces precisely that of which the patient is afraid.

In this context, one might amend the saying "The wish is father to the thought" to "The fear is mother of the event." 

Logotherapy bases its technique called "paradoxical intention" on the twofold fact that fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes.

there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man's "nothing butness," the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free. To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions. As I once put it: "As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps—concentration camps, that is— and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable."

Man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment. 

Let me cite the case of Dr. J. He was the only man I ever encountered in my whole life whom I would dare to call a Mephistophelean being, a satanic figure. At that time he was generally called "the mass murderer of Steinhof" (the large mental hospital in Vienna). When the Nazis started their euthanasia program, he held all the strings in his hands and was so fanatic in the job assigned to him that he tried not to let one single psychotic individual escape the gas chamber. After the war, when I came back to Vienna, I asked what had happened to Dr. J. "He had been imprisoned by the Russians in one of the isolation cells of Steinhof," they told me. "The next day, however, the door of his cell stood open and Dr. J. was never seen again."

This is the story of Dr. J., "the mass murderer of Steinhof." How can we dare to predict the behaviour of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we may even try to predict the mechanisms or "dynamisms" of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.

A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining.

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Tragic optimism

one is, and remains, optimistic in spite of the "tragic triad," as it is called in logotherapy, a triad which consists of those aspects of human existence which may be circumscribed by: (1) pain; (2) guilt; and (3) death.

In other words, what matters is to make the best of any given situation. "The best," however, is that which in Latin is called optimum—hence the reason I speak of a tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action. 

But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy." Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

Unemployment neurosis

And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries and the like—in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity—their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same. The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake

[elianaportugal]

25 May, 2023

“Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.”

[losttcontrol]

[aheadofgold]

My Search for Meaning

Searching for meaning feels redundant. I never thought about it until I needed to do it. I lived and moved through life and I didn’t have a lot to question. I’ve had plenty of discomfort, and I've grown from it and allowed it to shape my perspective. I’ve even allowed it to shape my compassion. And over the past year things have changed.  

I’m at least half way through my life. I’m not where I want to be because I had no plan to be anywhere. I thought things fell into place or opportunities approached me or I would meet someone who would change my direction. And those things didn’t happen. So now I search for meaning.  

But everyone searches for meaning. It has been written about by billions of people since the invention of writing. And here I am, in the same dark night of the soul, with only myself to make sense out of it. Their words all make sense, and in certain ways can be comforting, but this is not their life. This is my life. It comes down to actually participating in my experience, making choices for myself, prioritizing my own path, and shedding habits and ruts and expectations. 

At times I've thought myself a sort of regular, ordinary person. I’ve thought that I have an average perspective and that my opinions align with most other people’s. I’ve thought that the same things make sense to most of us and that we generally find the same things reasonable. Now, more than ever, I question that. 

I’ve always been a lover of the wonder and beauty and complexity of life around me. I grew up running around cornfields as they grew higher and higher through the summer. I wandered through streams and woods and climbed trees and sat by fires. I spent cold winter days getting lost in snow, and then lost in my own thoughts in the silence of the frozen world. That is no longer my world, and I realize that for the majority of people I encounter it has never been their world. This is a disappointing disconnect for me to accept. 

It bothers me that our bird populations are declining rapidly. It bothers me that our soils are poisoned by pesticides and fertilizers and motor oils. And it bothers me even more that it doesn’t bother anyone else. It bothers me that people don’t see these things, much less want to talk about them. It bothers me that to most people, humans are the only lives that exist in the world.  

Everything is always in the context of the human experience.  And it makes sense. I’m here writing about my own human experience. We all live in our own minds with our own preferences and worries and things to do. But it’s sad how there is no room for other life. When we speak of war, it is only in reference to how war kills people.  No mention of the flowers and land.  No mention of the rabbits and butterflies.  No mention of the rivers.  No mention of anything but humans.  As if it would be possible to live in a world of only humans. As if we could ever find happiness in a world of just humans.  As if destroying all life around us, polluting the air, water and soil, so long as humans can live, would be ok.  As if that would even be possible.  As if humans can live independently.  As if our food does not come from the land, as if our breath does not come from the sky, as if our blood sweat and tears are not made from the rains and oceans.  As if inspiration and beauty do not come from forests and mountains.  From birdsong and the breeze through trees. 

I feel like no one understands this.  No one sees that all life is interwoven and linked and interdependent. Humans focus on our one piece, as is that one piece stands a chance at survival without the other pieces. This disappoints and distresses me. 

I think maybe the core of wanting to blog is to exist in reality.  As the deep version of myself.  To at least put things out there.  Maybe I don’t try to have these conversations with people in my life.  Maybe my relationships and connections are shallow or short.  Maybe people don’t enjoy talking about deep things or real things.  Maybe I don’t have the right context to have these conversations.  I know that there is more to life than being a monk in a wildflower meadow.  I love being that monk.  That witch.  I love it.  And, I also want to live in the world.  I want to talk to people and do things and go places.  And maybe for now it’s just through the electricity of the internet. 

Or maybe this is quite selfish.  For me to dump and upload and empty and vacate and expose and cut and chop and throw up and out.  Maybe it’s just self-aggrandizing and desiring recognition for my existence.  Maybe that’s it.  It’s possibly that simple.  But I'm bored and tired of just fading away.   

I possibly have a lot of life left in me.  This mid-life crisis can lead me in many different directions.  There were many things that I did not choose in the first half.  Where I was born, who was my family, who were my peers, how I looked, whom I was attracted to, the tools I had to handle life.  But in one way or another, I am choosing almost everything in this next half.  My jobs, my downtime, my hobbies, my friends, my evenings, my disposable income, the media I consume, the places I go. 

Whatever change is happening to me, for me, around me, within me, cannot be managed by force.  I can’t surround it with rules and schedules and punishments and rewards. I have tried that, and I keep trying to try that again because it hasn’t gotten me where I'm trying to go, and so far I haven’t developed a different way.  But I have a new idea: I’m going to love myself into evolution.  These things that I see as obstacles and inconveniences and stressors, I'm going to look for the opportunities they provide. 

There are invasive species all over my land. The Autumn Olive, Multiflora Rose, Oriental Bittersweet, Burning Bush, Garlic Mustard.  For the most part they stress me out. But the other day I saw that they give me the opportunity to get outside and be on the land.  My relationship to my spirituality has become stale and obligatory, but this Samhain I saw that my rituals are opportunities to be under the moonlight and that the moonlight is an opportunity for me to practice my rituals.  I have opportunities to breathe, to rest, to reflect, to write.  I can stop running from my life and start living in it.  The obstacles become my path.  There is nothing for me to avoid, because this is the life that I have and that I'm living.  It’s all I have.  I want to live it.  I don’t want to keep running from it, like it’s misdirected or needs to be corrected.  All of my joys, all of my hesitations, all of my fear and petty annoyances.  These are what I have.   

I’m recognizing a shift for me. The repercussions of that are many when I give myself time to think about them. I need to clear space for this. I need space to expand and contract freely. It means I'm drinking less, which means I’m seeing my friends less. It means noticing when I'm just going through the motions of watching videos or scrolling or playing games and then finding something else, anything else, to do. Maybe that’s boredom. But I need to have open, free space for something new to land and grow. I need to be ok not knowing what I'm doing, and not knowing where I'm going, and being uncomfortable. Maybe for a while. It means to stop people pleasing, and start prioritizing my own life. In some ways it feels like going all the way back to the person I was, wandering through cornfields and jumping streams.  

There was no doubt that I loved who I was back then. That I enjoyed my own company and that I was content to do whatever came up. I didn’t need to have a plan because I was secure in my own position. I was my own stability. It didn’t matter what happened around me, I was sure inside. 

What would it feel like again? If I allowed people to have their opinions without trying to share my perspective on top of it? If I didn’t care whether people liked what I thought or wrote or whether anything I did was helpful to other people? What if I just planted wildflower meadows and watched the life they attract, and built birdboxes and watched them live and breed and fly away, and sat outside in the breeze or the snow or the sunshine and just allowed myself to be happy with what I already have and what I already do? 

I would breathe easier.  I would smile more.  I might even be a nicer person. 

I can’t save the world. I can’t make people care about rabbits and soil health. But I care. And I can live in that, and enjoy that, and support that. I don’t need anyone’s permission for that. And all it would really take is a little shift, a little time, a little space and freedom for these things to take root in my life and transform me. I don’t know if a seed knows what kind of plant it will become. But it reaches down for its water and reaches up for its light, and it becomes whatever it is. I don’t know what I'm going to become. I’m just going to reach for the things that I need. 

[wickedzeevyln]

Hollow Shallow

For my beautiful roadrunners out there. You claim the poetsknow the weight of night,as if on silver spoonemotions are measuredas nothing but a passing fever,and dare you call yourselftitles that none of your soullesswork hopes to appeal.You claim the poetsknow the weight of night,yet strip their wordsto leave an empty shell.What gold liesin a silence full of lust,where bodies speak,but minds…

[ufoandmermaid]

[tossawary]

This is petty fandom salt, BUT... I've been chewing on this phenomenon that I've been calling "Fandom's Darling". It is related to things like "Author's Darling" and "Mary Sue / Gary Stu" and "Protagonist Halo" and all that jazz, where one character gains a peculiar narrative weight in a story.

"Author's Darling" is when a writer has a favorite character, and the world and all other characters sort of get... warped to put the Darling in the spotlight. It's most noticeable in TV shows with multiple writers, when a character you personally like suddenly has their previous characterization destroyed to make another character look good somehow. Every other character might become weirdly incompetent. The Darling's feelings are treated as The Most Important Feelings in any given situation. The logic of the fictional world seems broken past suspension of disbelief in order to validate this one character's beliefs or skillset or some other fantasy. And so on.

"Fandom's Darling" is what I've been calling the pattern where a fandom essentially crowns a New Protagonist for their fanfiction stories (it's often a side character rather than the original protagonist, but it can also happen to protagonists). This character becomes the self-insert for all sorts of indulgent fantasies, gaining special powers or backstories, and/or becoming the focus of extreme whump, and/or hooking up with all the various hotties, starring in all sorts of tropey AUs, and so on. They're not always an obvious Mary Sue version of themselves, but the character's original personality and interpersonal relationships tend to get warped or dropped completely, and other characters tend to become a little flat around them. I call it "Fandom's Darling" because it's not just one self-indulgent fantasy fic (you do you! Have fun!) with characterization choices that I don't vibe with (I have neither the time nor the desire nor the authority to police anything, I am just venting), but rather a prolific mini-fandom of sorts revolving around this empty doll / fanon version of the chosen vessel character, so it becomes a little unavoidable.

I am salty about this (mildly frustrated) (imagine a soft sigh of disappointment before I just go do something else) because you are FUCKED if you actually liked the canonical version of this character and their interpersonal relationships. It's almost worse than liking an obscure character that no one cares about. There's about a thousand fics starring your fave, but maybe only about a dozen of them are actually rooted in any kind of recognisable canon.

[zeewipark]

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

[thixcy]

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you.

— David Wagoner

[callisteios]

Hi, feel free to take my new uquiz to discover what kind of vampire you are!

[thesockdrawersblog]

THEMB…💕💕

[noisyexpertobject]

Reclaiming Our Birthright with ION EcoBuilding

Explore the revolutionary philosophy behind sustainable building company, ION EcoBuilding, in my video documentary, Building as a Birthright. Learn how hands-on participation by a community can inspire meaningful changes in the human spirit.

In 2016 I had the pleasure of editing a short video documentary, Building as a Birthright, about a sustainable Olympia-based building company, ION EcoBuilding. Led by Joseph Becker, ION EcoBuilding educates people about environmentally friendly building materials and processes, helping people appreciate the intimate connection between ecosystems and community through hands-on…