Does the question even make sense?
Lack of meaning is a lack of peace. Is an inability to stay put, to relax, to feel belonging. It is an emptiness, a deep deep nothing that we always feel in the back of our necks or the bottom of our stomachs – although it may often or sometimes make itself very well known – and that, as with all other parts of ourselves, it paints everything we do with its colours, however faintl what is one to do?
A few months ago, I had a sudden, acute episode of intensely researching the question on philosophy, psychology, science and spirituality. After a few weeks of intense reading, I came across an author proposing the question , ‘does the question even make sense?’.
Now of course I had come across the question before, but this time it stayed with me… and I found myself slowly letting it be the answer. It doesn’t make sense. I get it. Our minds evolved to survive, not to question their own existence. But they do, nonetheless. And this creates an internal state of uneasiness, of suffering. Ultimately, the trait that has it us at the front of the survival game, that made us the master niche constructors, is now acting somewhat against the survival of the organism. AND this also is evolution — How can it not be? What is not evolution? What is not nature?
But I diverge… What then, is the meaning? Is there a meaning?
There is nothing to do (1); create one’s own purpose (2); accept the purposes es of life but live ‘anyway’ (3). Do as much good to benefit as many as you can (4)… the list goes on and on, the uneasy emptiness continues, and we still must decide if we are going to get up tomorrow morning or give up right now and end it all (as the absurdists proposed).
Maybe it is faith then. Not faith that things will be any different from what they are, that stupid faith of empty religions, but the faith that whatever is, is meaningful, even if I don’t get to understand what it is. This is the deep faith, the faith in the mystery, the faith that the ‘intelligence that is all’ is perfect, and that this is also perfect, as it is a part of it. I think this is it… for me. Faith. Funny, actually, I never thought i would write this down even though I always knew I had/have faith. I am the most religious person I know I used to tell myself and some close friends.
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1. Ram Dass
2. Existentialism, Kierkegaard
3. Absurdism, Camus, Sartre
4. Utilitarianism (yes, that is an ethical position that can become a reason to live… but is a reason for living its meaning?