man’s search for meaning: understanding the soul.

This is my first public draft on my random thoughts while reading. I started reading more seriously over Thanksgiving when I realized I had a lot more to think about when I had thought-provoking material I could tie in with itself- our brains love to do that- link thoughts, create hypotheticals, question for ourselves and come to our own conclusions and argue with them. It’s human nature.

So- in the spirit of human nature, here are some thoughts while reading Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

Frankl doesn’t really start talking about the psychology behind his experience in concentration camps until around 60 pages into the book. I think he does this to ensure that we’re given a broad enough context to understand life in the camp with enough detail to comprehend his reasoning. I don’t think he writes this in search of empathy, but rather as a prologue to how he interprets man’s search for meaning. It’s interesting to think about how often we try to read books on the holocaust to feel what it was like by reading a vivid depiction of suffering. In the way Frankl writes, you can infer that his writing isn’t meant to provoke the feeling of reliving the Holocaust- we never will be able to fully any experience without living it ourselves. Don’t read to feel- read to learn.

Meaning comes in how we deal with suffering. Frankl characterizes suffering as ‘similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber’. Suffering being omnipresent, basic developmental psychology will tell you that every reaction to a stimulus is a coping mechanism. The first step to creating meaning comes from analyzing our coping mechanisms and determining which are constructive and which of them hold us back from viewing life with the lens of meaning.

In the context of a 21st century lived experience:

From where we are right now, we’re on course to majorly devalue human life and dignity in the same way we did with the Holocaust, slavery, communism and genocide. This time it’s scarier- we’re doing it to ourselves. The way the book describes it, a man who isn’t recognized for his human life loses the feeling of being ‘an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value […] He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life’ (50). Regardless of whether or not you see us devaluing human life in abortion, social networking, technological advances, the adult entertainment industry (or the entire entertainment industry, for that matter) or social injustice, we can agree it all amounts to something- for us to argue that we can choose to devalue life, there has to be human life to start.

Being who we are as a flawed creation, someone always has to be sacrificed. Human history can be boiled down to fixing a problem to create a new one. What I love about Frankl’s writing is that he acknowledges a sacrifice is always necessary as long as there are people who live in the ‘gas chamber of suffering’ without making meaning of it for themselves. The way I see humanity dragging ourselves into another human disaster is by giving away our critical thinking to live in the hyperreality of a digital age. The most we have to think of is ourselves- what we want to see- what we want to know (or worse, what we think we want to know). The reality is that we cannot create meaning of our lives if we’re convinced our reality is worse than a hyperreality.

Frankl explains choice of action and how our perception of the human spirit is essential to believing whether or not we have the resiliency to live in the midst of suffering. The truth is that we only have as much choice of action as we think we do. If we’re bound only to faith in the physical/tangible world, we’d live in a constant state of fear in the future/past simply because we can’t convince ourselves of its existence. Belief solely in the physical means full faith that man has no choice of action in face of circumstance but to follow the current, and drown in it if that’s where the current leads. It’s living without any mindfulness of the future and learning no lessons from the past. The fact that we can find meaning in the midst of suffering realizes a spiritual freedom that supersedes physical human life. Spiritual freedom lets us choose our attitude to a circumstance and gives us the choice to renounce freedom and dignity if that’s what we choose.

I fear that we’re trying to erase the very concept of the spirit. I see it most of all in how quick we are to accept the conditional and environmental factors (the biological, psychological and sociological) around us and our hesitation to acknowledge anything outside the realm of what we understand. Believing in spiritual resilience gives life more intrinsic worth- we are given meaning and purpose not from ourselves, but from a Higher Mind which I believe to be God.

Taking a step back, let’s look at the bigger explanation for humanity through the lens of Frankl’s arguement. The truths we live by aren’t ones we’re born to believe, they come from conclusions we make based on personal perception of the environment. The freedom we have to think for ourselves and the space for disagreement isn’t something that can be controlled by human institution. Ever.

Conversations on thought and the human experience become more nuanced when you start taking the power of influence into consideration. I’m planning on covering it in future posts, but here’s my one theory-

Knowing all conclusions we consider truth are skewed by human influence, acknowledging spiritual freedom will unfailingly lead us back to fundamental meaning in being figures of a Divine Creator.

A couple things I’m still chewing on and am noting for your consideration (this means I want to hear your thoughts)-

1. I control what I believe to be true and false, but not what is in reality true or false.
2. What factors play an influence in my conclusions on truth?
3. Coming to conclusions on truth means we’ve chosen an attitude in which we approach circumstance.
4. What is my attitude towards my life circumstances, and is it an attitude that gives potential for growth in the midst of negative circumstance?
5. If inner strength is what raises us out of outward fate (68), is my source of inner strength one that’s consistent and reliable?

70 pages in, there’s a lot to chew on. I came to that conclusion based on the limited note-taking real-estate left in the margins of my copy.

Since leaving mainstream social media, I’ve decided I want to use social networking for what it was made for- sharing thoughts. I’ve given you mine, and now it’s your turn. I welcome argument with open arms.