The search for Meaning has been going on from the dawn of time.
The search for Meaning has been going on from the dawn of time.
We start to find the scientific search for Meaning recorded in documents such as The Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit and Hindu writings, but also in The I-Ching, the writings of Lao Tzu and Records of the Grand Historian Shiji
Loosely speaking as writing developed from Cuneiform markings to full writing sets, we start to see these studies of Meaning emerging from about 1500BCE to 100BCE.
The essence of these ideas has been in circulation in written form for nearly three thousand years, but we have to assume that these types of questions about Meaning were being discussed in the early Sanskrit times, and of course deep into “pre-history” in verbal form. Just because we have written text from the East, of course it doesn’t preclude Man, from every corner of the world, staring up at the stars, and sitting round a campfire asking the question what does it all mean?
Why do we require anything to have a meaning?
Jean-Paul Sartre in his lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” suggests that we need to search for a Moral Truth, and that it takes the right sort of person to do this.
Previously, the French philosopher René Descartes had suggested that there was only one truth, that was available to Saints and Sinners alike, but now Sartre laid the focus of Truth on authenticity, honesty and non-conformity. In this way we would be able to open ourselves to the ultimate truth; that truth being that we are all responsible for making our own Meaning in a universe that is just filled with chance events.
A quick stroll round a lovely local Museum in London, The Horniman, gave me more depth to the idea of Man’s search for meaning.
The Museum is a collection of artifacts from round the world, brought together by the rich Victorian family of Quakers who made their fortune from buying and selling Tea in the 1800’s.
They had endless funds and contacts all over the world which lead to the vast anthropic collection we see today.
They collected items from every tribe on the planet, from The Indians of the Wild west, to the South Sea Islanders of the Pacific and from the Inuit of the North, to the tribes of Africa in the South.
It’s clear that every people across the history of time have had a deep respect for Nature (How we ever allowed our greed to deprive us of this is a mystery…!) For thousands of years, people have worshiped the animals, plants and minerals around them.
We generally cling to the importance of our own life.
Nature can be very cruel, in our eyes, it can end our being in a flash flood, with an eruption of a volcano, or perhaps with a few years of drought.
What can you do about it?
Well, over time we have discovered that if we pull together, we can ameliorate the worst effects by building walls and dams, by farming together and storing crops, and by using historical planning to predict our future…
(Except in the crazy case of Los Angeles! Will people never learn? It can’t be long before god casts “Mamon” back into a pit of fire, for being so evil and wilful…😊)
Here then is a perfect example of searching for Meaning.
What would happen if the San Andreas Fault were to open again tomorrow?
There would be an awful lot of people that would suggest that it was God’s will to cast Hollywood into the Abyss.
Lots to pick through here.
Every one of us has a Father (be he good or be he bad!)
Men are seen as having volcanic tempers from time to time…
It MUST be a Man who oversees the machinations of Nature surely?
Tribes
Every tribe has come up with a God, or pantheon of Gods who are in control of everything.
For hundreds of thousands of years the prevailing view of most tribes was that there was a father or mother (Or both) that looked after us, as we do for our children…
Every tribe has had a tree, animal or fish that they have harvested in plenty, that they have lived cheek by jowl with, that they have been terrified by.
Every tool comes from bone or stones, every weapon from animals or nature around; all these things come from somewhere, and whomever provided them became venerated.
So, we find gods that were great fish, or great birds.
We find gods living in the deep seas and in winding rivers.
We find gods in the sky and deep inside the earth.
There’s no end to our imaginations.
The crucial point is that in all the movements of Nature, we were hoping to find a pattern and assign it some sort of Meaning.
If you go our fishing every day to bring back food for the family, and after thirty years you drown in a terrible storm, it’s just too much for your family to believe that you were just unlucky. It much easier to believe that you’d been taken by a fierce god, for his own reasons.
The flash flood, the volcano, the victory in battle must all be attributed to a divine power in some way, surely?
We live inside these bodies and the sensation is one of being important in the overall.
When we are young, we just run with the pack, but at our first puberty (about 7 years old when we lose all our teeth and start to become emotionally more mature) then we start to discover that we are actually an “I” – an individual.
We start to put supreme importance on the preservation of “I”
We start to think in terms of “what can I do to keep this “I” going and how do I navigate my way through this precarious life?”
Over thousands of years our tribe will have built up ideas of what’s required of us by Nature, not to anger the spirits, and to give us all the best chance of survival. Survival is the first basic driver of all humans, nobody is born and just thinks “I can’t be bothered with this!” Everybody has an inbuilt genetic drive to survive.
So then, what are the rules I need to learn to keep the gods happy?
Which mask should I wear, when should I dance, what shall I sing and whom shall I sing it too…?
For hundreds of thousands of years people tested out stories and strategies to keep them safe in a cold world full of chance events.
Jean-Paul Satre
Now we come to Satre, who is writing in a new scientific world, where the death of god is occurring.
He has just lived through two World Wars, and seen destruction of human life on an unprecedented scale.
It’s pretty difficult to see “god” in any of this work, how can this possibly be god’s will? These were no longer religious wars, there were Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists and Muslims on all sides, being slaughtered.
Science was beginning to suggest that Religion was just impacted belief, piled on top of impacted belief until it hardens into Faith.
Science was demonstrating the randomness of events, and not finding god’s hand in any of them.
Sartre, as a young precocious boy had found himself pondering the existence of God and had not found any plausible way to support his being.
But since the turn of the century many others had been researching the same subject. Marx suggested that god had been “drowned” by the tide of Capitalism, and Nietzsche had it that science and technology had taken gods place and made him superfluous, and that it was a self-sufficient humanity that had killed him.
For Sartre, this wasn’t just a simple value judgment but an empirical fact, effectively Atheism had taken over the European mind.
What was to take God’s place?
Without a system of guidance, we would all become Nihilists and the world would collapse into anarchy.
What happens when societal values dissolve?
What must life have been like in ancient Britain when one day the Romans just walked away?
How would it have been in ancient China when the first Emperor of the Qin Dynasty – Qin Shi Huang decided to burn all the books and shut all the borders for one hundred years?
What happens when it dawns on a huge section of society that the God they have been praying too for two thousand years doesn’t actually exist!?
Well, we know the answer, we dug deeper and deeper into Science to try to find our Meaning.
If nothing else, we will always keep searching for True Meaning!
Unfortunately Science keeps getting it’s rug pulled away from under its own feet. Time and time again, just when we think we have a theory of everything sorted out, we discover a new facet that tips over the apple cart and shows us that life seems to be much more random than we hoped.
We repeatedly come to the conclusion that if god can’t help us then we will have to do it for ourselves!
It’s Sartre’s contention that we are made, and that we make ourselves.
We materialise and then we encounter ourselves in the world, and start to construct the being we become, step by step. Without a guiding god, we are free to make ourselves in any way we wish. With God taken out of the equation not only are we free to become whatever we choose, but also we have the responsibility for what we build.
Albert Camus has it that there’s only one choice we have in life, that is to live, or to kill ourselves.
These philosophers come to the conclusion that there’s as little point in death as there is in life, so we might as well keep going (Or not, as you wish!) the Universe is indifferent to the outcome.
Sartre suggests that there’s only one place where Meaning can be found, this is in the sense of our personal projects.
The thoughts of Satre and Camus eventually challenge us to be the creator of our lives. If there’s no meaning in this wonderful Universe of ours, and the only thing that gives us any meaning is our own ability to create, then we may as well create beauty all around us.
In a world of no meaning Sartre finds that we are always trying to seek guidance from the facts around us, and in this way avoid taking responsibility for making our own choices.
We are in effect given total freedom. This is a scary concept.
There’s no guiding father, the universe is a cold hard place of uncontrollable events and it’s down to me to make the decisions!
In Sartre’s opinion, we are always free to do anything we wish.
You may have been born into abject poverty, or a wonderful rich family; you may come from Africa, Asia or Europe; you might be able bodied or physically challenged, no matter your circumstances you have free will to choose your path.
Satre illustrates these ideas about choice with a story about a soldier who wanted to go to England to fight against the Nazis, but he’s torn about leaving his Mother who lived only for him. Which is more important, his Patriotic duty, or his duty to his mother?
In Paris at this time he could have sought out the advice of a priest, but we find that some priests are collaborators with the Germans, some supporters of the Resistance. He suggests that our man already knows deep down which priest will tell him what.
Is the young man actually seeking advice or validation.
It’s like flipping a coin, and realising what we REALLY want, when the coin lands the “wrong” way up.
In short, we have already made the decision, but we are looking for somebody else to back us up.
“God, give me a sign!” – this has been on human’s lips for hundreds of thousands of years. … “- and then a blackbird landed on my windowsill and I knew that I was on the right path!”
We seek validation, because it’s scary to go it alone in this world.
We constantly look for some sort of Meaning where there seems to be none. Sartre places the responsibility for meaning squarely with us, don’t duck out of it, it’s all only down to you.
Quantum Body
I’d be so bold as to go a step further and introduce the ideas of the Quantum Body, as posited by Deepak Chopra.
The developing science that was only coming to light at the time of Satre’s lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” – Quantum physics and Mechanics was already shaping new thought processes.
As mentioned, this branch of science had already produced a banana skin to send standard Physics flying.
The astonishing science behind that Atom Bomb was also bringing new meaning to Life as well as death!
Interestingly, it would seems that the Vedas may have had it right from the very beginning, and that we appear out of nothingness as an expression of the universe, and eventually dissolve back into nothing, having been a ripple in a wave that expressed itself on this stage we call “Life” for a fleeting moment and then gone.
Chief Crowfoot (Ca 1830 – 1890) of the Blackfoot Nation said this on his deathbed, one hundred years before Max Planck offered his theory of the quantum world…
“A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go
What is Life? It is the flash of a Firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset”
From the Bhagavad Gita thousands of years before, “For, in that case death is certain for the born, and rebirth is inevitable for the dead” – the circle of life and death is eternal
The Quantum Body suggests that we are “projections” of Consciousness, consciously co-creating our lives with creative intelligence.
We do indeed have complete free will to make of it what we like.
Where as Satre has us down as a blank sheet to be drawn upon, the Quantum Body has it that we already arrive with certain characteristics and challenges, and that this is the nature of our lives, that we are given free will to do what we chose, but from the perspective that we are created with.
The final question that arises is WHY!?
Why are you born the way that you are and in that place and time, whilst I’m in a totally different set of circumstances? What drives this?
The current thinking in Cosmology is that our universe is one of matter, both as being and non-being, and that this matter changes stated based on Information.
This layer of Information may well form the boundary of our Universe, it’s seen as being the container of everything we have experienced and will ever experience. In ancient scriptures it’s expressed as a library, all the information of you and the history of our Universe is stored in this library.
You are just a reflection of one of the blueprints stored away in the library, like a story that’s been made into a film. You are projected into this world, and when the films ends, you return back to your shelf.
As per usual we need more meaning than that.
Modern spirituality has it that our part of the conscious universe can decide what experience to have next. This life, I’ll be a healthy boy in Asia, the next life I’ll be a disabled girl in Africa, in so doing, consciousness learns and evolves through me.
By the time I “arrive” here from the Quantum Field, I have already decided the basic rules for “this life” in the “Big Game”
I’m at total liberty to make any choices that I wish.
I have predetermined what heavy weights I’ve decided to put in my backpack, and I’ll have to work with them as best I can throughout this life.
I have chosen the society in which to express this version of me.
Each of us constructs our Persona
In traditional ancient Greek theatre the players spoke through masks called “persōna” – this is where we get the modern idea of the masks that we build up to make our “selves”
We assemble stories and put on “faces” to navigate our world.
I have recently had firsthand experience of the thinning of the veil between society and what acceptable behaviour is. What happens if one doesn’t want to or is unable to comply with the expected norms.
I have been forced to question the meaning of society for myself.
Do I actually wish to subscribe to the same stories that everybody in the West are currently demanding that I do.
I don’t believe in the story that I’m being sold.
It’s unnerving to find oneself adrift from society, but it’s clear I’m not the first. Throughout our history, there are stories of people who have taken a different path.
The birth of AI seems to be terrifying everybody. I agree, it may well spell the end of life as we know it. However, there exists another possibility.
Dr Pang Ming, the founder of Zhineng Qigong, the principal path that I have been following this past 20 years, suggests that there’s a next step in Evolution that’s drawing near.
Perhaps AI as a service will allow humanity to spend more time in peace and relaxation, and that through this path, we will be able to discover the higher powers of our consciousness.
Perhaps AI will give us the freedom to evolve as a species and move ourselves to a new level of consciousness.
People wonder what happened to the Maya people?
The prevailing theory is that small pox wiped them out.
The less popular interpretation is that they evolved to a new state.
I’ve seen a very peculiar photo, taken of Dr Pang
He’s standing on a stage, giving a speech.
On the wall of the Dojo behind him there are two crossed swords..
If you look carefully at the photo, you can see right through Dr Pang’s body to the swords behind him…
It’s before the time of Photoshop, maybe it’s just a trick of the light, or a double exposure…
Maybe it’s something more interesting than that. Maybe this is the expression of somebody who’d deeply plugged into the Quantum Field, and who’s found a way to manipulate the nature of “being”
Do you know for sure; can you be one hundred percent certain?
Every time we get a grip on “reality” it shifts and moves..
Keep your mind OPEN…
Just remember, you are free to create this life as you wish.
There’s no god who is inflicting this life upon you.
The only thing that keeps you stuck in the “loop” is your Ego mind.
Free yourself from addictions and you will find the true Meaning.
(My thanks to the Blinkist App editors who so beautifully abridged Jean-Paul Sartre’s fascinating lecture Existentialism is a Humanism and to The Quantum Body by Deepak Chopra, both of which have deeply inspired this article and have also helped me to bring Meaning to various aspects of my life…)
Hao Le! (Everything is good already!)