Chapter 10 - the making of meaning

introduction

• if we enjoyed work and friendships, and faced every challenge as an opportunity to develop new skills, we would be getting rewards out of living that are outside the realm of ordinary life. yet even this would not be enough to assure us of optimal experience. as long as enjoyment follows piecemeal from activities not linked to one another in a meaningful way, one is still vulnerable to the vagaries of chaos.
• to approach optimal experience as closely as is humanly possible, a last step in the cotnrol of consciousness is necessary. what this involves is turning all life into a unified flow experience. if a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow, and if he or she invests all energy in develping skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony and the separate parts of life will fit together - and heac activity will "make snese" in the present, as well as in view of the past and of the future. In such a way, it is possible to give meaning to one's entire life
• if is true that life has no meaning, if by that we mean a supreme goal built into thefbairc of nature and human experience, a goal that is valid for every individual. but it does not fllow that life can be given meaning
• from the point of view of an individual, it does not matter what the ultimate goal is - providedit is compelling enough to order a lifetime's worth of psychich energy. as long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person's life.
• many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.

what meaning means

• how can we talk about the meaning of meaning itself? there are three ways in which unpacking the sense of this word helps illuminate the last step in achieving optimal experience.
  • its first usage points toward the end, purpos, significance of something, as in: what is the meaning of life? this sense of the word reflects the assumption that events are linked to each other interms of an ultimate goal; that there is a temporal order, a casual connection between them. it assumes that phenomena are not random, bt call into recognizable patterns directed by a final purpose.
  • the second usage of the word refers to a person's intentions: she usually means well. what this sense of meaning implies is that people reveal their purposes in action; that their goals are expressed in predictable, consistent, and orderly ways.
  • the third sense in which the word is used refers to ordering information, as when one says: otorhinolaryngology means the stude of ear, nose, and throat, or: red sky in the evening means good weather in the morning. this sens of meaning points to the identity of different words, the relationship between events, and thus it helps to clarify, to establish order among unrelated or conflicting information
• creating menaing involves bringing order to the contents of the mind by integrating one's actions into a unified flow experience.
• people who find their lives meaningful usually have a goal that is challenging enough to take up all their energies, a goal that can give significance to their lives. we may refer to this process as achieving purpose.
• the goal in itself is usually not important; what matters is that it focuses a person's attention and involves it in an achievable, enjoyable activity. in a similar way, some people are able to bring the same sharp focus to their psychich energy throughout the entirety of their lives. the unrelated goals of the separate flow activities merge into an all-encompassing set of challenges that gives purpose to everything a person does
• the meaning of life is meaning: whatever it is, wherever it comes from, a unified purpose is what gives meaning to life
• the second sense of the word meaning refers to the expression of intentionality. and this sense also is appropriate to the issue of how to create meaning by transforming all life into a flow activity.
• what counts is not so much whether a person actually achieves what she has set out to do; rather, it matters whether effort has been expended to reach the goal, instead of being diffused or wasted.
• "he who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence" - blake
• when an important goal is pursued with resolution, and all one's varied activities fit together into a unified flow experience, the result is that harmony is brought to consciousness
• purpose, resolution, and harmony unify life and give it meaning by transforming it into a seamless flow experience. whoever achieves this state will never really lack anything else.

cultivating purpose

• in the lives of many people it is possible to find a unifying purpose that justifies the things they do day in, day out - a goal that like a magnetic field attracts their psychic energy, a goal upon which all lesser goals depend. this goal will define the chappenges that a person needs to face in order to transform his or her life into a flow activity. without such a purpose, even the best-ordered consciousness lacks meaning
• ultimate goals, in arendt's opinion, must accommodate the issue of morality: theymust give men and women a purpose that extends beyond the grave.
• every human culture, by definition, contains meaning systems that can serve as theencompassing purpose by which individuals can order their goals.
• pitrim sorokin divides the various epochs of western civilization into three types, which he believed have laternated with one another for over twenty-five centuries
  • sensate cultures are integrated around views of reality designed to satisfy the senses. they tend to be epicurean, utilitarian, concerned primarily with concrete needs. in such culture art, religion, philosophy, and everyday behavior glorify and justify goals in terms of tangible experience. people in a sensate culture are not necessarily more materialistic, but they organize their goals and justify their behavior with reference primarily to pleasure and practicality rather than to more abstract principles. the challenges they see are almost exlusively concerned with making life more easy, more confortable, more pleasant. they tend to identify the good with what feels good and mistrust idealized values
  • ideational sultures are organized ona principle opposite frmo the sensate: they look down on the tangible and strive for nonmaterial, supernatural ends. they emphasize abstract principles, asceticism, and transcendence of material concerns. art, religion, philosophy and the justification of everyday behavior tend to be subordinated to the realization of this spiritual order. people turn their attention to religion or ideology, and view their challenges not in terms of making life easier, but of reaching inner clariy and conviction
  • occassionaly a culture succeeds in integration these two dialectically opposed principles into a convincing whole that preserves the advantages of both, while neutralizing the disadvantages of each. sorokin calls these cultures "idealistic". they combine an acceptance of concrete sensory experience with a reverence for spiritual ends. needless to say, the idealistic solution seems to be the preferable one, as it avoids the listlessness that is often the keynote of purely materialistic workd view and the fanatical asceticism that bedevils many ideational systems
• there is a consensus among psychologists who study such subjects that people develop their concept of who they are, and of what they want to achieve in life, according to a sequence of steps.
  • each man or woman starts with a need to preserve the self, to keep the body and its basic goals from disintegrating. at this point the meaning of life is simple; it is tantamount to survival, comfort, and pleasure.
  • when the safety of the physical self is no longer in doubt, the person may expand the horizon of his or her meaning system to embrace the values of a community - the family, the neighborhood, a religious or ethnic group. this step leads to a greater complexityof the self, even though it usually implies conformity to conventional norms and standards.
  • the next step in development involved reflective individualism. the person again turns inward, finding new grounds for authority and value within the self. he or she is no longer blindly conforming, but develops an autonomous conscience. at this point the main goal in life becomes the desire for growth, improvement, the actualization of potential.
  • the fourth step, which builds on all the previous ones, is a final turning away from the self, back toward an integration with other people and with universal values. in this final stage the extremely individualized person willingly merges his interests with those of a larger whole
• not everyone moves through the stages of this spiral of ascending complexity. a few never have the opportunity to go beyond the first step
• complexity requires that we invest energy in developing whatever skills we were born with, in becoming autonomous, self-reliant, conscious of our uniqueness and of its limitation. at the same time we must invest energy in recognizing, understanding, and finding ways to adapt to the forces beyond the boundaries of our own individuality. of course we don't have to undertake any of these plans. but if we don't, chances are, sooner or later, we will regret it

forging resolve

• purpose gives direction to one's efforts, but it does not necessarily make life easier. goalscan lead into all sorts of trouble at which point one gets tempted to give them up and find some less demanding script by which to order one's actions. the price one pays for changing goals whenever opposition threathens is that it will end up empty and void of meaning
• no goal can have much effect unless taken seriously. each goal prescribes a set of consequences, and if one isn't prepared to reckon with them, the goal becomes meaningless. the same is true of all flow experiences: there is a mutual relationship ebtween goals and the effort they require
• goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later, it is the effort that justifies the goal
• but the inevitable consequence of equally attractive choices is uncertainty of purpose; undertainty, in turn, saps resolution, and lack of resolve ends up devaluing choice
• commitment to a goal and to the rules it entails is much easier when the choices are few and clear
• self-knowledge - an ancient remedy so old that its value is easily forgotten - is the process through which one may organize conflicting options
• inner conflict is the result of competing claims on attention
• there are basically two ways to accomplish this: what the ancients called the vita activa, a life of action, and the vita contemplative, or path of relfectionction helps create inner order, but it has its drawbacks. a person strongly dedicated to achieving pragmatic ends might eliminate internal conflict, but often at the price of excessively restricting options
• detached reflection upon experience, a realistic weighing of options and their consequences have long been held to be the best approach to a good life
• action byitself is blind, reflection impotent
• for this it is necessary to invest energy in goals that are so persuasive that they justify effort even when our resources are exhausted andwhen fate is merciless in refusing us a chance at having acomfortable life. if goals are well chosen, and if we have the courage to abide by them despite opposition, we shall be sofocused on the actions and events around us that we won't have the time to be unhappy. and then we shall directly feel a sense of order in the warip and the woof of life that fits every thought and emotion itno a harmonious whole

recovering harmony

• the consequence of forging life by purpose and resolution is a sense of inner harmony, a dynamic order in the contents of consciousness.
• the original condition of human beings, prior to the development of self-reflective consciousness, must have been a state of inner peace disturbed only now and again by tides of hunger, sexuality, pain, an danger
• the forms of psychich entropy that currentlycause us so much anguish - unfulfilled wants, dashed expectations, loneliness, frustration, anxiety, guilt - are all likely to have been recent invaders of the mind. they are by-products of the tremendous increase in complexity of the cerebral cortex and of the symbolic enrichment of culture. they are the dark side of the emergence of consciousness
• the psychic entropy pecurliar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow. but this becomes possible only if one keeps in mind more than one goal at a time, being aware at the same time of conflicting desires. it can happen only when the mind knows not only what is but also what could be
• the more complex any system, the more room it leaves open for alternatives, and the more things can go wrong with it. this is certainly applicable to the evolution of the mind: as it has increased its power to handle information, the potential for inner conflict has increased as well. when there are too many demands, options, challenges, we become anxious; when too few, we get bored
• the inner harmony of technologically less advanced people is the positive side of their limited choices and of their stable repertory of skills, just as the confusion in our soul is the necessary consequence of unlimited opportunities and constant perfectibility
• the order based on innocence is now beyond our grasp. once the fruit is plucked from the tree of knowledge, the way back to eden is barred forever

the unification of meaning in life themes

• instead of accepting the unity of purpose provided by genetic instructions or by the rules of society, the challenge for us is to create harmony based on reason and choice
• the project, propriate strivings, or life themes are concepts that identify a set of goals linked to an ultimate goal that gives significance to whatever a person does
• when a persona's psychich energy coalesces into a life themse, consciousness achieves harmony
• existential philosophers distinguish between authentic and inauthetic projects
  • the first describes the theme of a person who realizes that choices are free, and makes a personal decision based on a rational evaluation of his experience. it does not matter what the choice is,as long as it is an expression of what the person genuinely feels and believes. authentic projects tend to be intrinsically motivated, chosen for what they are worth in themsleves
  • inauthentic projects are those a person chooses because they are what shefeel ought to be done, because they are what everybody else is doing, and therefore there is no alternative. inauthentic ones are motivated by external forces
• a similar distinction is that between discovered life themes, when a person writes the script for her actions out of personal experience and awareness of choice; and accepted life themes, when a person simply takes on a predetermined role from a script written long ago by others
• both of life themse help give meaning to life, but each has drawbacks
  • the accepted life theme works well as long as the social system is sound; if it is not, it can trap the person into perverted goals
  • discovered life themes are fragile for a different reason: because they are products of a personal struggle to define the purpose of life, they have less social legitimacy; because they are often novel and idiosyncratic, they may be regarded by others as crazy or destructive.
• E's example illustrates several common characteristics of how people forge discovered life themes
  • what matters is the interpretation that one places on the suffering
  • to find purpose in suffering one must interprest it as a possible challenge.
  • a complex, negentrophic life theme is rarely formulated as the response to just a personal problem. instead, the challenge becomes generalized to other people, or to mankind as a whole.
• if there is a strategy shared by these and by other people who succeed in building meaning into their experience, it is one so simple and obvius that it is almost embarrassing to mention. yet becasue it is so often overlooked, especially nowadays, it will be valuable to review it. the strategy consists in extracting from the order achieved by past generations patterns that will help avoid disorder in one's own mind.
• whatever one's background, there are still many opportunities later on in life to draw meaning from the past. most people who discover complex life themes remember either an older person or a historical figure whom they greatly admired and who served as a model, or they recall having read a book that revealed new possibilities for action.
• Dante realizes that three fierce beasts arestalking him, licking their shop in anticipation. they are a lion, lynx, and a she-wolf, representing, among other things, ambition, lust, and greed.
• Dante's nemesis turns out to be the desire for power, sex, and money.
• Dante is an important model for another reason as well. although him poem is informed by a deep religious ethic, it is very clear to anyone who reads it that dante's christianity is not an accepted but a discovered belief.
• but it seems clear that an increasing majority are not being helped by traditional religions and belief systems. many are unable to separate the truth in the old doctrines from thedistortions and degradations that time has added, and since they cannot accept error, they reject truth as well. other are so deperate for some order that they sling rigidly to whatever belief happens to be at hand - warts and all - and become fundamentalist christians, or muslims, or communists
• if a new faith is to capture our imagination, it must be one that will account rationally for the things we know, the things we feel, the things we hope for, and the ones we dread. it must be a system of beliefs that will marshal our psychic energy toward meaningful goals, a system that provides rules for a way of life that can provide flow
• the obvious critique of this scenario is that science in general, deals with what is, not with what ought to be. faiths and beliefs, on the other hand, are not limited by actuality; they deal with what is right, what is desireable. but one of the consequences of an evolutionary faith mght be precisely a closer integration between the is and the ought. when we understand better why we are as we are, when we appreciate more fully the origins of intrinctual drives, social controls, cultural expressions - all the elements that contribute to the formation of consciousness - it will become easier to direct our energies where they ought to go
• the reality of complexification is both an is and an ought: it has happened - given the conditions ruling the earth, it was bound tohappen - bit it might not continue unless we wish it to go on. the future of evolution is now in our hands
• but complexity consists of integration as well as differentiation. the task of the next decades and centuries is to realize this underdeveloped component of the mind.
• recognizing the limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. the problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual's purpose merges with the universal flow.