An inner life in hell?

This elderly gentleman was a truly extraordinary man. He died in the late 1990s at the age of 92. Not only did he survive the Nazi concentration camps, he found in it a source of his life's work thereafter.

I can't sum up the depth, clarity and precision of his thought in a few words, but: he concentrated on how we need to find meaning in our lives. He realised in the depths of hell that if the inmates found no meaning in what was happening, they were doomed.

His answer to the frequent but hopeless question "what is the meaning of life?" he summed up thus:

"For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment."

He found that we have to let life ask the questions of us, different questions all the time, and how we respond is what gives meaning to our lives. He found that was the way to find meaning in what he and the others suffered, and to endure it. 

He found it possible, as did others, to develop  an inner life, a spiritual development, in the camps. He found that moments of natural beauty, because they were such a particularly intense contrast to his immediate surroundings, were supremely important.

He thought thus whilst working in pyjamas in zero degrees.

Such a man creates hope, enlightenment, understand. He relieves suffering.

Ah, don't bother with this feeble summary - go read the book.

"Man's Search for meaning," by Viktor E Frankl.

The Fear of Death

OK, so having sorted out the meaning of life, sort of, I'd like to turn my over-simplifying attention next to the fear of death...well, I never said it would all be snowflakes and kittens. Never mind, I'll soon turn back to funerals, for a bit of light relief.

It's surely a biological function, an evolutionary priority, to seek to preserve one's life. Sometimes, people have managed to put that function aside and either risked or actually given their lives seeking to protect other people. We call them heroes, and are moved and astonished by their ability to put a moral choice and a willed action in front of their natural human fear.

They themselves tend not to use the word "hero," but say things like "I just found myself doing it," or "seemed what had to be done," or "just doing my job." Self-preservation can be put aside, but for most of us much of the time, it's a priority. In a comparatively safe society like ours, self-preservation can give rise to all sorts of neurotic stuff - the so-called "worried well," and if I catch myself thinking like that, I try to remember that the human body at any age is not perfectable and totally stable; health is relative, and OK at the moment is OK.

So most of the time most of us want to keep on living, unless we are very ill, profoundly unhappy and distressed, or just tired out and resigned. Because mostly, people fear death, or if they don't fear death, they fear dying.

"Staring at the Sun," by Irvin Yalom, opens with these enlightening words:

"Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. ...But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom and, inevitably, diminish and die."

That awareness, he explains later, can lead to various death-fears and anxieties which, if not looked at and faced, can cause all sorts of personal problems and tensions. And yet looking into one's own mortality, looking into death itself, is like staring at the sun - you can't do it for long.

His words quoted above linked, for me, to another insight from Dorothy Rowe: it is not so much a fear of death that haunts many people, it is much more the fear of the annihiliation of the self - in fact, the loss of self-awareness. Some people would say they would rather die than lose all sense of their own identity, (i.e. face the destruction of their personalities, their memories, their egos.) They might describe such states as a living death. (Sorry - but I said, no snowflakes and kittens...)

So maybe, with respect to Yalom (it's a tremendously worthwhile and helpful book, I've found) but maybe sometimes self-awareness is not as precious as life, it's more precious to us than life, since without it we don't see ourselves as fully alive. And Rowe looks at the way people will defend themselves against a perceived threat to their sense of identity (even if the threat is hardly or non-existent.)

So maybe to accept our own mortality, to deal with the dread death holds for us, we need somehow to come to terms with losing our self-awareness. (I'm beginning to find "dread" a more useful word than "fear," in this context.) I'm going to hold that idea, and come back to it in a moment.

Yalom uses the insights of Epicurus, who points out that death is a non-state. There is no individual awareness after death, just as there wasn't before life. We didn't exist before we were born, and (in a literal and basic sense) we won't after we die. So, nothing to fear about being dead. There's nothing there, and no "me" to know that there is nothing there. Or, like the Venerable Bede quoted in a recent Good Funeral Guide post, we simply cannot know anything about before and after life, even if - like Bede - we believe in an immortal soul. So, still, there is nothing to dread about being dead. There's no point in dreading a state of non-being.

Except - we have to come to terms with losing our self-awareness, our very selves. (Even if you believe in a soul, you will still surely have to say goodbye to yourself in this life as you are now.)

You've been waiting for that second boot to hit the floor, if you've read any of my meanderings before, so here it comes. For many of us - well, for me and I hope maybe for you one day - some reconciliation with mortality, with acceptance of the prospect of the end of me, some resignation, can come from mindfulness meditation. (Other kinds of meditation too, I'm sure.) And that's because while you are meditating, you achieve some relief from the demands of the ego, all the "what ifs," the "should haves," the "I'm gonna.." and you exist, as far as possible, just in the present. And when you return to the usual flow of thoughts, plans and worries, you may find an increased acceptance of your life, and of its inevitable end.

I'm pitching the mindfulness thing fairly low today; I could say that a meditative state puts one into contact with non-rational, profound states of mind (what non-believers still call "spiritual," lacking another term, or what some sorts of believers might call God) and that these states of mind are deeply rewarding, and yield calm, compassion and general well-being, even back in the onward flow of the old hurly-burly.

And this may help you to a view you'll find in a comment on my last posting, from Comfort Blanket, where she says: "What I do know for sure is that if there is one thing that gives life meaning, then that one thing is death. Because it puts things into perspective, brings them into focus, sharpens us up, gives us a limit on how much/how long...
So perhaps the meaning of life is death? Can it be that simple?"

Yup.

Only death can give life its meaning. We are here to be, we are not here "because"....or "so that"....
It is only not being here that makes being here possible, significant, capable of creating meanings.

The meaning of life is death, the meaning of death is life.

The other meanings, we create for and between ourselves.

The Meaning of Life

So nothing too demanding today, just a little excursion round the human lot.

The BHA is holding a national conference this summer in Manchester, with people who I think are interesting (Philip Pullman, AC Grayling, Polly Toynbee) although to avoid preaching to the (un) converted, maybe they could have asked a lively bishop, rabbi or suchlike along. Rowan Williams and Pullman would be a good gig, I'd guess.

Anyway, the title of the conference is "The Meaning of Life." The publicity stuff admits that maybe Douglas Adams is right, and that the question itself may even be meaningless, (but of course that's not the point, for a conference theme.) I think they are right, it is a non-question. I seem to remember that philosophers call this sort of thing a "category error, " which is to say that the question itself is mistaken, unanswerable, its terms won't and can't lead to a valid answer.

We don't ask "why is a blackbird?" It simply is. To ask "what is the meaning of life" is to say "why is a person?"

Some religious people might say that the meaning of life is to serve God, but if you don't believe in God, or at least, not in any sense in which serving a god could be a meaningful action, then that's no real answer. Or, the meaning of life is to go to heaven at the end of life, or at least avoid hell. But I've two probs with that outlook: 1) I don't share the necessary belief and 2) the question isn't "How should I live?" (i.e. virtuously, so you can go to heaven.) It's about looking for a meaning in the fact that people live (and so do earthworms, gannets, stinging nettles etc.) i.e. it's assuming that life itself has a meaning, because if my life has a meaning, then why shouldn't the life of a stinging nettle have a meaning? We're both equally alive.

To ask "what is the meaning of life' might be akin to asking "what is the purpose of life? We can devise our own answers to that question. i.e. "the purpose of my life is to make money," or "I didn't even know what the purpose of my life was till I met you, li'l darlin, can I buy youse a drink?" But these are constructs we decide for ourselves, they can't be general categories that can apply to any and all life, or even any and all human lives.

It seems to me, having read a bit, pondered in a simple sort of way, argued with a friend or two, that life simply IS. A life (mine, yours) is an event, or series of them, a process not a thing. Life itself is a particular arrangement of energy in the universe, distinctive from not-life. We can usually say "this thing here is a life-form, that thing over there isn't, never was and never could be. That's a pencil, this here is a Duke" (I'm aware there are a few tricky boundary things that are sort of a bit but not entirely alive, but just for now, lay off the picky stuff please, or I'll get a headache...)

Life reproduces and evolves, and eventually, here you are, and me too. For now. Because life is finite in any single of its multiple forms. So maybe it helps to see a life as a bit like a deep-sea wave (not a breaker, but an ocean swell.) Water (cf our body stuff) with energy passing through it, the energy lifts water up into a wave shape, then when the energy moves on, the same water subsides (the body dies. )The water itself doesn't move forward, it just settles back and the energy moves on. H'm, that might need a bit more thought. But I'll hang on to the idea that a person is body-stuff which is energised until it isn't any more, and the wave itself moves on.

So - life simply IS. A friend of mine criticises my views for being rationalist, reductive, not open to the wonders of God, I should trust my intuition and silence my ego etcetcetc. Well, my feeling that life IS rather than MEANS is the product of some rough-and-ready reasoning, sure, but also a deep, intuitive feeling, a kind of identitification - it feels right, as well as thinks right, to me. I find it liberating.

BECAUSE (wake up at the back, please) it's important to note that although life itself doesn't have a meaning, that does not mean our lives are not devoid of meaning. We have to make meanings to live. The human animal has to throw nets of meaning over the universe in order to live in it, has to make "sense" of its surroundings and itself - and many of those meanings are enlessly wonderful. I've got meanings all around me: Bach's Cello Suites, the Beatles, "Figaro" and Miles, I've got "Middlemarch" and Seamus Heaney, "The Wire" - just fill in your own current favourites of people creating meaning so they can make sense i.e. so that they can live as themselves, fulfill themselves. But even without these wonders, I've got the lives of those around me, those I'm close to and those I've just met, all those narratives and encounters: why should I feel desolate because life itself (human or nettle) has no meaning? I feel liberated, not abandoned. Meanings in my life abound, but that doesn't mean that life itself has a meaning. What is the meaning of the universe? Why is a galaxy? Non-question.

Why does this matter? This will be the subject of my next post (probably) which will be about our fear of death.

Look, I know this stuff isn't a barrel of laughs, but you've got this far, so why not hang in, eh? Please?