The “meaning of Meaning” in 21st Century Spirituality
Religion traditionally has been the basis for a belief that life has meaning, even though the precise nature of that meaning can often be somewhat vague and difficult to define. The very notion of “meaning in life” has such a broad scope that simply defining the meaning of meaning is a challenge. When we say that life has meaning, what exactly does that even mean? In most traditional religions, meaning is derived from teachings associated with a divine revelation of some sort, a sacred text that contains the content of that revelation, doctrines that religious leaders promulgate to expand and clarify their interpretation of that meaning, and a body of church authorities who in various ways enforce that interpretation. But what about 21st century spirituality, which we have suggested will increasingly move toward a religious perspective in which there is no discrete act of divine revelation, no authoritative holy book, an absence of specific and detailed propositional belief statements, and lack of confidence in a hierarchy of religious authorities who are deemed to be especially qualified to produce and enforce doctrine? In a 21st century spirituality which lacks these traditional elements of religion, can there still be a basis for believing that there is meaning? Looking at the past century or so, there would appear to be ample evidence to suggest that as traditional religion has declined, the loss of a sense of meaning has increased. At the most extreme end, we see the rise of full scale nihilism, as expressed in various aspects of modern Western culture. At the popular level, we see a desperate attempt to find “meaning-substitutes” in activities such as consumerism, entertainment (sports, social media, streaming, music), a general hedonism which has included increased drug and alcohol abuse, and a glorification of sex. Intellectually, we see various expressions of nihilism and substitute meaning-mechanisms in art, music, literature, philosophy, and much more that comes out of the world of academia and intellectual circles (e.g., certain interpretations of deconstruction and post-modernism). Clearly, then, we live at a time of a widespread loss of a sense that there is any deeper meaning to our existence, and this loss of meaning parallels a decline in the traditional religions. But if the traditional Axial Age religions continue to decline, will the 21st c. be left without any sense of ultimate meaning to our existence? Or, as a post-Axial, post-traditional, 21st century slowly emerges, will a new source of and sense of meaning also appear? An encouraging sign is the reappearance in the philosophical community, after decades in which even hinting at meaning was greeted with derision, of serious speculation on the possibility that we live in a meaningful Cosmos. Such speculation has not been confined to philosophers and theologians: in exploring the puzzling picture of reality that emerged in the early 20th century from quantum physics, scientists such as Ervin Schrodinger, Freeman Dyson, and Roger Penrose have in various ways offered hints at how a post-traditional religion sense of meaning might be evolving. The legitimacy of talking about meaning can also be seen in serious philosophical writings by the likes of Bernardo Kastrup, Jared Goff, Robert Wright, Samuel Wilkinson, and even the generally skeptical Thomas Nagel (for those who prefer a video presentation on this issue, see the wonderful articulation of how a 21st century sense of meaning might look in Bernardo Kastrup’s remarks on meaning, especially between the 13:00 and 25:00 marks, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zfPKSRU-RI). That Oxford University Press would publish a book with the title Why? The Purpose of the Universe, by a mainstream philosopher such as Jared Goff provides compelling evidence that thinking about meaning is no longer considered the passé practice that it once was. The same can be said about Samuel Wilkinson’s unequivocally titled Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply about the Meaning of our Existence. But what do we even mean by Meaning?....The meaning of Meaning Of course, talking about the meaning of existence is hardly a modest sort of task. Quite to the contrary, one could argue that in a proper spirit of epistemological humility, we might do well to avoid any effort at speculating on what could be considered the ultimate question, so ultimate that it might well be unanswerable using the modest means of knowledge that humans possess. And then there is the issue of even defining what we are talking about: what do we even mean when we refer to the meaning of existence? In some ways, how we answer the question of meaning presupposes how we define meaning, creating a circularity that further compromises the legitimacy of the entire enterprise. And yet, despite these challenges, it remains the case that human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. In a sense, we just can’t help ourselves from asking the question of what is the meaning of existence even while knowing that we don’t exactly understand the question and probably can’t answer it anyway. Nonetheless, over the span of 14 billion years, the evolutionary process has somehow managed to bring forth this entity called homo sapiens, which has evolved a sufficiently developed consciousness to reflect on its own existence and ask the fundamental question, “Why,” (and, implicitly, does a “why” even exist?). So with these acknowledged challenges in mind, let’s take a look first at different meanings of meaning, and then finally get to the question of how meaning can be found in the post-mythic, post-traditional-religion that is likely to emerge in 21st century spirituality. Two models of Meaning We hardly can examine the multitude of specific answers, offered by philosophers and religious seekers in all cultures in all eras since at least 3000 years ago, to the question of what is the ultimate meaning of existence. That’s far more than what we have room for here. But among the many different interpretations of meaning, we can discern two models that help us identify two common approaches of thinking about meaning. We will refer to those models as: 1. The Historical or Grand Narrative model, and 2. The ahistorical or Personal Model The Grand Narrative/Historical Model of Meaning The historical or grand narrative model grounds the belief in meaning in the context of a purposeful, orderly, teleological development of history, past, present, and future. This model counters the notion of a universe as chaotic and directionless with the idea of a purposeful, directed creation, usually under the guidance of a personal deity as understood in terms of traditional theism. A God exists, evidence of this God is found in the narrative of the history of the Universe, and the meaning of our lives is confirmed through belief that we are part of that purposeful divine plan. We see the Grand Narrative model of meaning playing a dominant role in the Abrahamic religions, particularly in the fundamentalist interpretations of all three. Christians, Jews, and Muslims all take comfort in the belief that we live in a world created by a good and all-powerful God, who is providentially guiding that Universe to a final fulfillment. For Jews, this is seen in the past acts of God sending prophets and a future act of God sending a Messiah. Christians similarly believe in a God who influences history though the messages of prophets, culminating (so far) in God sending the Messiah in the person of Jesus, with the meaning of the future understood in the context of an eventual judgement, return of the Messiah, and establishment of the Kingdom of God. Among Christians, there might be much disagreement about the specific timing and content of these future events, but there is general agreement that the historical process is providentially guided by God toward an eventual fulfillment. Muslims adopt a similar concept of history, with the added belief that God has already sent the final prophet (Muhammed), who will also be involved in a final Judgment at some future point. While the role of the Grand Narrative is somewhat less important in the world religions that are not part of the Abrahamic tradition, we certainly see it in resurging Hindu fundamentalism and even in the Buddhist belief in multiple incarnations of the Buddha, including the Buddha yet to come, Maitreya. In all of these examples, a Grand Narrative allows believers to see their lives as meaningful in the context of a larger, divinely guided, historical process. Daily human life might be full of pain, sorrow, tragedy, injustice, and inevitable death, but if all of this is seen in the context of the Grand Narrative, meaning is preserved. The Ahistorical/Personal Model of Meaning The ahistorical or personal model of meaning focuses not on the long march of history but rather on each individual’s own life. In this model, meaning is something that exists and can be known and experienced by each believer through a relationship with the divine, regardless of whatever is happening in the larger historical process. In Christianity, for example, the denominations which derive from the Pietist tradition tend to focus on each individual’s inner relationship with God, and it is in the internal experience of closeness to God that meaning is known. In Christian philosophy, no one expressed this approach to meaning better than the Danish Lutheran philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, in his famous dictum, “Subjectivity is Truth.” In this phrase, Kierkegaard was not denying that there is objective truth: as a Christian believer he most certainly believed that the existence of God was “objectively” true. However, Kierkegaard argued that we do not find God and the meaning associated with Him through an objective rational analysis of philosophical concepts or historical events (he harshly criticized Hegel for doing just that). Rather, God is found, along with meaning and salvation, in an inner personal awareness of God. In a sense, God exists objectively but is known only through (to use Kierkegaard’s preferred word) subjectivity. Kierkegaard came out of the Pietist tradition of Lutheranism, which has influenced and been influenced by, many other Christian denominations that place little emphasis on understanding any sort of Grand Narrative that documents the historical process through which God has, does, and will guide the world. Such an understanding of the historical process is not necessary if God is found in one’s heart. It should be noted, however, that despite the clear differences between these two models of meaning, they are not necessarily in conflict with each other, and in most Christian denominations they co-exist, but with differing degrees of emphasis and importance. Fundamentalist Christians who strongly emphasize the Grand Narrative of Dispensational Premillennialism might hear sermons full of Biblical interpretations of current political events and socio-political developments, along with predictions of where this is headed as per the Grand Narrative. But those same fundamentalists also seek an inner “born again” experience of God in which they come to know God in an intimate way which bestows a sense of meaning on their life regardless of their understanding of the Grand Narrative. Meaning, Transcendence and Immanence Another key aspect of our perception of meaning, regardless of whether it is understood according to the Grand Narrative or personal interpretation, is the simultaneous presence of both immanent and transcendent elements. Meaning has an immanent quality to the extent that we find it in specific, concrete, lived moments in this embodied existence as conscious beings in a world of matter, energy, space, and time. In the love of a mother for her child, in an act of selflessness and sacrifice, in moments of courage, in altruistic deeds that put the needs of another ahead of one’s own interests, in a quiet act of compassionate discretion and in a public act of opposition to injustice – in countless ways, through what we say and do in real-life situations, we gain a sense that our choices matter, and, in some small, mysterious, indefinable way, contribute to Something that is larger than ourselves, Something of an abiding spiritual nature. We might not be able to articulate exactly how our action is meaningful, but we can sense it at a deep, intuitive level. As such, to the extent that we experience meaning through events and actions in the concrete specificity of our life, meaning has an immanent quality. And yet, while meaning is manifested in various concrete expressions of aspects of human experience, and as such has an immanent quality, meaning is always connected to and grounded in a transcendent dimension. By “transcendent” we do not mean the traditional anthropomorphic mythic deity. Rather, we mean a reality – an Ultimate Reality to use traditional philosophical language – that is in some sense more than and not dependent on, the totality of matter, energy, space, and time. Whether we call it God, Spirit, Buddha-nature, Brahman, or whatever term is used in one’s culture to refer to the transcendent reality, it is always in relationship to that transcendent reality that meaning is understood. Meaning emerges in the recognition that, with reference to our life, it’s not “all about me,” but rather all about something much bigger than me, something to which I am intimately connected as a part, but only a part. In purely immanent terms, divorced from a recognition of Transcendence, it would appear that our lives are characterized by an indifferent transience in which we come and go, leaving no lasting imprint on a world which is impermanent, harsh, and cold. But human consciousness has evolved to the point where, however dimly, we recognize that there really is Something More than the transient realm, and that Something More is the source and guarantor of a meaningful existence. Humans are certainly embodied creatures who are immersed in pain, suffering, evil, and ultimately, bodily death. But humans are also creatures who have developed the capacity for a conscious intuitive awareness of their connection to and dependence on that ineffable reality that we variously refer to as Spirit, God, etc., and it is only through a sense of that connection to the transcendent that we can sense the presence of meaning. As Ernest Becker so deftly described in his classic work, The Denial of Death, humans exert enormous effort to convince themselves that meaning can be found in all sorts of substitutes for Transcendence: careers, sports, entertainment, accumulation of wealth, consumption of goods, hedonistic pleasure, and on and on. And yet the pursuit of these substitutes never brings satisfaction, only an endless pursuit of the next substitute meaning, not unlike the hamster perpetually chasing its tail around the wheel. Only when one’s immanent efforts are recognized as connected to a Transcendent reality, does a true sense of abiding meaning appear. Meaning in 21st Century Spirituality: The Two Models All of the above leads us, finally, to the question which is the focus of this post: Is a sense of meaning available in 21st century spirituality? Once one has set aside the traditional mythic deity, lost confidence in the divine origin of sacred texts, and abandoned belief in traditional dogmas and the ecclesiastical authorities who create and defend them, can one still retain a sense that existence is meaningful? The answer is that not only is a post-traditional spirituality something that provides a firm basis for a confident sense of the meaningfulness of existence, but it does so in a manner that is far more credible to the contemporary citizen than is a sense of meaning that is sourced in ancient texts and faith in inaccessible historical events. Meaning in contemporary spirituality is empirically based, part of our lived experience. And a post-traditional spirituality affirms the meaningfulness of existence according to both of the models that we referenced above. The Grand Narrative of 21st Century Spirituality The traditional meta-narrative rooted in a mythic anthropomorphic deity with its parochial favoritism and ethical imperfections, described in the Bible and other sacred texts, is no longer be credible to many and hence no longer functions as a meaning-supporting story. But a new meta-narrative, full of meaning and compatible with all elements of a 21st century sensibility, has emerged: the evolution of the Cosmos. The evolutionary understanding of the Universe (including, but not limited to life on Earth) provides a grand narrative that supports belief in a Universe that is directional and purposeful, and hence meaningful. When seen in its totality, the evolution of the Universe presents a grand, elegant, breathtaking view of a cosmic process that steadily moves forward from energy to matter to life to consciousness, and then on to the emergence of increasingly sensitive and expansive capacities for conscious awareness, including a sense of the Transcendent, spiritual, meaning-imbued fundamental nature of Being. Of course, the spiritual implications of the evolutionary model are often not recognized: traditional believers reject the evolutionary process altogether because of perceived conflicts with their literalist account of sacred texts; the scientific community focuses only on the details of the process and refuses to recognize the bigger picture which it conveys. But fortunately, increasing numbers in both the scientific and religious communities are breaking free from the myopic blindness of both fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist scientism, and recognizing that evolution can indeed suggest that we exist in a meaningful Universe that is guided by ordering principles. Specifically, when viewed in its full cosmic context, the evolutionary process depicts reality as something that for 14 billion years has been developing according to finely tuned laws that produce entities of increasing complexity, eventually leading to the emergence of life, and later to the emergence of living entities that have conscious awareness, and culminating (so far, at least, in the tiny corner of the Universe which we can perceive) in the emergence of an entity whose level of complexity and consciousness has resulted in a being with the capacity to perceive not only sensory phenomena but also the spiritual quality behind/within/above that sensory world. It is the evolutionary process that has given the Universe a creature with the capacity to intuitively sense the presence of Spirit. In a sense, not only is it not the case that evolution and religion are at odds, but rather evolution has given us religion, to the extent that religion is the product of the evolved capacity of human consciousness to intuit a spiritual dimension of reality. From this perspective, religion and evolution are friends, not enemies. Looked at from a different angle, the long history of the Universe suggests that its evolutionary direction is one of being slowly spiritualized, or gradually becoming a Cosmos in which there exist beings which possess a non-physical property (consciousness) through which has evolved an increasingly sensitive spiritual awareness. The evolving Cosmos at some point ceased to be something that produced only novel forms of matter/energy, and began to produce beings which were not only living but capable of a mode of perception that extended beyond the sensory realm to an awareness of the transcendent (and immanent) reality of Spirit. This understanding of evolution as essentially a spiritualizing process was articulated early in the 20th century by the likes of the French priest Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu yogi Aurobindo Ghose. Thomas Berry fought for the adoption of this “New Story” as he called it, and that task has been carried on by the likes of Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Among contemporary spiritual writers, Ken Wilber is one of the most articulate and prolific advocates of evolution as the new Grand Narrative. Even mainstream philosophers, such as Philip Goff, Robert Wright, and Bernardo Kastrup, who are not associated with the advocacy of any particular spiritual position, have come to agree that an objective, all-encompassing perspective on the evolutionary process, freed from the biases of both fundamentalism and scientism, suggests that we are indeed in a Universe that is evolving in a meaningful way. Of course, this is not to suggest that there are no challenges to the adoption of evolution as a new Grand Narrative of meaning, but such challenges exist even for traditional theism, where the problem of reconciling the all-powerful and benevolent creator God with the presence of suffering in the world has vexed believers and professional theologians for centuries, producing countless unsuccessful theodicies, or attempts to explain how a good and all-powerful God could permit such suffering to occur. The evolutionary Grand Narrative shares similar challenges (which we will explore in later posts), but at least the evolutionary model is grounded in an honest starting point, based on our presently available conscious awareness. For the believer who seeks faith that is grounded in a story that is credible in light of what humans know today, rather than in light of what they believed to be the case over 2000 years ago, the evolutionary model provides a credible Grand Narrative in a way that the traditional theistic story can no longer do. The ahistorical Personal Model in 21st Century Spirituality And yet, however appealing the Grand Narrative model might be, both emotionally (by providing a truly awe-inspiring vision of the cosmic process) and intellectually (by providing a credible account of not only the evolution of the Cosmos, but also how consciousness and spirituality have emerged as a natural part of that process), it has a serious flaw. The Grand Narrative model situates the basis for meaning in the entirety of the vast cosmic evolutionary process. But what about the individual conscious entities that function as an integral and necessary part of that process? What about those individual conscious beings who, for whatever reason, do not have access to the Grand Narrative vision to provide meaning in their life? And how can the Grand Narrative model provide meaning for individual conscious beings who suffer and die? If a universe evolving toward a magnificent end does so only at the cost of heartlessly discarding the billions of precious individual entities that it consumes in reaching that telos, can that really be a meaningful Universe? (Teilhard and Aurobindo, perhaps the two greatest Grand Narrativists of our time, both struggled with this question and never produced a convincing response). If meaning exists, then, it must exist not only for the Cosmic Process, but also for the individual conscious entities that are part of that process. The meaningfulness of a given human life cannot necessarily be known or felt from the vastness of an evolutionary perspective. Evolution only acquires its meaning in the context of vast time. By contrast, humans live in micro-chunks of time. And that micro-temporal existence also needs to be made meaningful. Looked at from the perspective of the entire evolutionary process, an individual being’s existence has no obvious meaning. But if reality is meaningful, that meaning must apply to individual entities, not just the entire cosmic process. As even Teilhard acknowledges, evolution operates according to large numbers and long time periods. But, as he recognized, the meaningfulness of individual entities would appear to be contradicted by the enormous waste and suffering that is part of that meaningful cosmic process. All of which finally leads us to the question of: What is the meaning of a single human existence, independent of its role in a vast cosmic process of which it is unaware? Is there not a rare and precious quality to each individual manifestation of Being and Mind which exists at a specific and limited point in space and time, a meaning that can be known or sensed even in the absence of awareness of the evolutionary process? Traditionally, in the Abrahamic traditions this was answered in beliefs such as the idea that we are all children of a benevolent fatherly God. But in a 21st century spirituality in which traditional theistic language and symbols are less and less part of how people think about spiritual reality, where does the sense of individual, personal meaning come from? We would suggest that in a 21st century spirituality, a sense of meaning at the personal level ultimately comes from the same source that meaning in traditional theism comes from, which is to say that it does not come from any sort of rational thought process or intellectual interpretation of historical events. Rather, the sense that life has meaning is something which is sensed, or intuited, in a virtually limitless variety of specific moments of everyday, ordinary experience, where we sense that there really is something precious and meaningful about each individual conscious being (described so beautifully in the opening pages of Martin Buber’s I and Thou). In a sense, it is a taste of something, or an awareness of something, that is accompanied by an immediate and firm impression of “so this is the way things are,” even though there is no specific, detailed, easily articulated account of exactly what is meant by “this is the way things are.” This also suggests that meaning is not acquired solely through reasoning: meaning is not confined to a series of propositions that we can lay out in a logical sequence; like all human knowledge, it includes elements of this, but the fullness of meaning is something that we find at a deeper level of human awareness. In fact, as soon as we begin to assert that we can articulate the details of this perception of meaning, we immediately and of necessity enter into an error mode, in a sense committing a category error of trying to communicate the nature of something that cannot be communicated through the exteriorized mode of verbal expression. This sense of individual meaning, though powerful, is ineffable. Such moments of meaning-affirmation can be found in an endless array of everyday ordinary experiences, including moral experiences of the Good (a parent’s love of a child, an act of altruism, a simple kindness extended to a stranger) or even aesthetic experiences of beauty (a sunset, the vastness of the stars on a clear night, the sound of a bird, the smell of a flower). One could say that a 21st century sense of personal meaning, both in origin and content, is perhaps no different than a traditional theistic sense of meaning, the only difference being the language that is used to try to articulate that ineffable sense that we live in a Universe in which Goodness (despite all appearances) is ultimate, and in a Universe where our individual existence really matters (even though we cannot precisely articulate how). It may seem simplistic to some, but meaning can be boiled down to the basic assertion that reality includes Something More, existence is purposeful, and our personal existence as entities in that reality matters. Some will find this account of personal meaning inadequate, given that it lacks the detail of many traditional theistic accounts, but, as we have argued previously, to the extent that 21st century spirituality will be intellectually and spiritually honest, it necessarily will be lacking in detail, as we set aside the pretense of being able to articulate that which is far beyond our ability to do so. In a sense, a 21st century awareness of meaning, like a traditional theistic affirmation of meaning, necessarily includes an element of faith, but 21st century meaningfulness is grounded in faith derived from an experiential awareness, rather than faith based on the content of an ancient text or a historical event to which one does not have proof, and hence in the context of that empirical grounding, 21st century spirituality is credible to many who no longer find the traditional ways of thinking about religion (including the idea of meaning) to be convincing. We also must acknowledge an essential element in most religious concepts of meaning, even though we are deferring discussion of the issue for a separate post: belief in some type of preservation of the self (life-after-death, post-mortem survival, immortality, etc.). In a universe governed by a good God or, to say essentially the same thing in less theistic terms, in a cosmos in which Spirit is the ultimate reality, does it necessarily follow that souls or individual self-aware consciousnesses should be forever annihilated and doomed to permanent extinction upon death of the physical form, but rather, as a logical and necessary expression of the fundamental Goodness of God/ Spirit, each soul/consciousness must be preserved in some dimension of existence beyond that of the material realm which we now inhabit? Many would posit that there is a direct experience of the sense that we live in a meaningful universe in which individual consciousness, or personal identity, is a precious and valuable thing, and in order for that universe to be meaningful, that consciousness must somehow be preserved. Given the importance, complexity, and subtle aspects of this issue, we will examine it in a separate post. Perhaps all that needs to be said on the topic for now is something like this: the sense, sentiment, or intuition that we do live in a meaningful universe, however poorly and vaguely that sentiment might be articulated, is accompanied by a similarly vague and poorly defined, but adamantly convincing, sense that there is some kind of preservation of individual identity or consciousness after death of the physical body which we presently inhabit on this plane of existence (much more on this subtle, complex, and existentially essential issue in a later post). Meaning in 21st Century Spirituality: The Basics So to conclude, yes, meaning is available in 21st century spirituality that has set aside the traditional deity, texts, doctrines, religious authority structures, etc. Specifically, a spiritually meaningful life is simply a life lived in accordance with spiritual reality. There is a deeper, ultimate, Transcendent, spiritual reality, Something More than the totality of the Cosmos of matter, energy, space, and time. Our life takes on a sense that it matters, that it’s meaningful, to the degree that we live our life with primary reference to that Something More (variously referred to in religious and philosophical traditions as God, Dao, Buddha-nature, Ultimate Reality, etc.), rather than with reference to values, beliefs, wants, etc. that run counter to that Something More. And when we live a life in such a manner, what happens externally cannot negate the meaningfulness of our life, nor is our confidence in meaning dependent on awareness of a Grand Narrative. What happens externally can of course cause great pain, suffering, anxiety, disruption, heartache, destruction, etc., but it cannot negate the sense that we live in a meaningful reality. As long as we are persevering in the primacy of our relationship to the Transcendent Good, our life has meaning; as soon as we let it go – no matter what is happening historically and externally – that meaning is gone. Recognizing a sense that existence has meaning in the 21st century depends only on an openness to the intuitive sense that there is a Something More, recognition of that Something More as the Supreme Good, accepting that we are inextricably connected to that ineffable Something More, and realizing that a meaningful life is simply a matter of living in accordance with that Something More.
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