Finding Meaning without a god narrative

[RichardParticipant]

Meaning is, I believe, something unique to the human experience.  I don’t believe other living creatures on earth worry that their life is meaningful.  There are ancient living cultures such as the Pirahã that are only concerned with the immediate experience of life and really have no use for the concept of meaning.  So even among humans we can’t assume that the pursuit of meaning is meaningful.

One of the mistakes that some Christians make in their understanding of atheism is that atheism is a cohesive set of ideas.  They often project a church structure onto atheists when the only thing atheists have in common is their agreement that there is no evidence for god or gods.  But that is the definition of atheism.  It stops there.

Now, I as a former believer, had a need to explore the idea of meaning outside of the Christian investment in meaning.  I was under the false impression that my life wouldn’t hold value without a god telling me it was valuable or giving it value.

Meaning as a real thing doesn’t exist.  In truth life is meaningless on an objective level.  We humans, even when we evaluate good and bad, really are only concerned with what is good and bad for humans.  When there is an earthquake it’s bad because humans suffer, but in reality it is just the earth shaking and people may die.  Meaning is essentially imbedded in our emotional reaction to the particular narrative we have chosen to tell ourselves about the world around us.  We tend to think this narrative is universal, but it’s not.

We are also subject to the western idea that the unexamined life isn’t worth living.  We have been taught to give value to what we think about ourselves.  If that isn’t ego, I don’t what is. LOL

What I discovered is how much judgmental thinking I engaged in all day.  Am I doing this right or am I doing this wrong?  Are my thoughts pure?  Am I being helpful to my fellow man?  Is it wrong that I like coffee?  Am I taking care of my body properly?  Should I read that book or watch that movie?

And we could extend this to asking whether this community is a good thing or not?  Are we tolerant enough?  Are we being loving people?  It can basically go on and on indefinitely.  There really is no end to this type of self chatter.  And you can go Buddhist and ask if I’m meditating enough?  Am I detached enough?  (If you’re asking that question you’re probably not. LOL)  It’s all ego.  And maybe Solomon was right when he said it was all vanity.

What I found was that if you really want to suffer become even more self-centered.  Because when you are caught in this continual self evaluation mode, stuff that you think of becomes harmful.  Oh, he or she was disappointed with me.  Maybe I wasn’t loving enough.  Maybe I could have done more.  I need to be more spiritual.  And on and on and on and on.

These are all just narratives we make up for whatever reason and many of us give them energy even though they only exist in our minds.

If we are really free, then we are free to discover our own narrative.  I choose to have a narrative, because I like to live life with one, but I’m also aware that it is a narrative that is based on what I like.  I take personal responsibility for my narrative and I tend to try and keep my narrative as close to what I observe in the real world around me as I can.  And most of the time my narrative is pretty convincing to those who know me.  And the things that have value to me are valuable because I give them value in my own mind.  And when more information comes along that may show a better way to tell my narrative I shift because I’m more interested in the quality of my life than being right.  Being right is about ego and one is certainly able to create meaning out of being right, but I would hope that it would start getting old when one discovers that being right doesn’t really change anything in the outside world unless you apply it.

The problem with organized religions is that they believe that their narrative is reality and they tend to try and impose them on other people.  The fact that they have to impose them doesn’t seem to be a clue that maybe they aren’t real.

Each day I ask myself what I really want to invest my energy into.  And it’s different every day.  It has made it possible for me to like and enjoy my life.  Most of the time I enjoy investing my energy in people.  If I start to judge whether it’s meaningful or not or if I try and impose it on others, then it looses it’s sense of meaning.  Meaning is an art of life.

• This topic was modified 2 years ago by  David Hayward.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by  David Hayward.

[David HaywardKeymaster]

“Meaning is an art of life.” Like. “The Meaning of Life”, by Terry Eagleton is a great book in this regard.

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by  David Hayward.

[Anonymous]

As always, you make some really good points Richard!

I’ve spent 50 years examining myself, constantly judging myself (like you said it just goes on and on and on!), and searching for what makes life meaningful and fulfilling.I bought into the lie that apart from the church and Christ your life will never have meaning.

I sincerely tried every kind of Bible Study, read all the latest Christian books, went to seminars and conferences, and embraced every new Christian technique that came down the pike (5 steps to a better prayer life, 7 steps to freedom in Christ, yada, yada.)

And the ironic thing is I never found what I was looking for until after I left the church. And then, to my utter surprise, once I gave up on all that crap and simply focused on being my authentic self, the illusive butterfly came unbidden and landed on my shoulder! AMAZING!!

[servantgirlParticipant]

Richard that was beautiful, so very true, and explains where I am in life more elegantly than I ever could.  I know because I’ve tried explaining this before and ended up being accused of being nihilistic, so FAR removed from my point.  Thanks for posting this.

[RichardParticipant]

Jo,

It is amazing when that butterfly lands.  And it comes so naturally.  It makes sense that it’s far easier to just be what I am already.

[SavageSotoParticipant]

I don’t know that I’m comfortable saying “meaning” just flat out does not exist in reality, I don’t think anyone can say that for sure. I do agree though that, at least, our perception of meaning is the product of our minds.

When I was a Christian I felt fairly certain of my meaning and the meaning of life…now I struggle to decipher what meaning life has to me in this new stage of my life.

[David HaywardKeymaster]

I understand what you’re saying Savage. And I identify with it as well. I’ve come to a place now where I just rest back in a kind of knowing that there is meaning, but i don’t count it as fact. Just a feeling. But I don’t worry about it either. I’m just resting and living in a kind of trust… trust in the good of life.

[Ruth AnneParticipant]

Love your narrative Richard – I was tracking with you. Interesting thought about how having to “impose” our meanings on others might be a clue that it’s not real.

Jo – I was with you on the seminars, books, ANYTHING to go deeper  – have life have more meaning. Don’t know if I found it in not going to church… but I certainly am content not to have to figure it all out anymore.

[Anonymous]

Ruth – I can’t say I’ve got everything figured out now that I’m not in church – far from it – now I have more questions than ever. BUT at least now I believe it’s OK to trust my own heart and mind (which I was always taught I should NEVER do!) And now that I’m giving myself permission to do just that,  I’m getting to know who I am for the first time in my life. I find that far more meaningful and fulfilling than  going down all kinds of religious rabbit trails that lead nowhere. Screw that!!

 

 

[RichardParticipant]

Savage and David,

I understand the initial reaction you might have to the idea that meaning is not a real thing.  Notice your reaction is based in feeling.  I think feelings are important because I believe emotion is what makes life worth living.

It makes sense to me that meaning is a byproduct of consciousness.  An exercise that helped me grasp the idea that meaning is a product of the mind was an exercise from the Course in Miracles.  The exercise is to identify things and concepts in your life and say the following.  ___________ means absolutely nothing other than what I assign to it.

This helped me realize what I was attached to by my emotional reaction to the idea that a particular aspect of my life meant nothing extrinsically.  It woke me up to the fact that I made up the story of what I perceived and that story was not universal.

I believe that meaning is something our ego needs, at least trying to make our own lives meaningful.  And when my ego is confronted with the factual reality that in the great cosmic passage of time and space, my life is but a blip, my ego gets really offended.  I have become acutely aware of the underlying god complex presented in my less mature moments.

And Christianity has an interesting solution to this by a narrative of a loving god showing individual interest in each of us.  I think this helps some people to not feel so small.  The problem with this narrative is it tends to keep people in a childish dependent role.  I became aware for myself that retaining this dependent role to an invisible god prevented me from living life fully.

I agree that it appears to be a fearful precipice, but remember all of this is happening in the mind.  If I have a roof over my head and food to eat and water to drink life is good.  The suffering I generate for myself in my own mind for things beyond this make me laugh at myself.  I am particularly aware of this when I observe how people in third world countries still find happiness in far less.

And in our egos we tend to think that living in poverty ourselves will somehow remove this “survivor” guilt.  All of these things are ego and as the story of Buddha goes he finally awoke to this one day after 10 years of denying himself.  He supposedly came from a wealthy ruling family and could not stand it that he had while others did not.  So his initial solution was deny himself.  He was trying to be good.  What a waste of life sitting under a tree denying himself.

So this search for meaning, at least for me, is simply another way to be tricked into investing in ego.  That middle way as identified by Buddha is a tricky proposition.  Ego seems to bound it on both sides.

I think philosophically within western thought we can identify this middle way as love.  And love is pretty hard to define much like meaning, but love is certainly identified through the feeling when we have it.

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