www.radicaluncertainty.com

Author: Nicholas Williams

THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

Everybody comes to the point when they ask the question “what is the meaning of it all?”, or some sort of variant on this. Even if I don’t actually formulate the question as such, I wonder about it – on some level or other. After all, we aren’t machines, we can’t just continue day after day, year after year, and not wonder what the point is. As everyone knows, we need meaning in our lives, and as the existentialist philosophers have noted in connection with this, we usually get around this problem by choosing some sort of reason, and then being very careful never to question the reason that we have chosen. Another possibility, more common these days, is to give up looking for a reason – we become cynical and we say that the meaning of life is that there isn’t any meaning (or that there isn’t any meaning beyond the biological imperative of ‘surviving in order to survive’).

But neither of these two options cuts it really – the first method of coping with existential angst leaves us prone to a sense of repressed meaninglessness, and prey to a fear that we might find out one day that we were simply fooling ourselves (a fear that is all the more terrible for being unacknowledged). It also makes us ‘deliberately stupid’ in the sense that we have to purposefully inhibit our own natural curiosity, since dogmatism and unabashed curiosity can never live happily together. The second option is equally flawed in that it ‘leaves us cold’ – it makes us believe that there is no point to anything we do, and this ‘rational alienation’ thwarts the life-impulse right at its very root. We might get some sort of intellectual satisfaction from our belief that everything is just a meaningless accident, but where do we go from there? To say that this is a dead-end is putting it mildly - it is a case of making up my mind just for the sake of making up my mind. Rather than endure the pain of not knowing – which would be the honest thing to do – I seize upon the conclusion that ‘there is nothing to know’, and derive whatever dry satisfaction I can from this. The former option involves committing myself to the belief that ‘such-and-such’ is the ultimate reason for us being here, and the second option involves me committing myself to the belief that ‘there is no ultimate reason’. Neither of these strategies leaves any room for questioning, for curiosity, because there is an actual investment that has taken place. It matters to me more than I am willing to admit that I should be right. If I close my mind, it is because I am afraid of taking the risk of leaving it open. I want to slam the book shut, and spend the rest of my days alternatively gloating and despairing over the meaning that I think I have captured.

The question “What is the meaning of life?” might sound like a cliché, but at the same time it is also one of the profoundest questions that we are capable of asking. But there is a snag. It might be true to say that it is an excellent philosophical question, but it is also true to say that it almost always tangles us up so badly right from the outset that there is absolutely no way out of the tangle. Therefore, our questioning gets nowhere. The only way to avoid the fatal confusion that generally ensues when the question is asked is to get one point very clear right from the word ‘go’. The point that we need to understand if we are to stand any chance of actually getting anywhere has to do with the difference between ‘closed’ and ‘open’, which is something that we have already alluded to. A closed system, we may say, is a system that cannot register anything that does not already correspond to its expectations regarding what there is out there to register. The fact that it is ‘closed’ means that a datum will not have any meaning to it unless the datum in question has already been specified – in principle – somewhere within its pre-existing structure; it cannot encounter what it doesn’t already know about, in other words. This state of affairs is sometimes spoken of as ‘self-referentiality’, which simply means that the system sees everything in terms of itself. A closed system of logic sees everything via the assumptions implicit in the structure of its own logic. In psychological terms, we can say that when I am operating on the basis of a closed system of logic, I can never see anything unless it corresponds to my ideas and beliefs about the world – unless it matches the criteria or rules that I use to process incoming information. Therefore, stuff is ‘allowed’ only after it makes sense to me; it is allowed only after it has been ‘checked and verified’ in relation to the set of rules that the system takes for granted. I see only what I can see.

In an open system there is none of this self-referentiality, none of this ‘reflexive-checking’ – there is no ‘comparison-making’, no ‘referring back’ to an original unquestionable set of assumptions. There is no automatic operation of checking and verifying because there is nothing to check with and nothing to verify against – there is no all-important template of meaning that I have to measure everything against. Reality itself is the important thing, not my prejudices with regard to how I like to interpret that reality. Instead of seeing the unknown in terms of the known (which is an act of control, or ‘self-assertion’), I see the unknown on its own terms. This means that I never actually ‘know’ it - I never enclose it within the narrow framework of my pre-existent rational understanding, and so I never make the unknown part of ‘me’, part of ‘my system of understanding’. The difference between a closed system and an open system can be explained in terms of ‘willingness’ to change:

A closed system is fundamentally insensitive and ‘resistant’ to what is around it. It tries (for the sake of its own security) to rule over everything else and is constantly fighting against change, constantly seeking to defend and maintain its own way of doing things. An open system, on the other hand, is infinitely sensitive and vulnerable, and is as a consequence able to change in the most radical of ways. An open system does not have a fixed, all-important ‘self’ to hang on to, and so as a result it is able to constantly learn and grow.
Now that we have gone through this initial perambulation, we are ready to look at the original question again. The ‘point of understanding’ that we said we needed to introduce right from the start is this: the meaning of life cannot be found in myself, in my ‘system of thinking’, but must come from outside of that system. This is the same as saying that I cannot create or construct my own meaning but rather it must be independent of my control. It cannot do my bidding, or else it is merely an extension of my own thinking, an extension of my own hopes and fears. Neither can a find meaning in any logical system that I find around me, because that meaning too is created by thought to serve thought’s own ends. Thought can create anything it wants, and believe in anything it wants, and for this reason everything it creates and believes in is equally empty, equally meaningless. As soon as I ‘make up meaning’ to suit myself that meaning becomes false - it becomes ‘the spurious meaning of self-deception’. If meaning is to be genuine, then it cannot serve the petty master which is thought – in fact we can go so far as to say that genuine meaning is the enemy of thought since the true and the false cannot share the same bed.

When we reflect on the matter it is of course pretty obvious that genuine meaning cannot be arrived at via some sort of self-referential procedure. If I insist on holding the key which is to decide what form that ‘meaning’ is to have before I am willing to allow it, then the only meaning that will be allowed will be the sort of ‘meaning’ that suits my prejudices. It is obvious that I must have no hand in the process, that truth or meaning - to be trustworthy – must arise independently of my wishes and my efforts at manipulation. An obstacle to understanding creeps in here however because of the way in which I automatically assume that my thinking is an independent arbitrator. The idea that my thinking is simply an extension of my prejudices, an extension of ‘me’, and not an objective representation of an objective truth is one that we find novel and hard to get to grips with. We all assume that rational thought is an impartial and therefore trustworthy agency but if we stopped to remember just how many times we have used thought to twist situations around to suit ourselves we would soon start to lose some of this naïve faith in its assumed impartiality. Actually, as Professor David Bohm says, ‘me’ and ‘my thinking’ is all the same closed system – it is all one continuous structure with no breaks or discontinuities in it anywhere.

Between my ideas and the world as it is in itself there has to be a break, or discontinuity. The discontinuity is what gives life its ability to surprise us, to catch us unawares, to exercise its unique and inexplicable fascination upon us. If there is no difference between my thinking and the world then everything is flat and unremarkable, everything is matter-of-fact and dead. When I look out of the window I see only what I expect to see – nothing more. When I see only what I expect to see, then of course I don’t really pay much attention to what I see. Why should I? I know it all already - I’ve seen it a million times, I know what it is and so there’s no incentive to look at it again. This is the mode of being that we find ourselves in most of the time – life is taken for granted, it’s a show that I’ve seen over and over again and I’m bored with it. It is as if my spirit is bored within me, and has gone fast asleep, leaving my dull mind to get on with the tedious business of conducting my repetitive and essentially banal life. If I was aware that there was a difference between my thinking and what my thinking is about, then this of course is a whole new story – in this case there is something to ‘wake me up’, there is a sense of strangeness about everything. Strangeness means that there is something vital that I have left out of the rational equation, something that doesn’t fit in to my scheme of things, something that defies my commonsense mind. I can’t put my finger on it, it eludes me, and yet I sense that it is crucially important – it changes everything. This experience is like finding out that the boring old guy you used to call Bill is actually an incomprehensibly advanced telepathic being from another star-system who has been pretending to be your predictable friend Bill in order to do research on the human race. You have been rudely awoken out of your lazy, inattentive way of thinking and all you can do is to repeat “But, but, but…” as your mind tries to comprehend the enormity of its error.

James Carse explains this notion of ‘discontinuity’ by saying that nature (which includes my own true or hidden nature) is radically unlike – it is radically unlike everything I know about. Carl Jung was getting at the same thing when he said the collective unconscious is always experienced as wholly ‘other’. This is what makes the unconscious mind so uncanny, so threatening to the safe and cosy world that we have invented for ourselves. Jung also said that the Self (which isn’t the known and arbitrarily constructed ego, but rather the hidden, innate Self) is wholly other, as we can see from this passage taken from The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

As an individual phenomenon, the self is “smaller than small”; as the equivalent of the cosmos, it is “bigger than big.” The self, regarded as the counter-pole of the world, its “absolute other,” is the sine qua non of all empirical knowledge and consciousness of subject and object. Only because of this psychic “otherness” is consciousness possible at all.

When we talk about ‘unlikeness’ or ‘otherness’ we are saying that the unconditioned reality (which is reality as it is in itself) is independent of our thinking, and therefore utterly incomprehensible to us. This unconditioned reality is right under our noses the whole time - bigger than big and smaller than small - and yet we never notice it. Another way to get at this is to say that the ‘radical unlikeness’ which is unconditioned reality exists at right angles to our all of our expectations – it exists at right angles to our hopes and fears, at right angles to all of our rational enquiries. For this reason it presents no ‘face’ to us, it is invisible to us just as an infinitely thin sheet of paper would be invisible if we saw it ‘edge on’. Naturally enough, because this ultimate reality is both invisible and inconceivable, we act exactly as if it wasn’t there. However, the rub is that the ultimate reality doesn’t depend on us believing it. It doesn’t need our validation, but on the other hand we do need it, because without the infinite depths of unconditioned reality our lives collapse into two-dimensional cartoon stories - full of sound and fury, as Shakespeare says, but signifying nothing. Without the profound and immeasurable meaning of the depths, we are lost in pettiness – and what is worse, we become lost in the type of self-deceiving pettiness that refuses to see its own true nature, and as a consequence of this we lead lives steeped in an insidious meaninglessness that we are too afraid to face. We are constantly busy taking seriously things that do not matter a damn, and the whole time we turn a blind eye to the stuff that does matter (the stuff that matters more than we dare admit).

This brings us to the point that we have been working up to, which is that the ‘meaning of life’ is not to be found anywhere in the continuum of thought, but rather it is in the gap between our thoughts, which we never take any notice of. Thus in Ibsen’s play, when Peer Gynt asks Death what the secret to life is, Death replies cryptically: “To be oneself is to slay oneself”. In other words, one cannot live unless one relinquishes life. Another – more cumbersome - way of putting this would be to say that the meaning of life cannot be appreciated until the system of thought has sacrificed itself, i.e. we cannot see reality for what it is until the system of thought drops its ‘prerequisite condition for everything’, which is that it should decide what is real and what is not real. Only when I give up looking at the world from the personalized and therefore hopelessly biased viewpoint of the ‘me’ can I glimpse reality. Of course, making a statement like this straightaway provokes incredulity – I cannot imagine how the world can possibly be perceived unless it is perceived by a ‘me’, which is to say, by a centralized or particularized awareness.

But this incredulity is simply another manifestation of the prejudicial viewpoint of the ‘me’ – the ‘me’ cannot see how anything can be done without it, in fact it cannot imagine anything that doesn’t involve itself. As far as it is concerned the world revolves around it and so of course it refuses to see that it might not be necessary at all. The ego or ‘me’ can be defined as a particular, narrowly biased viewpoint that sees itself as the only possible viewpoint, and this means that it is constitutionally unable to envisage its own absence. It certainly doesn’t want to sacrifice itself. Dropping the personalized viewpoint is not such a preposterous suggestion as it may sound – all that it means is that we should drop our biased way of looking at things, the deeply ingrained way that we have of looking out at the world in terms of ‘what I can get out of it’, or ‘what use or relevance it is to me’. Normally the invisible condition to my perception is the condition of ‘personal utility’ or ‘personal significance’ – I am interested in stuff only insomuch as it supports my unconsciously biased view of myself as ‘the most important thing in the picture’. If something exists that in no way supports my idea of myself, then I am so very profoundly uninterested in that ‘something’ that I don’t register its existence for a second. The ‘me’ hasn’t time for anything else than its own story – it has to be the vital ingredient in everything that happens or else it just doesn’t want to know.

So when I forget about the self and all its greedy or fearful agendas this straightaway means that I am looking out at the world in an unbiased way, I am not nosy about what reality means in relation to me, but rather I am curious about reality for its own sake. This is not such an unusual idea – it is in fact what every poet and every artist does. A poet or an artist sees in such a way that his or her own personal self (and its tedious history) is not brought into the picture to spoil the beauty of what he or she sees. That is why genuine works of art have the power to move and inspire us – because they speak of an impersonal and timeless reality that is not merely a reflection of the ego’s banal desire for self-glorification. The same may be said to be true with regard to the mystical vision, as we can plainly see from the way the Sufi Jalaluddin Rumi criticizes religious scholasticism in the following passage (taken from Reynold Nicholson’s The Mystics of Islam):

“Do you know a name without a thing answering to it?
Have you ever plucked a rose from R, O, S, E?
You name His name; go, seek the reality named by it!
Look for the moon in the sky, not in the water!
If you desire to rise above mere names and letters,
Make yourself free from self at one stroke.
Become pure from all attributes of self,
That you might see your own bright essence,
Yea, see in your own heart the knowledge of the
Prophet,
Without book, without tutor, without preceptor.”

What all this implies is that there are actually two worlds rather than just the one that we now about, and which gets thrown in our face ever day. The ordinary world is a world of our humdrum daily concerns, our hopes and fears, our ambitions and regrets – all the issues that crowd into every day that we live, demanding all our attention. This world can be exciting at times and terrifying at others but for the most part it is just routine and unremarkable. It is at root the sort of a business that does not nourish the soul – in fact quite the opposite is true because the longer we spend in this world the more our spirit is drained, and the more the ‘magic ingredient’ that makes life worthwhile gets taken away, as if it had never existed in the first place. The routine world is a tough place to be – ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die’, as the saying has it. It makes us greedy and fearful and ultimately, despairing. Many is the time we wonder if it is worth the struggle, or how on earth we are going to come through the latest instalment of sorrows that has been delivered to our door. And when we do get up of the floor again, how long is it going to be until the next knock comes to put us back down there again?

And yet, alongside this world of sorrows and meaningless routine, there exists a second, timeless world – a world that is there the whole time, a world which has the power to unendingly replenish our spirits and return to us for good the sense of magic that we lost when we left childhood behind (in our hurry to grow up and play the game of ‘being self-important adults’). Needless to say, this suggestion sounds far too good to be true – “How could anything that marvellous be true?” our cynicism demands, offended by the very idea of it. And if cynicism has not yet grown too deeply into us, we might feel a pang of sweet sorrow for a moment, as we remember something of that world. But even then, we will decide that it is not for us, that it could not really be true, and we will do our best to put it out of our minds.

In a sense, of course, this sense of cynicism is justified because we know from experience that - somehow – we always manage to spoil things. Paradise is always lost to us, each one of us is permanently exiled from perfect happiness and we know it. That is our fallen condition, and even if we don’t subscribe to the letter of the ancient religious formula we still subscribe to the spirit of the idea – albeit in a modern, disguised and ‘rationalistic’ guise. The sin that keeps us exiled is a form of ‘disobedience’, only instead of disobeying some tyrannical Father Figure, we are disobeying our own true nature – we are busy ‘being what we are not’. I am the gap between my thoughts, but I insist on being the thought, because the gap between my thoughts is too deep – it is a terrifying abyss, and if I fall down it there will be no more ‘me’. The ‘me might be dreadfully and annoyingly shallow the whole time, and its life might be both frustrating and as meaningless as hell, but at least I don’t have to face the infinity of selflessness. In other words – my life might be fundamentally repetitive and sterile, but at least I get to ‘stay in control’ of what is going on.

Basically, the endless depths of profundity, beauty and freedom that are to be found in the vertical dimension of ‘not self’ are terrifying to me because they do not support my habitual or preferred way of seeing things. My preferred way of seeing the world is to see things in relation to the central point of reference of the ‘me’ - the ‘me’ is a sort of habitual way of looking at things in other words, but even though this habitual way of thinking is so very familiar to me, it is not at all necessary. After all, why can’t I just see Reality as it is – without reference to ‘what it means to my habitual way of thinking about things’? Why do I have to bring the ‘me’ into it? The answer is of course that I don’t, but a problem arises because the temptation - due to sheer force of habit – is to experiment at looking at infinity from the point of view of the finite self, and when I do this I start to panic. I am instantly overcome with terror on behalf of that ‘self’, a self which – ironically - isn’t really who I am at all.

As Herman Hesse says in Steppenwolf, the entrance fee to this internal infinity is your mind (i.e. it is your ‘rational and reliable sense of self’) and who amongst us is ready to pay such a fee, even if all the wonders of the world were to be found on the other side of the door? Too many wonders, too much mystery, too much freedom is not to our liking, and it is for this reason that we prefer to retire to the ‘universe of common sense’, which is reassuringly safe and predictable, but at the same time perfectly and horribly sterile. I might moan about the rottenness of life in my prison cell (the prison which is my mind), but if you came to evict me I would run back screaming and lock the door myself. For all my talk, freedom is the one thing I do not want.

Freedom also means ‘the freedom to see the truth’, and one way to formulate this ‘truth’ is to say that it has to do with the perception of non-specialness. Or, as David Bowie puts it: “It’s got nothing to do with you, if you can grasp it”. As we have said, the ‘me’ always thinks that everything revolves around it, and so it is pre-eminently incapable of ever grasping anything of the sort. The ‘me’ is always special, in fact that is the essence of it, that is the whole gist of ‘me-ness’. This is a particularly nasty trap because nothing the ‘me’ does can ever make it ‘less special’. For example, if I see that the key to everything is becoming non-special, and I try to become less special, than I have made ‘being nothing special’ into something special, and so I am scuppered from the word “go”. The ‘me’ just can’t win – it is a knot that can never untie itself, in fact the more it tries the worse of a tangle it creates.

Jung argues that modern man –in all his cleverness - has forgotten the most important piece of wisdom of all, which is that life should not be lived simply in order to fulfil the petty needs of the ego. According to Jung, life is to be lived sacrificially, i.e. offered up to something greater than himself. The difficulty is of course for me to go beyond myself, and it is because of this difficulty that I end up inventing my own meaning. As Jung says in Psychology and Religion:

Man can live the most amazing things if they make sense to him. But the difficulty is to create that sense. It must be a conviction, naturally; but you find the most convincing things man can create are cheap and ready-made, and are never able to convince him against his personal desires and fears.