… as a way to create meaning. Josef Rabenbauer
When I first came to India in the Eighties, I was invited by a doctor colleague. When I visited there for dinner, I was taken aback and amazed by our conversation: he and his family, together with their grandparents, talked all evening about spiritual issues and how spirituality can be lived in everyday life: for me a course in wisdom cultivation. Such conversations I had not experienced in Germany. In our culture we do not usually talk about wisdom and meaning in Life.
This is, I propose, one cause of the increase of anxiety disorders, depression, despair, and suicide rates, whichare going up in North America, parts of Europe, and other parts of the world. This crisis is intertwined with the crises in the environment and the political system, those in turn are enmeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis that John Vervaeke calls “The Meaning Crisis“.
Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist and meditation-teacher from the University of Toronto says:
“Today, there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future. … Getting out of this problem is going to be tremendously difficult. It’s going to require significant transformations in our cognition, our culture, our communities.“
The meaning crisis as a crisis of wisdom cultivation
„One way of thinking about the meaning crisis is to understand it as a crisis of wisdom cultivation. The monasteries are gone, the commodification of schools is diluting what passes as ‘education’ to mere preparation for uncertain labor markets; where else do we go for wisdom?“ The seemingly most important and powerful entities of our world, the capitalist economy with big business, politics or social media hardly offer us any orientation in finding wisdom or meaning.”
Wisdom cultivation means – among other – ways to reconnect („religio“) with our essential values and our essential Being – from which we are quite disconnected in our culture. We are shaped to consume, to produce more and more, faster and faster and to compete. We try to fill our lost essential nature by trying to get it from outside: we consume, we strip-mine the earth and exploit the animals we eat.
Meaning is not a thing to „have“, nor an information to consume or to purchase – but is revealed by truly coming in contact with a fulfilling way of Being – also and especially in the midst of our crisis. It means being in contact with compassion, with friendly and mindful ways of contact, with warmth, empathy, humanness, gentleness, curiosity and openness, courage, agency and capacity. And to be able to recognize and offer true nourishing contact.
Can we value this qualities more than the surrogates like money and power? When we explore the effect on our soul, we know immediately, what makes more sense and meaning, what fulfills us more deeply.
We are beginning to understand again that meaning in life, rather than simply an accessory to survival, is essential to human flourishing, predictive of well-being in every sense of the term.
What at first seems contradictory is suddenly compatible: to live a fulfilled life in a crisis-ridden world: we can then allow the pain and the grief, the shock and the fear as well as the joy, the compassion and the friendly humanity.