When I watch the podcast of our American friends John Gardner and Harry Segal, called “Shrinking Trump” I am shocked about the overwhelming amount of info about the authoritarian politics in their country, but also impressed about the support, John and Harry offer to us.
When I get these latest news about America but also German news about the shift to right in politics I have a feeling, that I lose my place in the world I have known so far. – It´s no more the world I want to live in.
And I know this feeling already from the news about the loss of home for millions of migrants, forced to flee by war, climate and economic crises, the destruction of nature, the extinction of so many species, the loss of social coherence, the rightwing tendencies all over the world – and these crises are interconnected. In one word: we experience the Meta-crisis.
The loss of feeling at home
This leads us to the experience of domicide: the loss of our feeling at home in the world.
Domicide, derived from domus – meaning home – and describes the destroying of your home or being expelled from your homeland – you have no home in the world anymore. “Home” refers here metaphorically to your place in the world, your worldview and your values.
Our human nature and deep need is to understand and to make sense of this changes: we need to make and find meaning. But when things do not make sense anymore, our world seems to fall apart, when our values and esteemed qualities do not fit in this changing world, we lose our capacity for finding coherence. Things that matter to us are no more relevant in this world: we feel disconnected, alone.
How to live a meaningful life in all this?
John Vervaeke, a Canadian cognitive scientist and Meditation-teacher, offered a metaphoric picture for a better understanding of the domicide:
Imagine, you play football and you apply all your skills, your knowledge of the rules and best movements, when you suddenly realize, that none of these skills and movements fit, none make sense – how would you feel, before you find out, that you find yourself playing football in a different arena, a tennis court, with completely different rules.
This agent-arena picture refers to the coherence, the fit between the agent (the player) and the arena (world) with their rules – this coherence is necessary for the whole thing to make sense.
We do not have a culture of support and wisdom for sensemaking in our society, for cultivating meaning. Our consumerist behavior and oversaturatedness drowns us in meaninglessness.
„When a person can‘t find meaning, he distracts himself with pleasure“ V. Frankl
We distract ourselves by pleasure … and by consuming – We want to have something, own, get, buy, have more: we are stuck in the having mode. We cannot gain meaning by the having mode: by consuming, by getting it from outside.
It is this deep human need for sensemaking that populist or fascist leaders or movements address for their own purposes. When we believe them, the world feels safe, seems to make sense again – even if we do not get a coherent system of meaning. They offer a simple explanation (offering someone to blame for…) and simple solution to complex problems – with disinformation, fake-news or “bullshit”, as Harry Frankfurt calls it.
And also the advertising industry uses our need for a meaningful life: they pretend, that by buying all the unnecessary things, we allegedly we buy pleasure, friendships, adventures, whatever we need. And of course by social-media: We hope to get connection, value or being seen – but feel more empty than before. So we easily get hooked because our own sense of meaning is disturbed.
Having and being mode
Relationships, love, and finding meaning needs the being mode, where we are participating in the experience, where we are being changed, transformed. An important differentiation between the having mode and the being mode can help (see also Erich Fromms book: “To have or to be”:
It needs wise awareness and conscious insight to apply these modes in the right place.Finding meaning is only possible in the being mode: by becoming more fulfilled in our soul. By realizing more of our essential potential and by bringing our inner peace, our essential kindness and love, but also our courage into the world.
Being able to differentiate between the having and the being mode is a meta tool: you find meaning more easily, in many areas of your life.
Finding meaning is vital and in many ways crucial to our well-being: We feel nourished and balanced, connected – and we experience the ability to act. The feeling of having no meaning in life makes us vulnerable to depression, addiction and suicide – if my life in this world has no meaning, I might as well cease to exist.
The feeling of disconnection from nature, from ourselves, from others, from our deeper nature is devastating. All that deeply matters to us, that is good, true and beautiful, is then lost to us. Fundamentally, this feels so terrible, because we feel that this is not reality, that we have lost touch with reality.
The longing for truth and reality
John Vervaeke tells about an interesting experiment on being real. He asked his students in a lecture: “How many of you are in satisfying personal relationships?” Quite a few people put up their hands and then I’ll say: “how many of you would want to know that your partner was cheating on you even if that meant the destruction of your relationship?” Almost everybody puts their hand up. They’re willing to destroy this relationship, that’s giving them so much happiness, because they don’t want it to be fake. They want it to be real.“
Reality consists of the truth of interconnectedness, interdependence with everything and everyone. Its often in the midth of deep disruptions that this essential qualities of life emerge, like all the creative and engaged movements and activities in the world right now show.
Reconnecting with nature, with our cherished values, and ultimately with our true, essential nature brings us closer to a deeper reality: we are in touch with our compassionate kindness, our love, our peacefulness, our joy and openness, and our power, which serves care and community.
We begin to marvel at our ability to be conscious and to make meaning – especially when we feel that we have lost it temporarily. We might feel that we have agency: that we can make a difference by bringing more of these much-needed qualities into our relationships and into the world.
And the ability to act is one of the ingredients for successful meaningmaking. This soul movement – which is best experienced in community with others – is a remedy for many aspects of the meaning crisis: it leads to meta-meaning. It´s a meta-tool, just like distinguishing the having mode from the being mode. We then live again in a world that makes sense to us, in which we find meaning.