What is a meaningful life? How does one discover— and live—what is truly important? How do we manage to spend the time of our lives in a way that will finally seem worthwhile?

Quotations
Thoreau
William James
Einstein
Gandhi
Ken Wilber
Rumi
Nelson Mandela
Thomas Merton

Archives

Life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Life’s purpose is to “take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies.”

Two very different views – penned by the same hand.

Shakespeare had the rare capacity to give voice to totally divergent points of view, and in the two quotations above, he succinctly captures one of the great dilemmas of the modern world: Does life have meaning – is there something worthwhile to be about with the limited time we are granted on this earth? Or is our short sojourn on this spinning lump of clay merely an accident, our decisions guided by “nothing but” instinctual drives, whims, and fantasies?

Biologist E. O. Wilson declared that the great battle for the mind of the 21st century would be between transcendentalism and empiricism. The conflict he describes, however, could more accurately be seen as the battle between materialism and religious fundamentalism, between those who argue that there is nothing beyond the material realm, and those who respond that there most certainly is – and they alone are the ones who know “The Truth” about it.

Most humans in the past did not have to face this divide so starkly, for they lived in cultures that assured them of life’s meaning and purpose, cultures that also supplied a common set of values by which to pursue the anointed ends. But the seismic eruptions of the last few centuries have cast more and more of us out of Eden – into a world that questions all beliefs and values and meanings. In the face of this expulsion from the garden, what shall we (both as individuals and as communities) do?

One response is to attempt to return to the garden – fiercely defending the old beliefs – in spite of the accumulated evidence that parts of those answers no longer serve. Another approach is to put one’s faith in the denial of all the old stories, rejecting any claim concerning the existence of the sacred as illusory and false – despite the severe consequences of such a position. (As Abraham Maslow warned, “without the transcendent and the transpersonal we get sick – or else hopeless and apathetic.  We need something ‘bigger than we are’ to be awed by and to commit ourselves to.”)

So is there another way – a path that honors the hard-won knowledge of the modern world, yet recognizes the value and significance of the wisdom contained in the sacred traditions of the world, a way to “take upon us the mystery of things” without adopting a fundamentalist position?

If such a path exists, it is more likely to be found through humility and open-mindedness than through participation in the debate between the above-mentioned warring camps. So let us explore the possibility that the sacred dimension has an important role to play in our lives, but that discovering that territory lies not in adopting the categories and definitions of the fundamentalists or the materialists, but in exploring that broad middle ground a number of wisdom figures through the ages have urged us to discover for ourselves.

From earliest times, many of the best and brightest among us have counseled that we avoid the dangers of extremism, and seek instead the path of poise, balance, and harmony. In ancient Greece, taking this middle path was considered a great virtue, known as the Golden Mean. Socrates taught that a man "must know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side” – which he declared would lead to beauty, harmony, and an experience of “the good.” Aristotle spoke of the Golden Mean as the rational and virtuous path between the many excesses into which we mortals so easily fall. And in story form, Homer recounted the journey of Odysseus, who had to navigate the passage between Scylla and Carybdis – had to find the middle way between the great dangers threatening on either side of his treacherous path.

In ancient China “The Doctrine of the Golden Mean” held a central place. It was believed that life was filled with opposites, but that each extreme contained the seeds of the other, and only in finding the proper balance between these extremes could one develop a good and harmonious life. This idea led Confucius to entitle one of his major works The Doctrine of the Mean – in which he described why, and how, one might choose to walk this middle path.

Jesus, in his many parables and sayings, often suggested that we should avoid the extremes: 1) we should neither hoard what we have, nor should we waste it; 2) we should not slavishly follow the rules of society (telling his followers to harvest what they needed for sustenance even on the Sabbath), nor should we overly rebel against society’s laws (give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s); 3) we should stand up for what is right (throwing the money changers out of the temple), but we should also accept the anger and violence of others without fighting back (turn the other cheek); 4) we should sometimes speak out concerning the wrongs we see around us (criticizing the actions of the Sadducees and Pharisees), yet we should also forgive our enemies; 5) we should not condemn others (saying to the crowd who brought the adulterer before him, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her”), yet we should also stand up for right conduct (after all her accusers had departed, he said to her “go, and sin no more).” All these and many other examples that could be given point to a fine sense of balance between the extremes in the teachings of Jesus.

And the Buddha, after having lived his early life in luxury - protected from the problems of the world – spent many years experimenting with the most extreme forms of asceticism, renouncing for long periods the most basic human needs (shelter from the elements, and even sufficient food to eat). But he eventually rejected both ease of life and excessive asceticism – declaring that his teaching was that of the Middle Way – the way between such extremes.

It seems to me that most people have a natural instinct toward this Golden Mean, yet often the debate over life’s issues is framed by the definitions and categories of the extremists. Those seeking answers to life’s questions with a bit of humility are often drowned out and pushed aside by the extremists’ intensity, for they are often more vocal, more passionate, and more strident. As the poet W. B. Yeats put it:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Which for Yeats was the cause of this chilling glimpse of the world:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

In the modern world, the most passionate and outspoken concerning life’s meaning and purpose are the Materialists and the Fundamentalists (capitalized here to suggest how these two words have come to stand for competing belief systems and worldviews – two ways of understanding the nature of the world and our lives in it. In other words, two competing metaphysical systems).

The worldview of Fundamentalism starts with the belief that there is some organizing principle or force or power beyond the material realm. (Up to this point, agreeing with the vast majority of humans who have ever lived.) But Fundamentalists go one step further, asserting that only they have the “one true way” to understand this organizing principle or power. In the world today, there are of course many different Fundamentalist belief systems, holding radically different views from each other. But they have in common the belief that they, and only they, have the “one right way” to understand what the world is like and what life is about.

Materialism contends that when the world came into existence many billions of years ago, the only thing that came into existence was matter – and these tiny bits of matter, acting randomly, just happened by chance to fall together in such a way as to create planets, and whales, and rain forests, and humans, and consciousness. From these tiny bits of matter, everything arose, including consciousness. This consciousness arose as a byproduct of biochemical and electrical processes in the brain, but it has no meaning beyond its usefulness for survival – in fact, there is no meaning beyond survival. We have biological drives in us that arose completely by chance – drives for sex, for pleasure, for food, for comfort – and these drives are sufficient to explain all human actions and emotions. Any claim of a higher purpose in life, of deeper meanings, of values arising from a ground of truth – of anything transcendent to the material realm – all these are just fantasies.

These two definitions are presented here in simplistic terms, and few would admit to holding either of them as presented in such stark relief. But these two worldviews have been engaged in a ferocious debate with each other for several hundred years, breaking out at various times and in various ways all over the world. Using these simplified definitions, it is fascinating to focus carefully on the public discourse all over the world about many different issues, and to hear just how often these two points of view appear in and affect the debates. They creep into the arguments of even the most reasonable among us, and when they do, they inevitably carry us away from the domain of the sacred.

Given the intensity of the debate between these two metaphysical systems, it would be easy to assume that most people belong to one or the other of these camps – but nothing could be further from the truth. As mentioned before, most people seem to have a natural inclination toward the wisdom of the Middle Way – the Golden Mean – yet the voices of this large middle group are often over-shadowed by the strident and shrill claims of the two extreme camps.

Differing from the Materialists, those on this Middle Path feel that there is some organizing principle or force or power beyond the purely material – whether it be called God, or Great Spirit, or Tao, or Consciousness, or Ayin, or the World of Forms, or Brahma, or the Great Way, or Allah, or Buddha-nature, or the Evolutionary Impulse, or Intelligent Design. They tend to think that some values exist beyond pure self-interest, and that there might be some meaning to life beyond simply fulfilling one’s immediate whims.

Differing from the Fundamentalists, proponents of this Middle Way have the humility to understand that what they believe might not capture the whole truth, and that their current beliefs might not be complete and final. They leave open the possibility that their wisdom and understanding will continue to grow, develop, and change as they grow older – and perhaps wiser. They therefore resist, to some extent at least, the very human urge to be dogmatic about what they believe, and are willing to allow room for others to hold differing views. They can respect the beliefs of others, while at the same time honoring the beliefs they themselves hold dear. This openness creates a clear line of demarcation with the Fundamentalist position.