Life 101, A Wise Man's Advice for Adulthood

"Meaning" in terms of personal definition is only part of the search. There is also the question of how I fit with everything else. To ask "What is the meaning of life?" is to ask "How do all things fit together? not only "How do all branches of knowledge and learning form a unified and comprehensible whole?" but "How do the varieties and complexities of experience in life holds together in any kind of discernable pattern?" To ask what is the meaning of my life is to ask "How do I fit in with all else that is in nature and in history? What is my relationship with my family, my community, my country, everything else?" The question is asked out of a desire for wholeness, a need to know that "I fit." The difference between meaning understood as "definition" and meaning understood as "purpose" is like the difference between the meaning of a word and the meaning of a string of words in a sentence. "Div...

MEANING AS "DEFINITION"   (1)  Vaclev Havel  has said,  "The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of life, but that it bothers him less and less."  Perhaps this is because we've thought of the question as an aerobic exercise and we've no time for that. But I believe there is a way to approach and explore the question in an uncomplicated and straightforward manner than sets the trivial overcomplification aside and gets right to the point. It begins with an understanding of the word "meaning" itself.  In the middle of the last century, two Oxford philosophers,  C. K. Ogden  and  I. A. Richards , wrote a book entitled  The Meaning of Meaning  in which they documented no less than sixteen different meanings of the word. Of these sixteen I think there are four directly related to the question we're raising about "the meaning of life." All four of these questions are of absolute importance as we ...

                         "The world is not  a divine sport, it is a divine destiny.  There is divine meaning in the life of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and me."                 --Martin Buber When all is said and done, what is it that people most want in their lives?   Countless answers to that question have been proposed.  Psychologist and founder of psychoanalyses, Sigmund Freud , was convinced that what people wanted most was pleasure .  Alfred Adler , a student of Freud's who later broke away from many of his teachings, claimed that what people really wanted most and struggled for is power .  But it was another Viennese psychiatrist  by the name of Viktor Frankl who proposed what I believe is the nearest thing to a right answer to our question.  He said what...