Life 101, A Wise Man's Advice for Adulthood

Our individual journey can be confusing and complex. This figure, called a labyrinth, has been helpful to me. The Chartres Cathedral in France, built in 1220, has a labyrinth on its floor design.  St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco* has two, one within the walls of the cathedral and one on the grounds outside available to everyone. It is a trail you can walk. At first glance the Labyrinth may appear to be a maze with puzzling alternative turning points, many of which lead to dead ends. But a labyrinth actually has no dead ends. It is one continuous path that does eventually end up at the center, which represents life's ultimate objective or Truth or spiritual fulfillment or God or whatever. Nevertheless, the path of the labyrinth often feels confusing. If you trace the path you'll notice that at first it moves you directly toward the center, but soon you turn off to the left and later to the right. At one time or another you'll move in each of the four directions. ...

Feelings can sometimes motivate good and responsible actions, but they can also impede good actions or motivate irresponsible ones. Feelings need to be felt and understood so that they can become our servants rather than making us slaves. Just as the Age of Reason was a reaction against tendencies toward unthinking superstitions and careless religion, there came to be a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment as well and it was called Romanticism. It affirmed that the human being is more than just a thinking head. Humans are also able to have strong emotions and capable of expressing them in personal relationships and in the arts. In the past three decades or so there has been a resurgence of appreciation for the importance of "getting in touch with our feelings" and expressing them in appropriate ways. All sorts of therapeutic techniques and movements have emerged that have helped us recover this "lost dimension" of our humanness, despite the critical caricatures that...

So far in our search for the Truth about Reality as outlined in these pages we have sounded pretty much rationalistic in our approach, a matter of thinking. Clear thinking is the biggest part of it, but it's not all of it. If we want to know the whole Truth, we must seek it as whole human beings. Our thinking capacities, our mind, our brain, are only part of who we are and how we function. We are also feeling creatures capable of great emotions. There are some people, and have been ever since the rise of what is called The Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason , in 18th century Europe, who tend to think that emotion is the natural enemy of reason and who have utter confidence in the human being's reasoning capacity. The Age of Reason wasn't all bad. It challenged superstition and a lot of patterns of belief that just didn't make any "sense" at all. But this reaction against matters emotional and spiritual went too far. To use a popular image, it "t...

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...