Viktor Frankl: On a Meaningful Life

"Time that has passed is certainly irrevocable, but what has happened within that time is unassailable and inviolable. Passing time is therefore not only a thief, but a trustee. Any philosophy which keeps in mind the transitoriness of existence need not be at all pessimistic."

"To express this figuratively we might say: The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who takes life in the sense suggested above is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors. He can then reflect back with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the full."

"What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that young person has, the future that is in store for him? "No thank you," he will think. "Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past - not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of suffering suffered. These are the things of which I am most proud - though these are things that cannot inspire envy.""

"All that is good and beautiful in the past is safely preserved in the past. On the other hand, so long as life remains, all guilt and all evil is still redeemable."

-- Viktor Frankl --
("The Doctor and the Soul, pp. 33-34.)

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A new study released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("CDC") shows that approximately 25 per cent of Americans suffered from some form of mental illness last year, at a cost in terms of treatment and lost productivity in excess of $300 billion. Moreover, the CDC predicts that fully half of all Americans will suffer from some form of mental illness - ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder to depression to suicide - at some point in their lifetimes. Indeed, 8.4 million Americans reported having suicidal thoughts in 2010, 2.2 million made plans to kill themselves, and 1 million attempted suicide.

Why, one asks, in a country devoted to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are Americans so evidently and profoundly unhappy?

The answer may be that the United States, more than nearly any other developed country, suffers from a common post-modern malaise, from a crisis of meaninglessness that only accentuates deeply flawed human thought structures. Alienated from their inner life and faced with the unraveling of a fictitious "American" dream, one wonders if Americans in the early 21st century are not suffering from the same sense of anomie that Emile Durckheim, the father of modern sociology, associated with increased suicide rates amongst nineteenth century Europeans citizens disaffected from their societies following epidemics and dislocations resulting from war.

"The achievements of humanity are impressive and undeniable," notes Eckhart Tolle in his best-seller, "A New Earth," observing that the human mind has proven itself to be "highly intelligent" particularly in the arts, technology, and science. "Yet," he notes, "its very intelligence is tainted by madness."

Moreover, he notes, "(s)cience and technology have magnified the destructive impact that the dysfunction of the human mind has upon the planet, other lifeforms, and upon humans themselves. That is why the history of the twentieth century is where that dysfunction, that collective insanity, can be most clearly recognized. A further factor," he points out, "is that this dysfunction is actually intensifying and accelerating."

"The collective manifestation of the insanity that lies at the heart of the human condition," writes Tolle, "constitute the greater part of human history. It is to a large extent a history of madness."

"If the history of humanity were the clinical case history of a single human being," Tolle points out, "the diagnosis would have to be: chronic paranoid delusions, a pathological propensity to commit murder and acts of extreme violence and cruelty against his perceived "enemies" - his own unconsciousness projected outward. Criminally insane, with a few brief lucid intervals."

Such a collective diagnosis is far from exaggerated. If you do not recognize it, Tolle suggests that you watch the evening news, with its daily tales of war, terrorism, violence and mayhem, our collective madness is all too apparent.

With societies the world over hitting new lows in terms of their compassion for the individual, each other and the planet as a whole, is it any wonder that Americans mired in two apparently unresolvable wars, massive dislocations caused by financial hardship and unemployment, and with no end apparently in sight, are feeling blue? And yet, little or nothing is being done about it. If one in four Americans were suffering from an incurable and life threatening virus, one can assume that all the stops would be pulled out to find a cure. But is it possible, one wonders, to solve the problems of societal disintegration and looming crises portended by these skyrocketing rates of mental illness within the currently existing societal paradigms? Is time running out?

It was Einstein who famously said one cannot solve one's problems with the same level of thinking that created them. Tolle, too, clearly acknowledge that our current thinking is the problem, and that we cannot get to the solution utilizing that same mode of thinking that got us here.

(For more on Tolle's views on our "collective insanity" and the problems created by a strictly "consumer society", please listen to the audiobook readings from "A New Earth," below.)

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The Pursuit of Happiness Re-Examined

"The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Some of those situations may no doubt deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice."

-- Adam Smith --
("The Theory of Moral Sentiments")

Would you really be happy if you won the lottery? What if, instead, you had an horrific accident and were rendered parapalegic? Faced with these two "permanent situations" is it possible that we could really over-rate the difference between these two seemingly diametrically opposed outcomes?

It turns out that we do, according to research by psychiatrist, Dan Gilbert. Surprisingly, one year after an inarguably life-changing event, both lottery winners and parapalegics report the exact same level of happiness with their lives. By virtue of our anatomy alone, Gilbert explains in the attached video, humans have an unbelievable capacity to synthesize happiness. The trouble is, few of us (a) know it, or (b) know how to tap into it.

This is perhaps not so surprising, given that in our consumer society we are taught (incorrectly) that attaining happiness lies in the acquisition of exterior things, and that permanent happiness can be found through such acquisition. Gilbert looks at the the thought processes that goes into acquiring goods and the phenomenon of buyer's remorse in order to demonstrate the innate potential we all have for being either happy - or profoundly unhappy.

"Some things are better than others," Gilbert observes. "We should have perferences that lead us into one future over another."

"But," he cautions, "when those preferences drive us too hard or too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk."

"When our ambition is bounded," he notes, "it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we are prudent, we are caution, we are thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we are reckless and we are cowardly."

"Our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown," Gilbert concludes, "because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity (i.e., happiness) we are constantly chasing when we choose experience."

Ecstasy and Being 'In the Flow'

In the attached video lecture from TED.com, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi examines the state of ecstasy people experience when they are "in the flow." Ecstasy itself, he explains, in the original Greek meant to stand outside of one's self, and "then it became essentially an analogy for a mental state where you feel that you are not doing your everyday routines. "

"Ecstasy," therefore, Csikszentmihalyi observes, " is essentially stepping into an alternative reality."

Examining the inner lives of composers, poets, athletes and business leaders who have consciously experienced being "in the flow" he notes that all focus on peripheral things drops away because there is not enough capacity to take in these externalities while being so tightly focused on the ecstasy-producing activity. "Existence, itself," he notes, "is temporarily suspended."

A poet explained the ecstatic "state of flow" experience in the following terms to one of Csikszentmihalyi's research assistants:

"It's like opening a door that's floating in the middle of nowhere and all you have to do is go and turn the handle and open it and let yourself sink into it. You can't particularly force yourself through it You just have to float. If there's any gravitational pull, its from the outside world trying to keep you back from the door."

Combining the research into such peak experiences amongst athletes, artists, contemplatives, innovators and leaders of all stripes, Csikszentmihalyi sets out seven characteristics of how it feels to be "in the flow" in the following list:

1. Completely involved in what we are doing - focused, concentrated.
2. A sense of ecstasy - of being outside everyday reality.
3. Great inner clarity - knowing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing.
4. Knowing that the activity is doable - that our skills are adequate to the task.
5. A sense of serenity - no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.
6. Timelessness - thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by in minutes.
7. Intrinsic motivation - whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.

With the aid of the following chart, Csikszentmihalyi explains that the state of "flow" typically occurs when difficult challenges are met using a highly developed skill set. The "flow state," he notes, is most often entered from a state of "arousal" - i.e., where very challenging tasks push the limit of one's skills - or, less frequently, from a very "controlled" state, where a highly developed skills set is being used to meet and overcome progressively more difficult challenges.

It is no mere coincidence that the characteristics of the "flow state" that Csikszentmihalyi describes are virtually identical with the peak experiences of mystics, for the mystic is ever-seeking that state of ecstatic union with the Wholeness, Godhead, or Ground of Being which results in a higher, dilated consciousness and an expansiveness of being - all characteristics of what Csikszentmihalyi would describe as being "in the flow."

"There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds," Rumi cautions. "Don't think all ecstasies are the same!"

Know Thyself!: The Hidden Dimension of Consciousness

"Know Thyself!" is the great admonishment behind all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions, for it seems that virtually all such traditions acknowledge that there is the small "self" or "ego" which we take to be "who" we are, and a hidden, transcendental "higher Self" which, though obscured by the ego's narrative, is the very essence of our being.

"Most people," observes the great psychologist, Carl Jung, "confuse "self-knowledge" with knowledge of their conscious ego personalities. Anyone who has ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents."

"People," he points out, "measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body with its physiological and anatomical structure, of which the average person knows very little too. Although he lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to the layman, and special scientific knowledge is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to speak of all this is not known, which also exists."

"What is commonly called "self-knowledge"," he notes, "is therefore a very limited knowledge, most of it dependent on social factors of what goes on in the human psyche. Hence one is always coming up against the prejudice that such and such a thing does not happen "with us" or "in our family" or among our friends and acquaintances, and on the other hand, one meets with illusory assumptions about the alleged presence of qualities whcih merely serve to cover up the true facts of the case."

"In this broad band of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control," he warns, "we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know what it is that is attacking us, and how, where and when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual facts, theories help very little in this respect. For the more a theory lays claim to universal validity the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts."

[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self," pp. 14-16.]

In "How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali" (written with Christopher Isherwood), Swami Prabhavanada notes that "(t)he external world even in its most beautiful appearances and noblest manifestations, is still superficial and transient. It is not the basic Reality. We must look through it, not at it, in order to see the Atman" (or true nature of our being). In short, we need to be "in the world" but not "of the world," as great sages and philosophers have told us since time immemorial.

"The mind of the truly illumined man is calm," Prabhavananda observes, "not because he is selfishly indifferent to the needs of others, but because he knows the peace of the Atman within all things, even within the appearance of misery, disease, strife and want."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," p. 24.]

But how to know this non-conflictive and acceptive consciousness of our inner being? Through introspection, self-examination and meditation is the answer found in virtually all traditions.

"(M)editation," Prabhavananda observes, "is evolution in reverse. Meditation is a process of devolution. Beginning at the surface of life," he explains, "the meditative mind goes inward, seeking always the cause being the appearance, and then the cause behind the cause, until the innermost Reality is reached."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," p. 41.]

Thus, to "Know Thyself!" one must move beyond the small "self" of the ego to the transcendental "Self" of one's own inner being.

Burying the Spiritual Instincts of the Unconscious

"Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so . . . "

 -- William Shakespeare --
("Hamlet," Act 2, Scene II)

Conscious thought, that great ability of humanity, can be - as Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - "a prison." Lost in our cloying thoughts and judgments, we make a virtual prison out of this world's reality wholly through our thinking. A point recognized in all the world's great wisdom teachings and philosophies.

A more-or-less contemporary accounting of this universal truth was provided by Carl Jung in "The Undiscovered Self," his enlightening look at our conscious and unconscious thinking processes. In it, Jung discusses how the intellect endangers us by wholly obscuring the spiritual instinct that is buried within our very being.

"Nothing," Jung observes, "estranges man more from the ground plan of his instincts than his learning capacity, which turns out to be a genuine drive towards progressive transformations of human modes of behavior. It, more than anything else, is responsible for the altered conditions of our existence and the need for new adaptations which civilization brings. It is also the source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties occasioned by man's progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious."

"Separation from his instinctual nature," Jung continues, "inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side."

"There is," he notes, "an unconscious psychic reality which demonstrably influences consciousness and its content. All this is known, but no practical conclusions have been drawn from it. . . . We do not think of distrusting our motives or of asking ourselves how the inner man feels about the things we do in the outside world. But actually it is frivolous, superficial and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the unconscious."

 "We are the origin of all coming evil," warns Jung, in the attached video. And, it is our "thinking without awareness" (as Eckhart Tolle expresses it), our reliance on conscious thought to the utter neglect of our unconscious and its spiritual instincts, which both imprisons and threatens us through a crisis in consciousness. "Nothing is either good or bad," as Hamlet notes, "but our thinking makes it so."

"The Work' of Byron Katie

"Life comes out of your imagination. Life is a mirrored image of what you imagine to be true,' says enlightened spiritual teacher, Byron Katie. '

The Work,' as Katie calls her process of examining and re-orienting the thoughts of the mind, is a genuine liberation practice that has changed hundreds of thousand of lives, helping its practitioners to carve a different path through a world of hurt and pain.

In a two-hour audiostream special on Global One TV, Katie takes the viewer through a tour of her doing 'the Work' with a number of audience participants in different venues, dealing with a host of issues from prejudice to resentment and fear, and from the need for approval to the feeling of being unloved and unappreciated.

Watch live streaming video from globalonetv at livestream.com

"You know those people that are so cold?," Katie asks. "They're innocent. They are believing their thoughts."

"You know those people that have been so mean to you?," she asks. "They have to be. They are believing their thoughts about you, about the world."

"You know the things you do that you're so sorry for?," Katie continues. "Those things you regret? Those things that you experience guilt over? If you go back and you look at what you were believing before you did what you did, you will see clearly that you had no choice. Zero! And whatever you were believing before you did it," she notes, "you still believe. And you will do it again. Only you will just be a little more subtle about it so that you don't get caught so obviously next time.

And, so," she observes, "we become so secretive . . . so painful."

Katie offers those who practice 'the Work' an opportunity to examine their life stories, to see where they would be without that story, and to turn that story around so that they see who they could become without their story.

"I know the taste of freedom," Katie boldly states. "I know what that is. And if you don't love your world, I invite you to question what you believe about the world."

'Mindsight' and the Science of Mental Well-Being

"Mindsight is the ability of the human mind to see itself. It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner lives with more clarity, tranform the brain, and enhance our relationships with other."

-- Dr. Dan Siegel --

In one of the more insightful videos in an already insightful series of Google  TechTalks (below), Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., Co-Director of the UCLA Medical Center's Mindful Awareness Research Center and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, goes where many other mind scientists refuse to go and defines what the 'mind' is. He then takes his audience through a fascinating and informative tour of the brain, highlighting how 'mindfulness' enhances brain function and increases mental and physical health.

Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.

"You'd be amazed," says Dr. Siegel, "but a lot of people live there lives just having thoughts, feelings, beliefs and attitudes, having hopes and dreams, and memories and perceptions - all the stuff we can use to describe the mind - but they haven't developed the capacity to actually observe those mental activities as the flow of energy and information, as the mind itself."

"That process of being able to see mental activity with more clarity and then modify it with more efficacy is something you can name with the word 'mindsight,' he says, defining 'mindsight' as "the ability to actually see your mind, not just have one."

"When you look at different areas of research what you find is that when 'mindsight' is present, various ways of understanding mental health are also present. There is something about being able to see and influence your internal world that creates more health."

 Dr. Siegel, a developmental psychiatrist by training, then takes his audience through the paradigm-shifting case of the family of a woman whose middle pre-frontal cortex was permanently damaged in a tragic car accident; a woman who, in essence, said that she had "lost her soul."

Pre-Frontal Cortex

Siegel describes how the middle pre-frontal cortex of the brain regulates the body, attunes communication, optimizes the flow of emotional balance, inhibits fear, gives an individual the ability to pause before acting (response flexibility), and gives the individual insight (auto-noetic consciousness), self-knowing awareness, the capacity for empathy, the capacity for morality, as well as compassion and intuition, or introception (the ability to 'be in touch with the feelings of the body' that controls the individual's ability to have empathy).

"A healthy mind emerges from integrated systems. Integration, (being) very clearly defined as the linkage of differentiated parts," says Siegel. "So that when you have a nervous system that is integrated you get these nine functions," both in the individual and the family, as well as in larger groups.

In the practice of mindful meditation, notes Siegel, there is a 2,500 year tradition of specific mental training to develop mindfulness traits, and a tradition which is designed to develop all nine systems, centered in the middle pre-frontal cortex. "We have every reason to believe that what you are doing in (practicing meditation), says Siegel, "is strengthening the integrative fibers of the brain, in particular the middle pre-frontal areas."

Thus, he concludes, practicing meditation affects both the ability to approach problem areas in life that the meditator once withdrew from, as well as  improving his or her the immune system. "But," he cautions, "(t)he mind uses the brain to create itself, and if the pathways aren't there, the mind can't do it."

Rupert Sheldrake on 'The Extended Mind'

"We don't know how consciousness works, or what it does," says controversial biologist, Rupert Sheldrake. "This is one of the things which in science is called 'the hard problem,' because there is no known reason why we should be conscious at all, or exactly how the mind works."

"What I'm going to suggest," says Sheldrake, in a fascinating Google TechTalk, "is that our minds are field-like, that they are not confined to the inside of the head, that they spread out into the environment around us. And because our minds are extended beyond our brains, they can have effects at a distance."

"I'm suggesting, he says "that minds are field-like and spread out beyond brains in a similar way to the way that magnetic fields spread out beyond magnets, cell phone fields spread out beyond cell phones, and the Earth's gravitational field stretches out far beyond the Earth. These fields are within and around the systems that they organize, and I think the same is true of our brains."

Taking vision as an example, Sheldrake suggests that the mind is more than just the bio-chemical processes within the brain, that what we 'see' is not just an internal re-creation of an externality within the brain, but rather that the mind projects what we 'see' out to where it 'exists' in space-time.

Rupert Sheldrake

"I'm suggesting," says Sheldrake, "our whole visual experience of the world is projected out to where it seems to be. Our minds are projecting out all that we see.  So vision is a two-way process, light coming in and the outward projection of images. This, I suggest happens through . . . a perceptual field. . . . It is a field phenomenon, and in a sense your mind reaches out to 'touch' what you are looking at. The image of what you are seeing is superimposed on what is really there."

Because of this 'superimposition,' Sheldrake, who has developed a much larger theory of consciousness and what he calls 'morphic fields,' suggests that by looking at an object we can affect that object. In recounting a series of innovative experiments involving, amongst other phenomena, 'the sense of being stared at,' Sheldrake makes a convincing argument that the mind is, indeed, larger and more encompassing than the mere physical brain.

Einstein called the quantum phenomenon of 'non-locality' - or the entanglement of particles at a distance - "spooky." One wonders what he would have made of Sheldrake's findings. Would the preeminent scientist of the 'New Physics' have found Sheldrake's results 'spookier' still, or would it perhaps have spurred the great theorist on to bridge the continuing divides between quantum theory and relativity?

Sages: Paul Brunton on the East and West

"When the iron bird flies, and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will  be scattered like ants across the World, and the Dharma will come to the land of red-faced people."

-- Padma Sambhava --
[Eighth-century Indian guru; founder
of Tibet's first Buddhist monastery]

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Paul Brunton (1892-1981)

From age to age, and on all continents that were occupied by humankind, there have been great sages bearing messages of radical non-duality. Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisagardatta were two such sages from our modern era, and the relatively little-known philosopher Paul Brunton, a student of both, was another.

In speaking of the world's great sages (see the attached video, below), Brunton wrote:

"The world should be more grateful for the presence of such men. The good they do is mostly indirect, however, through intermediaries, or mostly hidden because psychological, so it escapes the world's notice.

Further, in speaking of the interplay between Eastern spiritual traditions and the "materialistic" West, Brunton wrote:

"We Westerners ought to be humbler than we usually are in confessing that we need to borrow some spiritual bread from the Orient today, as we did long ago. We ought also to be humble enough to confess those defects in our civilization and culture which arise from our emphasis on the quest for material wealth or livelihood. But, this said, let us firmly reject the absurd exaggerations of those Orientals who accuse us of a materialism so gross that we are unable to respond to spiritual urges at all. This is nonsense. It is true that the Oriental's basic instinct moves toward religion. But, in this modern era, this instinct is being overlaid with those same urges which have made the West what it is today. The same process overtook medieval Europe. Let us all, then, face the truth about what is really happening to us, both here and there, to all races alike. For make no mistake: it is a universal phenomenon."

"When the era of science overtook the West, the era or reason applied to mechanical development and external institutions, the push towards it was so great, the rewards so attractive, that we lost much of our balance. The East is being drawn in the same direction, the chief difference being that it has started later in time, and same push is beginning to appear all over the East. Will it not lead ultimately to the same defects? Not quite, for the Easterner has the spectacle of our own lopsidedness to warn him whereas we had no living example to provide us with such a lesson. What is the meaning behind this universal process? For we cannot believe it to be accidental in a divinely ordered world?"

"Philosophy answers that it is a fated evolution that man everywhere is intended to develop his intelligence and refine his feelings in all directions. If it is not materialism to attend to physical matters, to work for one's livelihood, to seek the comforts and conveniences of applied science or even the beautiful homes of applied art. Man is a growing creature: his reasoned thinking demands that he seek the one, and his aesthetic feeling demands that he seek the other. The materialism enters when to get these things, we forget the daily need of prayer and meditation, of listening for the voice of moral conscience and heeding the laws of spiritual balance."

["The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," vol. 10, "The Orient," pp. 16-17]

 Noting the then already-evident Western interest in Eastern wisdom traditions, Brunton writes:

"There is wider general interest in these subtle Oriental ideas than ever before but there is not much evidence of wider general willingness to practice with fervour the goodwill, the forbearance, and the compassion without which those ideas are half-dead, bereft of their best values."

["The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," vol. 10, "The Orient," p. 35]

And, on the convergence of the Western scientific vision, with Eastern metaphysical traditions, Brunton observes:

"When the scientific wisdom of the West unites with the mystic wisdom of the East, we shall arrive at truth."

["The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," vol. 10, "The Orient," p. 57]

Viktor Frankl: From Suffering and Death to a Life Fully Lived

"When a man finds it is his destiny to suffer he will have to accept suffering as His Task, his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his stead. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden."

Viktor E. Frankl, "From Death Camp to Existentialism"

For those not familiar with the literary and psychological works of Viktor Frankl, a brief recounting of some crucial moments of his life story may shed light on the length and difficulties this remarkable man faced on his spiritual road from Holocaust survivor to eminent psychological theorist.

Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1997 )

In September of 1942, the newly graduated young doctor, his new bride, his mother, father, and brother, were arrested in Vienna and taken to a concentration camp in Bohemia.  It was events that occurred there and at three other camps that led the young doctor - prisoner 119,104 - to realize the significance of meaningfulness in life.

One of the earliest events to drive home the point was the loss of a manuscript - his life's work - during his transfer to Auschwitz.  He had sewn it into the lining of his coat, but was forced to discard it at the last minute.  He spent many later nights trying to reconstruct it, first in his mind, then on slips of stolen paper.

 Frankl along with 1,500 prisoners on a Geman cattle train pulled into a Polish switching yard. "Everyone's heart missed a beat at that moment," Frankl recalls. "Auschwitz -- the very name stood for all that was horrible: gas chambers, crematoriums, massacres. Slowly, almost hesitatingly, the train moved on as if it wanted to spare its passengers the dreadful realization as long as possible. Auschwitz!"

With the "fateful selection process" designating a person either to turn to the left and live, or to turn to the right and die, Frankl was spared the too-soon fate of those pointed to the right - the billowing crematoria that ran 24 hours a day at Auschwitz, and through which the earthly remains of some 1.2 million souls would ultimately pass.

Then, after this first and most essential reprieve, along with the remaining few who turned left Frankl was forced to run a gauntlet through electrified barbed wire to a showering station where they were stripped of virtually every possession they had left.  Though he tried to bargain for his precious manuscript he saw that this was fruitless and tossed it along with his clothes into the growing pile of personal possessions on the floor of the changing room to the showering shed.

"At that moment," Frankl recalls, "I saw the plain truth and did what marked the culminating point of the first phase of my psychological reaction: I struck out my whole former life."

Unlike his young wife, parents and brother, Frankl survived the war against all the odds and was able to rewrite his thesis, this time based upon the scraps of paper which outlined the profound and varied reactions that he had witnessed - both in himself and in others - to the unremitting physical and existential suffering that were the backdrop to their daily lives.



Ultimately, while Frankl posits three specific ways that an individual may come to find meaning in his or her life - through one's life work, through one's love for another, or through overcoming suffering - he notes that this generalization of itself does little good, as "the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour."

"What matters, therefore," says Frankl, "is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of life at a given moment."

"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked, In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life  by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."

 Thus, he urges:

"Live as if you were living already for the second time, and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!" It seems to me that there is nothing that would stimulate a man's sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is passed, and that the past may yet be changed and amended. Such a precept confronts him with life's finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself.

[Viktor E. Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning," p.131]

 "Live as if you were living already for the second time. . ." Is this not the existential equivalent of "die before dieing," the age-old precept and advice of the spiritual masters and sages of all ages, cultures and continents?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * 

The following audio excerpt is from the first chapter of Viktor Frankl's most famous work, "Man's Search for Meaning," the story of Frankl's insights gained in a series of Nazi concentration camps, and an outline of "logotherapy," his psychological theory of existentialism, suffering and ultimate meaning.




The remainder of "Man's Search for Meaning" is available here as an "audio book" on Youtube.

Why Intellect Alone Cannot Attain Higher Consciousness

David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.

One of the most unheralded and "under-the-radar" enlightenment teachers is David R. Hawkins. Hawkins experienced what by any measures was an authentic enlightenment experience as a young man, as recounted in his first book, "Power vs. Force: An Anatomy of Consciousness." Moreover, as a medical doctor who enjoyed a long and successful career as a psychoanalyst while staying mum about his spiritual awakening, Hawkins brings a critical and scientific perspective to bear on the discussion of higher states of consciousness and spirituality.

The author of a four general, yet in-depth, books about the nature of higher states of consciousness and "enlightenment," together with several more scientific treatises on the same subject matter (including,  "Ortheomolecular Psychiatry," authored with multiple Nobel-laureate chemist and peace activist, Linus Pauling), Hawkins explains the long silence on his own enlightenment in the following manner:

"In this case, nothing was said about it for more than thirty years during which time there progressively arose the capacity to dissimilate as normalcy and function in the world. There was no one to whom such a condition would be comprehensible. Only twice were there meetings with known sages who comprehended the condition. The first was Muktananda, and later, Ramesh Balkesar. There was another such meeting on the streets of New York City that was mutually anonymous but total and complete."

The path of enlightenment is, as has been said, a lonely path. "The harvest truly is plentiful, but the labourers are few." (Matt. 9:37)

Like Swami Muktananda, Ramesh Balkesar and the long-line of sages that preceded them (Vedantists and non-Vedantists, alike), Hawkins points to the inherent dualism and illusion of the small "self" or "ego" as the impediment to the attainment of our true nature, what he calls the "I" that underlies our supposed 'reality.' And, in order to shed the dualism of the ego and achieve a consciousness of God, he (like all other enlightened seers) stresses that it is imperative - and possible - to sever the ego's attachhments:

". . . (A)ttachments can be to either content or context, as well as to intended or hoped-for results. to undo a difficult positionality, it may be necessary to disassemble it and then surrender its elements. the payoff that is holding an attachment in place may be that it provides a feeling of security or pleasure; the pride of 'being right'; comfort or satisfaction; loyalty to some group, family, or tradition; avoidance of the fear of the unknown, etc.

 When belief systems are examined, they turn out to be based on presumptions that are prevalent in society, such as right versus wrong or good versus bad. For instance, "I have to have chocolate ice cream" (content) "and then I'll be happy" (context) is based on another positionality, that the source of happiness is outside oneself and has to be 'gotten' (in overall context). All these propositions indicate a series of dependencies (e.g., the Buddha's Law of Dependent Contingencies or Dependent Origination), and when they are surrendered, the source of happiness is found to be in the joy of existence itself, in this very moment and, beyond that in the source of one's existence - God.

Attachments are to illusions. They can be surrendered out of one's love for God, which inspires the willingness to let go of that which is comfortably familiar."
        ("I: Reality and Subjectivity," Veritas Publishing, West Sedona, AZ: 2003, pp. 352-353)

Hawkin's detailed analysis of the enlightened state, and the path to enlightenment, is not for the casual aspirant or dilettante - flouting the "presumptions that are prevalent in society" is not for the casual spiritual seeker, but rather for those who are, indeed, fully committed to their own liberation and to reaching the 'other shore' of the vast expanse of ordinary consciousness. Yet Hawkin's works are an insightful, reassuring, psychologically sound and invaluable trove of insights for the dedicated, modern aspirant on that oft-times lonely path.

Physics, Spirituality and 'the Structure of Consciousness'

Quantum Fluctuations by Kevin Moore

Arthur I. Miller's book, 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession, traces the evolution of the relationship between Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Carl Jung, arguably, the West's most influential psychoanalyst. What started as a patient-therapist relationship quickly morphed into a partnership of metaphysical exploration.

The volume immediately caught my eye in my local bookshop not-so-much because of its subject matter - interesting though it may be - but, rather, because of a memorable passage from Gary Zhukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a now-classic treatise on the convergence of modern physics, metaphysics and the world's oldest wisdom traditions.

The memorable passage which had stuck with me from my first reading of the Wu Li Masters was the following passage on the fundamental nature of quantum physics that features the parallel views  Pauli and Jung held on the true nature of 'reality':

"According to quantum mechanics there is no such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself. Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way round.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, wrote:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.

 Jung's friend, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, put it this way:

From an inner center the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world . . . 

"If these men are correct," Zhukav so memorably wrote, "then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness." [Emphasis added.]

Now why didn't high school physics start with that remarkable proposition rather than with the rote repetition of Galileo's experiments with falling bodies? That would have caught my attention!

The great theoretical physicist, Richard Freeman, reportedly said, "If you think you understand quantum physics, then you don't understand quantum physics. (The bongo-playing polymath also reportedly said, "If you think you understand quantum physics, you've got rocks in your head!")

The quantum world is apparently beyond (and antithetical to) our human comprehension because our language and mere existence in the 'ordinary world' of our conscious existence prohibits us from envisioning the indeterminate and radically interconnect nature of basic reality - a 'proven' reality where everything is composed of discrete 'quanta' of energy, yet where there is no such entity as a separate "thing."

Whether there is, in fact (and I believe there is), a limit beyond which our ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate the "suchness" of what "is" - to use a famous Buddhist description of fundamental reality - it is truly remarkable how the phenemona and explanations of quantum theory echo the conclusions of the world's most ancient wisdom traditions; conclusions which are themselves impossible to fully penetrate with "ordinary" consciousness. Hence, the search for "enlightenment" which has remained a fundamental concern and pursuit of humankind since we first walked out of the mists of time.

Zhukav's assertion that "physics has become the study of the structure of consciousness" is tantalizing because at once it seems to unite the three great streams of humankind's pursuit of knowledge: the sciences (which are all rooted in physics), the social sciences (that are all, in their fundamental aspects, sub-systems of psychology), and the humanities (which highest discipline is metaphysics).

Zhukav concludes his exposition of the 'New Physics' - which admittedly does not cover the most-cutting edge of quantum theory, such as "superstring theory" - by examining the profound implications of Bell's theorem and the work of quantum theorist David Bohm (who was a unique participant in the "dialogues" of Jiddhu Krishnamurti, one of the 20th-century's rare, enlightened masters).

In the closing pages of the Wu Li Masters, Zhukav, initially quoting Bohm, observes:

"Matter is a form of the implicate order as vortex is a form of the water - it is not reducible to smaller parts." Like "matter" and everything else, particles are forms of the implicate order. If this is difficult to grasp, it is because our minds demand to know, "What is the 'implicate order' the implicate order of?"

"A new instrument of thought such as is needed to understand Bohm's physics," Zhukav writes, "would radically alter the consciousness of the observer, reordering it towards the perception of the "unbroken wholeness" of which everything is a form."

The relationship of form with the formless, the reordering and submergence of ordinary human consciousness within universal consciousness, and the description of ultimate reality and our relationship to it, are the elements of all the world's great religious, spiritual and metaphysical traditions. As Zhukav notes, "all eastern religions (psychologies) are compatible in a very fundamental way with Bohm's physics and philosophy. All of them are based upon the experience of a pure, undifferentiated reality which is that which is."

In the end, as the juxtaposition of Jung and Pauli's views illustrate, just as in the beginning of human inquiry, not just physics but all explorations of  'what is' become "a study in the structure of consciousness."

Or, in the words of Rumi, the 11th-century Sufi poet and mystic (as translated by Coleman Barks in The Essential Rumi):

"If you have a body, where is the spirit?
 If you're spirit, where is the body?
 This is not our problem to worry about.

  Both are both. . . .

 Invisible, visible, the world
 does not work without both."