The Meaning Crisis is a Crisis of Incoherent Self Concern

I've been following the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) movement over the last couple years with an intent of making sense of what's really new here. It's a nebulous movement with thought leaders such as Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein, Sam Harris, and several others. An astute tweeter recently distilled the IDW into the people who hold these three positions: (1) those who pursue of truth instead of power; (2) those who favor understanding over judgment; and (3) those who value ideas more than identity. I tend to like this check list, but I also don't see anything that new in it. This is how the great philosophers and theologians have been orientating themselves for eons.

At its core, the IDW is also attempting to identify today's meaning crisis and to come up with alternatives that could serve to ameliorate it without going back in time to something more traditional. The reason of it being dismissive of traditional forms of meaning is that we can't unlearn what we have already learned, and at this stage of the game we have all been heavily indoctrinated into modernity and post-modernity. The assumption is we can't believe in biblical revelation, a virgin birth, and the Eucharist to explain things anymore. (Ironically, many of today's New Age pagans have bought into the healing power of crystals, Divine goddess worship, and alien abductions.)

Many in the IDW have a God allergy, but are pointing to ideas that have a religious fervor. We see a striving to come up with a new myth that puts on a fresh coat of paint on the crumbling walls of western civilization. I don't think it is a fruitless effort by any means, since it is lighting many up to look beyond their indoctrinated beliefs. And if it's a Trojan horse to something higher and deeper, then all the power truth to it. My point is to contest the idea that our search for meaning can be fulfilled by any belief system by itself — as it can only point us to ultimate meaning which is beyond the searching! Otherwise, we are just grasping at belief systems to create another identify for ourselves.

Our meaning comes through our being, and there are three ways of being a person in the world: “(1) knowing Tao; (2) not knowing Tao; and (3) instead of knowing Tao, or clinging to a Taoist teaching” (Shaw). (1) will always provide a deeper realization than (2) or (3). In the case of (1), you know Truth, trustingly, beyond any belief system. It is not a borrowed Truth, but is a known meaning that is ours. The paradox is ultimate meaning does not come from searching for it, but is allowed by reversing our intention for searching for meaning. 

(1) goes by many names other than Tao. Shinzen Young, in Return to the Source, compiles a great list of the unseen order that gives life significance:

Pure Consciousness (Purusha in Yoga)

Cessation (Cittavrittinirodha in Yoga, Nirodha in Buddhism, Cesó in St. John of the Cross)

The Source (Ha Makom in Kabbalah, Kongen in Sasaki Roshi)

The Witness (Drashtri in Yoga)

True Self (Atma in Hinduism)

No self (Anatma in Buddhism)

The Unborn (Ajata in Buddhism and Hinduism)

The Undying (Amrita in Buddhism and Hinduism)

Emptiness (Shunyata in Buddhism)

Fullness (Purna in Hinduism)

Nothingness (Nihil in Christianity, Ayn in Judaism, Ākiñcañña in Buddhism)

Ground (Grund in Christianity, Gzhi in Tibetan practice)

Peace of Heaven (Shalom bimromav in Judaism)

Void (Shunya in Buddhism, Xūin Daoism)

True Love (Shinjitsu no ai in Sasaki Roshi)

Shaw notes, “belief systems are to be valued for their effect rather than for their informational content, and yet from this side their content is indispensable.” Meaning via a belief system can come from the distilled experiences of others, through the traditions, so the wheel does not have to be recreated through the one's own self indulgence. This can be useful, where we can become reenchanted with a religious faith/spiritual path despite seeing the cracks and loving it still.

But we must also realize Truth by practices that take us beyond all concepts. To seek meaning through doctrines, theories, self-expression, and reason will always be limiting and prolong the existential crisis. Only by turning to God with an open heart, aligned as body and soul, can we really find the meaning we desire because He is the Source of our being and the Reality of what we truly are. 

Ultimate meaning = Self realization beyond time and self actualization in time.

As It Is

For most of us, grace does not always spontaneously reveal itself and we need to pick ourselves up from our own Buddhastraps. One way to do this is to immerse yourself in S.N. Goenka's 10-day Vipassana course which I've heard about for years but was always hesitant to take on. I somehow thought it was too simple in its dharma and approach. What I found out is there is an elegance to its simplicity.

There is the technique of scanning the body for sensations, distilled from the Buddha's original Pāli Canon which was preserved as a practice in Myanmar (Burma). With awareness of gross, subtle and very subtle sensations, the saṅkhāras (formations/impurities) can begin to be cleared away. Otherwise, the mind just becomes a stick in the mud craving this or averting that. And I definitely experienced the mud! As the sediment of the mind is churned up through the depths of the practice, those waters can become very murky for a while. As they say, it gets worse before it gets better. 

While there were moments of utter agony where my ego was shouting at me, there were also many moments of ecstatic bliss that lured me down the wrong way. In either case, I was always applying effort to come back to what is experiencing all this experience. Eventually this allows for a posture of equanimity which sees experiences with non-attachment; not an aloof detachment, but more like an “holy indifference” that is intimately sober. Goenka kept going back to the core of the teaching: to see reality as it is, and not the way we want it to be. 

That bears repeating: to see reality as it is. If we could take that teaching all the way in and out, the timbers to man would not be so crooked. We would not continuously wannbe, but just be. Even chasing enlightenment is a wannabe'ing away from being. The problem is always not seeing the mirage as a mirage.

There was the bottom-up approach to the technique, but in the end it culminated for me with top-down love. What made the difference with the practice is I ultimately fell in love with Goenka which came in a tearful, joyful moment.

While possessing a magnetic presence, Goenka also had a grandfatherly decency and pragmatism about him that sweetly resonated with me. God finds all sorts of interesting conduits. In the 1991 discourses, Goenka talks about the dangers of idolatry. If devotion arises, it should be devotion for the good qualities of character you see in another. While that may an astute point, it's never feasible to detach qualities from the overall goodness and beauty of the man. It's in the integration of personhood where it all comes alive! And for me, he did breathe life into the structure of the retreat.

Siddhārtha Gautama said there were four types of people: those who come from the darkness and move toward more darkness, those who come from lightness and move toward darkness, those who come from lightness and move towards more lightness, and those who come from darkness but move their way to lightness. I am probably in the latter category based on the low bar of wisdom I came in to this world with. But I always had a sense there was more. And these retreats are the times when that more is confirmed as a direct encounter — an encounter with the mystery and reality as it is. 

“All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good.

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

One truth is clear, 'Whatever is, is right.”

― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man