Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer. ― Joseph Campbell

The search for purpose… The folly of the 21 century self help movement. I say that because more often than not it leads to despair and stuckness.

The problem in my opinion is that the idea of purpose and meaning is subjective and personal yet most people tend to try to measure it in objective ways usually involving the need for validation outside of our self. I have not met anyone that has not sucked at measuring experience.

After my own search for purpose/meaning I have come to the conclusion that any philosophical or psychological search for purpose can only end in the absurd.

In philosophy, “the Absurd” refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not mean “logically impossible”, but rather “humanly impossible”. The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.

Purpose and meaning like air cannot be grasped and is not something that can be searched for, these concepts can only be experienced and lived. To experience purpose and meaning one must stop looking. (Stop the seeking experience and in that space experience the moment as is and ones involvement with it – that is meaning, that is purpose)

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
― Joseph Campbell

I have found my guides in books though like you would love to meet a mentor in the desert or woods

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl – Frankl concludes that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living; life never ceases to have meaning, even in suffering and death.

Learning to Fall – The Blessings of an Imperfect Life by Philip Simmons

“We do not have a say in all that befalls us, but we do have a say in the shape of our own character. Character, too often, is something others feel we must have beaten into us. Truth is, much of our character is under no one’s control but is shaped haphazardly by our families, our communities, and our culture—not to mention the genetic foll of the dice by which we’re made to begin with. But increasingly as we reach adulthood, we come to see character as a matter of choice. We choose practices and principles that share our character, building either a sound vessel or a weak one. We choose friends whose qualities we wish to develop or preserve in ourselves. Religious faith and spiritual practice are thought to strengthen this vessel, creating a sound container for our developing relationship to mystery, suffering, and the Divine. Life throws things at us that we cannot predict and cannot control. What we can control is who we are along the way.”

“When we accept our impermanence, letting go of our attachment to things as they are, we open ourselves to grace. When we can stand calmly in the face of our passing away, when we have the courage to look even into the face of a child and say, ‘This flower, too, will fade and be no more,’when we can sense the nearness of death and feel its rightness equally with birth, then we will have crossed over to that farther shore where death can hold no fear for us, where we will know the measure of the eternal that is ours in this life.
We all have within us this capacity for wonder, this ability to break the bonds of ordinary awareness and sense that though our lives are fleeting and transitory, we are part of something larger, eternal and unchanging.”
– Philip Simmons

Came across a blog by Connie Zweig that I found interesting

Meeting The Shadow At Midlife

“To live with shadow awareness is to turn away from the peaks toward the valleys, away from the heights and the rarified air toward the depths and the dark and the dense. It is to turn toward the unpleasant thoughts, hidden fantasies, marginal feelings that are taboo. Our secret lust, greed, envy, rage. To live with shadow awareness is to move our eyes from up to down, to relinquish the clarity of blue-sky thinking for the uncertain murkiness of a foggy morning.” That is so beautiful, and yet we live in a culture that’s addicted to blue-sky thinking. So how can people begin to open themselves to the shadow in their lives?

“The Greeks had a name for this downward path: katabasis, or descent. Our ancient forebears understood that we needed not only to fly above with the birds, lightly and full of grace, but also to crawl beneath with the snakes, slowly, silently, on our bellies. We do not choose this lower path; it chooses us. At midlife, we do not have depression; rather, depression has us. And if we can allow the ego to take a back seat and go along for the ride, then the real journey can begin: depression can become descent; the refusal to go down can become the choice to go down. And the appointment with the shadow can be kept” – conniezweig