MT
Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
In Process.
What are most important in making a person happy? First is the filling of basic needs: food, shelter, companionship, sex. Also required is meaning: the world that we inhabit needs to make sense to us. We need to find it predictable, coherent, and amenable to our existence. I look at myself. When I wrote this, I was recovering from a lung cancer operation and the second of two traumatic divorces. I had recently lost the magazine I had worked so hard to create. On the other hand, my daughters and my parents love me and I met, fell in love with, and married a woman who not only loves me tremendously, but who allows me to be me, in fact encourages me to pursue what I need to do. Is my life happier than it was before: do I feel greater intensities of happiness, do I feel happier more often, or do I feel unhappy less often? Yes and no. My relationships no longer absorb most of my emotional energy. Neither need I fight for the right to follow my aspirations. Minute by minute, however, the pain from the operation gnaws. The question ought to be, rather than whether I am happier – for truthfully, I may be a little happier, but I could be happy before as well – do I feel I have a place in the world that I want to inhabit or dream of inhabiting? A sense of meaning is imperative for happiness, indeed for human life. This book develops that point, shows how it works in each of us, describes how it ties intimately with our spiritual nature, and suggests a large-scale story of meaning that may help some of us more readily discover more meaning and hence more happiness in our lives.
I start the discussion
at the bottom with what constitutes the world. Gazing first at the fundamental
laws of physics and chemistry, we can raise our eyes to how things operate from
the smallest right on up the ladder, from non-life to life. At the higher
levels, rather than according to the laws of nature, things behave in keeping
with certain consistencies, evolution through natural selection and chaos
theory being two of them. The fundamental laws, the initial conditions of the
universe (entailing the values for certain fundamental constants like the speed
of light), plus the actual existence of things as opposed to their mere
possibility, births a process that is the universe and everything in it
evolving and developing through time. Process is basic. Evolution has taken the
raw matter of the universe through the elementary forms of life to plants,
insects, and the various kinds of animals including us humans. We have unique
attributes that distinguish us from the rest of the known products of nature,
but they’re not without their precursors in the others; even plants appear to
have rudimentary feelings and thoughts. With animals and the chemical
messengers such as hormones, and a centralized nervous system in the brain with
its neurotransmitter messengers, come significant feelings that direct
behavior, including the correlates of happiness and unhappiness. Social
behavior first emerges further down the ladder than in the mammals. In humans,
however, it comes to wrestle with the desires of the individual and the sense
of self-directedness. Values appear, at least in the primates.
Our chief distinguishing attribute seems to be the large size of our brains. Its many foldings produce a being whose primary characteristic is to seek meaning, to assemble what is known into a web of ideas, experiences, memories, fables, and feelings with mutual logical connections between them. This capacity imposes onto the basic animal facilities to value and to pursue social and hormonal-neurochemical drives (toward happiness and away from unhappiness, for instance), to create differences in the way we can behave in comparison with other animals. We can think about what might make us happy, for instance, and set about doing things we believe will bring about that feeling. We can also think about doing what we think and feel is right, and set about behaving in those ways. Overall, we can consider what is meaningful to us and seek to live that way. Meaning and purpose seeking are, in fact, a fundamental human motivation.
What can a person do to try to increase her or his level of happiness? Research in social psychology points to several things, including obtaining and maintaining close personal relationships, involvement in flow activities appropriate for us, and pursuing a purpose for our lives. These also help provide a sense of meaning, which ties in to our living in a way that we would consider ethical. They relate well to what religious traditions have told us to do (though they often word them in such terms as closeness to God). They do not, however, always relate well to what our culturally provided norms tell; for instance, while increasing our income to above the poverty level may significantly increase our level of happiness, increasing our wealth further and further will probably not. Advertising and common attitudes, on the other hand, suggest it will. Social norms have yet to learn some of the natural restrictions on the innate processes of happiness. Nevertheless, scientific studies show that one of the leading motivations for human beings is the drive toward meaning and purpose. Meaning is probably a more fundamental need for humans than purpose, but purpose can supply meaning: the meaningfulness in doing something can derive from the purpose in doing it. Meaning can also help create in us feelings of happiness and hence help motivate us toward creating a more and more meaningful framework in which to live our lives.
Don Cupitt considers the need for a religion for our period of human history; ‘The world is our world,’ he writes, ‘and our world is the only world….True religion is the practice of making eternal happiness out of the flux of ordinariness by the way we attend to it, cast ourselves into it, identify ourselves with it, and relate ourselves to others in it. True religion is saying Yes to life, Yes to transience.’ The way of life that I describe in this book as producing happiness and minimizing unhappiness through meaningful living is a moral and religious way of life, but not moral or religious in the usual sense. It is moral in that it seeks to do what the person believes is right. It is religious in that it seeks the best out of life here and now. These are two of the directions to pursue in further research on the topic of meaning. As important is the scientific; we need to find out more about happiness, moral inclinations, and meaningfulness: with social psychology (about what makes us happy and unhappy and how the two relate), with neurochemistry and genetics (what are the biological mechanisms behind these two states and how the two relate), and with theology, anthropology, and philosophy (what we’ve developed in the past to make us happy and ward off unhappiness). The human being is very complex and we need to understand more about how meaningfulness relates to other states in which we might find ourselves, including our moral inclinations, happiness, and unhappiness.
Let’s try to construct a meaning story that is true to what we now know from science about human beings and our world, and the swath of human experience represented in philosophies and religions. In general, it will contain such elements as monism (so we don’t find ourselves divided against ourselves), a sense of mystery (we’ll never understand anything fully and there’ll always be things we don’t understand), the feeling of process (everything’s always changing), the need to feel inspired, an emphasis on loving relationships, a sense of what is right and wrong, and the need for involvement according to our abilities. I suggest such a story and indicate how each of us might build from it our own sense of meaning. This grows out of the religious framework but isn’t subject to any one tradition. Rather, it looks to the natural nature of religion, acknowledging how religions have grown from this to the point where, unfortunately, they now tend to undermine it.
In this chapter, I introduce God. Not God as tradition and orthodoxy depict, no matter what any particular religion or spiritual or philosophical tradition may uphold. The God I introduce ties closely to our experience as secular moderns. This God is the world, or nature, or the universe – whatever image resounds most positively in your mind. Or the image that may suit you more may be that of the face of God is the world, nature, or the universe. The point is that divinity has to do first and foremost with our physical environment. That doesn’t exclude our inner or our cultural environments because these derive from the natural environment. What is the nature of God? This is a scientific question. God for us as specifically human beings is what we know of our spiritual selves and what we know of this we find out through such sciences as psychology, genetics, neurochemistry, and social psychology. Needing meaning is a big part of this spiritual side of ourselves – spirituality is in part leading a meaningful life. Ethics comes in here in a similar way. This chapter expands on this approach to meaning.
How, as modern people, can we find meaning and the relationship of this pursuit to happiness and religion? Meaning requires coherence within the worldview even though elements of it still seem out of sink and in need of bringing into the coherent whole. If those renegade elements challenge the meaning of the rest, the meaning can’t be coherent. Thus, the meaning must focus on the world and our relationships with it and with each other. These foci are where our secular centers lie and they must fill up a great deal of our meaningful whole. The idea of God the last chapter introduced can fit in well with this whole and provide the rudiments or grounding for the meaning that needs to pervade the whole. The God idea implies an understanding of our spiritual nature and our place with respect to divinity (which is the world). This chapter will weave this argument into a storied framework that will make sense of even such mundane circumstances and events as the first chapter related.