I found this quote today by Carl Jung. He wrote that meaning comes “when people feel they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya (illusion) compared to that one thing, that your life is meaningful.”
I read that quote and I came up with so many questions about it I got totally confused. So, I'm not asking questions about it today. I'm just going to let it sit there while I wait to hear what you guys have to say.
We all
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“We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we
don't to make it all bearable.”
~Neil Gaiman
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4 comments:
oh, I sigh, life has meaning because i have children. that really is true. i think most of the things i do are because of my children, in one way or another. i think if there were no children here, i would just find something else to tire me out and make me complain about my daily life.
i understand what he is saying, and i feel that drive for meaning. meaning for me, separate from the kids....but like daniel said...it feels like stealing. from them. i know on some level, that it isn't....but it still feels like it.
one of the things that happens to me when i am trying to find meaning in the daily list of chores and crap is that while i am pushing, pushing, pushing myself through it, i lose any interest in meaning, i only find interest in sleep. but when i wake up, and i am not on pandora, or in some thousand year old virgin forest, or in some dark corner of magical hedonism, the gray of the day creeps in on me and its just go, go, go.
i am not sure about carl jung's statement. i am sure that after years of psychoanalyzing people, he probably lived in a world of his own surrounded by the psychosis of everyone he studied, looking for meaning in their madness, and maybe his own.
possibly there is more meaning in madness than in sanity....because in madness, true possibilities are skewed to the schemes of the mind. so, normalcy is sacrificed for some obscure plan that has no significance to anyone but the mad hatter who thought it up.
however...isn't this what we are all looking for here? that one path that is meaningful to only ourselves?
i've always said that being an insane artist gives me social leave to be eccentric and follow my own drummer. sometimes that drummer leads me right into oncoming traffic...and sometimes it leads me into that magical world where there's an unexplainable giddy feeling under the moon, lighting candles and listening for dogs barking in the distance, trying to find the significance of a tree that looks like an elephant. crazy to some, but irreplaceable to me, and that one experience can fulfill me for weeks on a spiritual level.
life is hard. it's fleeting, and typically unappreciated. i have been working on feeling that connectedness, and seeing it in everything, even the walls. maybe it is slowly changing the perception i have of my life.
My life has meaning from the people I love. They add the drama, the spice, the wonder, the frustration, the magic. The people I love push me, pull me and some times spin me around like a tornado ripping me apart but I go on loving them because of and in spite of all this. I don't know if it is accurate to say "I love for love" but it is accurate to say that the people I love give me reason to live, to stay alive, to continue searching for a deeper truth, a higher magic.
In my prayer/meditation time I ask everyday that all that I say, think and do be done with and through love. Not sure I am always successful at it, but I try. And when I catch myself doing something that is not so loving it is thought of this daily prayer that brings me back to a place a little more loving than the one I was in.
I have been kinda searching for a magical role model and I always come back to one, Geb (from A Wizard of Earthsea), but recently I was reminded of another, Dumbledore, and it occured to me that both of these wizards act through love.
Okay so now I am thinking that Love is a very, very powerful magic. One that can be both a force for creation and destruction. More thoughts but not coherent enough to write. Have to mull over this some more.
If we are living a symbolic life, then what are we symbols of and are we all symbols of the same thing or do we each have our own individual meaning.
Wow you guys! Lot's of mind fodder here! Somewhere, I read, in some new age feel good book that your life has meaning because you have meaning - not from what you do, or from who you do it for, or anything that has to be lived up to, achieved, earned, found, or discovered... that there is intrinsic value and meaning built in, it's automatic you are you and your life has meaning because it just it is and you are...
And all this talk about meaningfulness reminds me of Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning which gives me a great idea for today's post.
Michelle - I love you - and I totally get where you are coming from.
Daniel - I love you - and thank you - and I think you are absolutely right - Love is the most powerful magick of all!
Jennielee - My thinking is that we each have our own individual symbols... we are each one different and unique, that life holds different meanings for everyone. The important thing is to have something meaningful to hold on to.
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