Meaning and purpose of being
THIS is a paraphrase of Viktor Frankl es sentials in his famous book "Man's Search for Meaning," a sort of compilation of his insights when he was in the Nazi's Auschwitz concentration camp.
I find Viktor's thoughts very attuned to our times when Covid pandemic, whether true or not, has further altered the increasingly suffocating and denigrating modern human societies and the very fundamentals of the meaning of human existence.
Everywhere, people wonder where the world is heading from the devastation of Covid-induced world crisis; ask what has become of human freedom, relations and existence with all the impositions of health and military protocols; confuse why big pharmas, military-industrial complex and ruling elites and bureaucrats seem to have holidays in amassing more wealth and power, while a majority of citizens, sectors and communities are being bludgeoned to dying and death by poverty and state's neglect.
Hopelessness and submission to planetary powers, to people bigger than life, and to their gods seem to have engulfed most citizens, societies and nations; to many, the world seems to have stopped moving, and fatalism is the only thing that bonds them to their salvation or redemption.
Every day, as I make my trips to the city, traverse roads, bridges and narrow corners, meet people from almost all walks of life, I feel like the world has been narrowed down as people from all sides sigh and whisper about the increasing meaninglessness in their lives.
Their faces, body movements and languages seem to demonstrate their long, boring and tiring wait to graveyard, so much that the line separating life and death loses a significant distinction.
I often hear from people I've met and talked with, the stories of human beings who seem to know nothing more than struggling to satisfy their bellies and those of their beloved, of competing with others like animals just to survive each day.
Like the essential stories of Viktor, the world today seems to have shrunk into a huge hell of suffering, and people are blind and speechless on how to respond.
Partly, I blame the modern education and technologies that have enslaved people, isolated them from feeling and seeing the dynamics of life and the fast-changing world, and disabling their innate capacities to see the bigger picture and make right responses to stimuli that hit them.
We have to regain our humanity after being dehumanized by our decadent world, or by the powers that be in this world. After all, a human being is a deciding being; he or she is rational, sentient and has free will.
We must use that to see that between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response, and that response we make lies our growth and freedom.
We don’t just exist to fulfill the demands of our bellies; that would be too degrading a life, no different from animals and beasts. Our nature gives us the power to see our reason for being. That is something that cannot be taken away from us, even in our death zone.
Viktor is right in saying that life is never made unbearable by circumstances, only by denying or ignoring the meaning and purpose of our existence, we suffer the inhumanities of the world and of some people.
As I always teach my students and friends, the being with no reason for being can never find a cause to die for.
Viktor’s version is even sharper; he who has a “why” to live for can bear with almost any “how.” Why is what gives strength to the inner being to be able to bear the how’s of existence. Let's stand up once more and assert our humanity.