The Problem

Sigmond Freud and the Gautama Buddha seem to have had at least one insight in common. Their perspectives both rested heavily on the observation that the lived experience of people is generally quite unsatisfactory. Freud wrote that the goal of psychoanalysis is to “turn neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness”. The First Noble Truth of the Buddha was “dukkha”, often translated as “the unsatisfactoriness of existence”. It is hard to argue with those observations when one looks at historical accounts of the affect of humans.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that the persistent unease in human psychology reflects a genetic adaptation that was effective for our survival and procreation. Watch the critters in the wild (or even your backyard), and it is apparent that a bit more bliss in their experience might quickly result in becoming the lunch of another critter. Some states of being, including worry, fear, hyper-alertness, aggression, workaholism, acquisitiveness and social pretense, can serve people well at times and places. Life has its demands and the effective emotional response is often uncomfortable.

We need to look no further than patterns of substance abuse to realize that people are driven to relieve their discomfort in ways that can be counterproductive. More subtle and generally less harmful behaviors to that end are common too. We seek distractions and stimulations that simply do not satisfy. Many of our incessant activities appear to be attempts to fill a hole inside of us that remains open and deep.

Is there an answer to this problem?

Our traditions offer a wide variety of responses of different types. Generally, they attempt to provide a faith or a psychic foundation of ultimate meaning that transcends this unsatisfactory existence. They also recommend behaviors that lessen the suffering of oneself and others in the world.

Religious traditions often attempt to guide us by appealing to the authority of a deity and with descriptions of consequences for us in the future and perhaps in an afterlife.  Religions also offer arguments for the benefits within this life that result from following a creed. Some direct behavior toward deeply humanistic ends. Other religions rest on beliefs that can only be described as cultic and contrary to what most of us regard as the good life for ourselves and others.

Ultimate meaning is on offer from various ideologies as well as theologies. Some ideologies resemble religions in offering a teleological picture of a better future, such as classical Marxism. Other progressive perspectives from the 19th century shared a commitment to the perfectibility of humankind within this life experience. The forms of neo-Marxism and democratic liberalism that have emerged more recently argue for liberation from various forms of oppression and a better life for people without such a strong sense of the inevitability of progress. 

Beyond the truth of any faith, the effect of many traditions is benign. If we find some meaning beyond our work-a-day existence, it may ease our pain. We can listen to God, read the scripture, worship together, study the books, engage in a common struggle. People do find a sense of purpose and guidance for our actions from the wisdom traditions and other social movements.

Other people seem to live their lives without much attention or conscious need for theology or ideology. The meaning some draw upon is a practical sense that a certain way of living is a good bet to obtain the life that best fulfills their desires or higher commitments. 

Some of us are skeptical of the metaphysical narratives offered by many religions, resistant to ideological movements, but still feel the tug of ideals. From what source can such a contemporary person find a sense of ultimate meaning that is supportive of the good life?

This essay offers philosophical and psychological insights about heart and mind. The insights are rooted in the various wisdom traditions that preceded the modern age, as well as contemporary studies in cognitive science.

The central problems being addressed are simple. Why is the experience of human living so often unsatisfactory, almost irrespective of how favorable our objective life circumstances are? Is it possible to find inspiration for the good life and a sense of ultimate meaning from a worldview that is rooted in the simple experience of living? Despite our enormous personal and cultural differences, what are the commonalities of experience for people that might be the foundation for living well?

Insight usually comes as an immediate recognition. We might feel that an insight solves some problem. But when it comes to the habits of heart and mind, an insight may dissolve the same way the flow of other thoughts dissolve, and our heart and mind will remain unchanged. Insights of this kind demand support from a life practice.

A central premise here is that generally we live our lives in a dream-like state in which our minds “take us for a ride”. By experience, we are the flow of thoughts that stream through our minds. Only occasionally do most of us stop to take a perspective from outside of that mental stream, if we do so at all. When we manage to reflect on the flow of mind, as in a meditation, it is typically a fleeting experience. 

This points us toward a life of practice. Practice is where a good deal of the action is when it comes to heart and mind. If an expert in the physical sciences, such as a physician, is working on a problem and has a helpful insight, it should be easy to preserve the thought and apply it to the problem objectively. The physician diagnoses and formulates a treatment plan.

However, the work of treating dysfunctions of our own personal habits of heart and mind is more difficult in one critical sense at least. Our dreamy entrancement makes it easy for the insight to slip away, and for our moment-to-moment experience to remain unchanged. It is difficult to hang onto an insight into our psychic experience even in a quiet moment. To put the idea to work an hour later when our mind has re-entered the stream of consciousness and other demands of life have arrived is much harder. 

Here’s a way to think of why this work is so challenging–“I am too close to the problem. I am the flow of thoughts for which I need to develop and implement a treatment plan.” Consequently, practice is everything, and this kind of practice relies upon frequent reminders to stop, reflect, and reset.

There is nothing seminal in any of the ideas or suggestions offered here. With conscious living, we take note of valuable ideas that have come down to us from our wisdom traditions, from modern science and from our own reflections; we see the point when and where the ideas may be useful; and we find helpful ways to implement the ideas. 

Beauty, Reason, Love

Even as a somewhat solitary person, I have many conversations with dozens of people. Yet I’m surprised at how seldom those conversations focus on topics like this: “What are the core values in your life? Where do those values come from? How do you work toward realizing those values?” 

Conversations like that may be too private for some people. For others, the answers may seem obvious. Others might not think about it much. One thing that inhibits these conversations may be that we don’t live in a time and place with a unifying religion or philosophy. I am interested in finding values that can unify people even with different traditions or origins.

The two traditions in this vein with which I am most familiar are Buddhism and classical Greek philosophy, and there is a sense in which these traditions honor three particular values in distinct ways. Platonic philosophy captured this in terms of the “Three Virtues” – “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful”, but there is some manner in which most wisdom traditions point us in this direction. Comparably, Buddhism points to the “Three Jewels”–the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. 

Let us take a look at the alignment of these concepts. The “Beautiful” and the “Buddha” (symbolic of a fully enlightened being) both center on the perfect realization that is available to each of us subjectively, according to the traditions. The “True” and the “Dharma” (the teachings of the Buddha) center on objective accounts of that perfection. The “Good” and the “Sangha” (the Buddhist community) center on the inter-subjective aspect of life, the highest expression of which is love.

Perhaps in the Christian tradition, there is a similar alignment of values as reflected within the “Holy Trinity” of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

My philosophical focus in life places a heavy emphasis on lived experience, rather than metaphysics. It is a “here and now” perspective. My answer to questions of ultimate meaning are unsurprisingly a version of what we find in our wisdom traditions, but with a first hand and experiential focus–Joy (the highest subjective experience), Reason (the highest objective experience) and Love (the highest inter-subjective experience). Let me explain.

In a certain way, each person lives life “alone, with others”. No one else will ever know what it is to live life in my mind and body. Moreover, my subjective experience, the experience and the content of my mind, is the only reality that I truly know directly, as is your subjective experience for you. In this way, we are each subjectively alone. 

Of course, no one truly lives alone. We live with others, and through a simple intellectual leap, we come to suppose that to live in the mind and body of another is reasonably similar to our own experience.  Presumably, to be “in there” for you is of the same nature as to be “in here” for me. This is the objective realization that marks the emergence of a mature heart and mind and that creates the inter-subjective space that allows our relational lives to get started and hopefully to flourish. Others are almost certainly like us, but separate in an important way. 

This is not just a one-off realization. We all have interactions with loved ones that cause some psychic hurt. Is it not much easier for us to feel our own pain than it is to imagine the pain of the other? In a fundamental way, we are simply closer to own experience than we can ever be to that of another person.

Is it not clear then that in this life, all meaning begins with the subjective experience, the fact that we are consciously alive? And because it is within this realm of being that all experiences occur and because our experience of life is varied in tone and content, it is easy to miss the simple fact of consciousness that underlies the content of our minds.

My primary assertion here is that the quality of beauty is at the foundation of the subjective experience, our purest experience of beauty is joy and a sense of freedom. When our habits of heart and mind allow a bare opening to this experience, it is truly ineffable. There is nothing to say that adds to it.

Think of the most beautiful moment you have ever experienced. Is there a word or an artifact by which you might depict it that is anything but a shadow of the experience itself? Of course not. If our mind, heart and circumstances allowed us to dwell in perfect subjectivity, perhaps we would never move another muscle.

But life both by necessity and good fortune is more than aesthetics. We need to cloth, feed, and otherwise protect ourselves. And from birth through old age, we find ways to make our way in the world. The most human quality for making decisions that serve us is reason. Of course, many of our actions are instinctive. However, early in life the youngest children begin to rely on reasoning to meet their needs. We learn.

Think of the way that infants are so fused with the universe around them that they cannot distinguish between the nipple of the mother and their own thumb, and they suck on both. But then they make the distinction, especially upon feeling the pain without the nourishment from thumb sucking. Is it not reasoning from the experience (and absence) of milk and discomfort that yields the refinements in their actions? From their fused state of mind that sees no distinction between objects, their experience allows them to differentiate nipple and thumb and then to integrate the knowledge that both nipple and thumb are essential, but each are for a different purpose.

Moving from psychic fusion, to differentiation, to integration is the foundation of all learning. Reasoning is the process behind that learning.

There is a great deal to be learned in life in order to live well. In our time as in the past, behavior is driven by magical thinking, conspiracy theories, narcissistic worldviews and reasoning errors. For all of the confused and destructive thinking that people do, nothing provides the antidote like the objective perspective and reasoning about what we observe.

Those two verities, beauty and reason, are reflections of much that is best in life. But this is an incomplete picture. What does it amount to without love?

A man from whom I have learned a great deal writes about a Christianity that gives primary focus to what he calls “the law of love”. Who knows where natural laws come from? When I think about love, it seems less like a law than a conclusion.

Think about young children at play. We understand clearly the deep self-involvement of children. We don’t even call it selfishness because that sounds too judgmental. Very young children lack the understanding that they are not the center of the world and that their experience is not the only experience that counts. These narcissistic habits of heart and mind will continue throughout life in nearly every human in some form, but they tend to diminish somewhat, and people usually become more considerate and accommodating of others. We learn to think about others, how they feel, and what they need.

What happens when this realization occurs, this insight that other people matter too? Isn’t it always derivative of two understandings? (1) It is beautiful to be alive, simply to be! (2) Access to beauty in life is in you too! 

Is this reasoning not the foundation of love in all of its forms?

These perspectives of subjectivity, objectivity and inter-subjectivity, of beauty, reason, and love feel inclusive of all that deeply matters in life. 

I am uncertain about and not especially interested in the answers to some of the great philosophical questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there consciousness?

But the questions about what it means to be human, what is the foundation for living well, what it means to be good–these questions do not require me to go beyond my direct experience as a human being. And that experience is clear. The values of beauty, reason and love are first order, together they are fully satisfying, and they can provide the ultimate foundation for living.

Beauty

Earlier in my life, I was most inclined to understand the world objectively. My academic areas of interest were political science, history and sociology. I had a strong sense that the problems of modern living could be solved for the most part if we simply addressed them in a rational manner. Moreover, I saw human attempts at understanding to be either “scientific” (by which I meant objective) or “religious” (by which I meant magical).

In middle age, I opened up to the reality that human experience has a deep interiority to it. Of course, I had been exposed broadly to profound ideas about subjectivity. The problem was that I was studying those ideas “from the outside” and lacked a practice that opened my own interior landscape in which I could simply be.

Meditators sometimes refer to a process of “waking up” from the dream state of our mind. By that, they are referring to the dream-like quality of our normal waking consciousness and suggesting that there is a deeper understanding of reality available to us through practice. Cognitive scientists refer to the development of a “theory of mind”, by which they refer to our ability to understand how the mental states of ourselves and others shape our behavior. 

The commonality in those ideas is that humans possess the capacity to reflect upon the habitual flow of thoughts, feelings and attitudes that we experience and that are the content of our dream-like mental flow. To some extent, we have the capacity to no longer “be” the contents of our mind. Instead, we glimpse that we “have” thoughts, feelings and attitudes.

The development of some reflective clarity of this kind several decades ago prompted me to take up a study of psychology. As it happened, my regard for the newly examined interior experience was that it was a curiosity. As I watched the flow of my mind, I was stunned at how misleading and confused my mental process could be and how poorly it served me at times. My impulse was to untie the knots of my mind that had been created by the evolutionary nature of humankind and by my personal history, and simply see reality more clearly. That is to say, I was trying to see and reflect upon the contents of my interior space just as I do in the social and natural world. Just try to get a clearer view, think better thoughts, a little bit at a time. This is a therapeutic perspective, and it can be very helpful.

Over time and with a deeper practice in meditation, I have begun to rest, even for brief periods of time, freed from thought. This has helped me to recognize the primacy of consciousness, of subjectivity, without the clutter of content. The sense of beauty and the experience of joy at the core of consciousness does not feel in any way imaginary or constructed by prior experience. When the thoughts stop, even for a second, everything is perfect, just the way it is.

Before giving a deeper consideration to the way meditative practices can open up this kind of experience of our inner landscape, let’s take a look at the human intuition that there is something very special about the state of being alive. Yes, suicidal impulses are common. Yes, there have been death cults in many different contexts. But what is more widely condemned than self-destruction? Warfare, slavery, and homicide, all actions that minimize the value of the life of “others”, have been tolerated or supported by cultures throughout history. Where the destruction of oneself is embraced, is it not usually for a greater existence on another plane? To “throw away one’s life” universally seems to be regarded with scorn. Does it not seem that one of the deepest human offenses is the failure to value one’s own gift of life? We start then with the assumption that there is a nearly universal understanding that our lives are a precious opportunity.

Meditation is a way to access more deeply the state of simply being alive and the recognition of the primacy of that state.

Various traditions in Buddhism describe meditative experiences in a similar way to what I describe here. Keep in mind that reports about these experiences reflect an inter-subjective process at work about our subjectivity. We communicate with one another about what we experience, because each of us is uniquely privy to the flow of our interior experience. In other words, the subjective experience is the “territory” we are exploring and the inter-subjective exchange is the “map” that we are drawing. This is a critical distinction. Too often, we reduce experiences to our descriptions of experience.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the word “sunyata” (often translated as “emptiness”) is sometimes used to describe the state of perfect beauty that occurs when the flow of thoughts cease. There are an enormous number of personal reports of this kind that we can read, and there is a complex and significant philosophical literature about sunyata. I am using the term simply to indicate that in Buddhist traditions there are such reports and discussions, and there is some consistency within them. Other traditions also point to similar states of being.

Frankly, when I read or hear about layered and hierarchical descriptions of experiences like sunyata that are offered by advanced practitioners or the spiritually adept, my understanding seems almost as limited as when I read about sub-atomic particles. My only assertion about my experience is that with some practice over the years, there are more frequent and more sustained moments of perfect beauty. I have gained enough confidence in the experience that I have some sense of direction for my practice.

Consequently, I will use the phrase “the experience of emptiness” to refer to the experience of being subjectively aware without the appearance of thought. I am not in any way asserting that this is more than a taste of the reality apparently achieved by more intentional and dedicated practitioners. Moreover, the traditions contend that this experience is available to everyone with practice. More properly, the contention is that this reality is always present. Practice is simply learning to let go of distractions from that reality.

For me, as for many others, the subjective realm without content is beautiful, free and joyous. Like many others, this experience is usually fleeting, lasting perhaps only for seconds. More adept meditators claim that the experience shapes the entirety of their waking consciousness. Those claims are not the subject of this essay, since my experience is more limited. 

Most accounts that align with my experience also include some quality of de-centering from one’s personal identity: “anatma” or “no-self”, the “death of the ego”, the “non-dual” collapse of subject and object. There are important distinctions to be made here within the traditions and a good deal of disagreement about the ideas, but the conceptual alignment is undeniable. There is a lifting of the veil of the self, even momentarily, and a clearer seeing of reality.

What would it mean if it were true that the experience of emptiness is in the nature of all humans: Release one’s mind from the flow of thoughts and rest in the emptiness. Beauty and joy ensue.

My first reaction to this experience is that it is the greatest imaginable gift, and that it is simply the primal ontological fact of consciousness. 

My second reaction is that it is really strange, maybe even mystifying, that this is true. What else in life ever has seemed so pure, so unconditional?

My third reaction is that the experience of emptiness tells us nothing else about our origins, about life after death, about the nature of the universe or multi-verse, or any metaphysical question. 

The experience of emptiness is simply a gift that, if we attend to it, clarifies being and has the potential to positively change our relationship with others and our understanding of the natural world.

For me, descriptions of the experience of emptiness as “mystical” resonate, meaning it is awe-inspiring and so qualitatively different from the normal waking state that a “shock of recognition” takes place. Increasingly, I come away from the experience with a faith and confidence that emptiness is simply the way life is for sentient creatures, that the point is just to notice what is always there, and that it is foundational to the good life.

Consequently, I practice in a tradition that tells us to just let it be in the realm of beauty, freedom and joy. That experience is capable of filling us with meaning and informing all of the derivative aspects of reality.

Love

There are ideas that love in the universe is elemental and is witnessed by the force of attraction. I once heard it suggested that the force of gravity may be a gross form of love in some way. For me, love is more like “positive regard”. In all of its forms, love derives from a sense that “the other” matters in a positive and relevant way.

Yesterday, I spent some time pruning a few plants near my home. I did it with love, because I want the plants to thrive for their own sake, without regard to whether I am here next spring or not. This afternoon, I will spend some time caring for my grandchildren. I will do it with love, because I want them to thrive as well, even decades from now when their memory of me just occasionally bubbles up in their minds. The significance of my love for my grandchildren is far greater than it is for those plants. But fundamentally it is the same dynamic. The object of love of this kind must possess being. “Love” of a non-living object feels of a different sort. 

When we feel positive regard for another living being, we experience love.

Where do we invest our love?

Our traditions often point to the significance of sentience. Recognition that some beings have consciousness, those in whom “the lights are on”, is an important distinction in this respect. Most of us can be oblivious to the welfare of creatures that do not have the complex neurological equipment that higher order beings have. Many people who would never intentionally hurt another person simply ignore the ways in which our lives create widespread harm in other mammals. 

Of course, many of us devote our lives to helping some other people thrive while doing little for people with great needs who are “out of sight” for us, but who obviously do have the capacity for great suffering and joy.

We are very familiar with how limited people are physically. It seems clear as well that we are very limited in our psychic capacity for love. The evidence for this is on full display in the world and always has been.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that several things are true about our capacity for positive regard, for love, of “the other beings” in the world–

1. Our capacity for love is considerable. Imagine for a second what our world would be like without positive regard for “the other”.
2. Our capacity for love emerges and expands as we develop psychologically and gain the ability to identify others’ experiences with our own experience.
3. Our experience of love intensifies with our recognition that others may suffer.
4. Our experience of love flourishes with our recognition that others share access to the beauty of being.

Clearly love is essential to the good life. My contention is that the experience of love is a function of our own experience of beauty and that our capacity for love will grow as the voracious appetites of the self may subside. 

Our capacity for love (as well as for reason) reflects the ongoing learning process of decentering our identity from the self.  We begin life as narcissists, fused with the world around us. Instinct guides us in the fulfillment of our powerful needs as infants. Our initial differentiation of objects in the world hopefully is accompanied by support on the part of our caretakers. The emergence of the sense of self is critical, but it creates a separation from the world. The wall of our self-identity is powerful. We learn to love those closest to us, as our identity expands to include them. Gradually, that expanding identity includes larger groups of people to which we belong, and the circle of love expands in those directions. 

In late childhood and early adolescence, our identification with our best friends and other peers is powerful. Gradually, identification with our community, our church, our nation is typically very strong and an indication of healthy growth. We know however, how much hatred people can hold for others who are outside of their circle of friends, neighbors, brothers and sisters in religion or state.

Universalism is a perspective that recognizes that “we are all the same” and that positive regard for others is an appropriate moral response to other humans and perhaps all other sentient beings. If we mature further than psychic adolescence, the walls around our separate self will continue to weaken, and we can gain the capacity to love beyond the groups with which we identify. The concept of “ahimsa”, or no harm, in numerous Indian religions reflects a universalist morality, as does the Christian call to love one’s enemies. The realization often dawned on the wise in many traditions, but it may have gained the broadest application to civic institutions with the Western Enlightenment and classical liberalism.

Many people feel overwhelmed by their experience of love. Yet when we put in the effort to uncover our habits of mind and heart or witness our patterns of behavior objectively, it can be disappointing to see that our love is not actualized more deeply even in relationship to the people dearest to us. Why is that?

Evolutionary psychology suggests that the experience of love is deeply useful in solidifying social relationships. It also suggests that many of our most troublesome and least loving qualities, such as tribalism, hyper-alertness to danger, restlessness and acquisitiveness, promoted our fitness for survival.

There are pervasive obstacles to the fullest expression of love in our lives, and they generally attach to survival strategies for the self, even when one lives a life that is comfortable and secure. That comfort and security does however open the door more widely to the experience of love and loving behavior, as our identity with the self and extensions of the self are able to soften, and we see that each member of our species is grappling with the human condition, just as we are.

There are romantic traditions that emphasize the primacy of love, that suggest that we are naturally loving, and “we have to be taught to hate”. That is exactly backwards. We are born narcissists, but the beauty of being and the process of reason give birth to our impulse to love and our capacity for love.

In our lives, love is limited and imperfect in the way it expresses. But we have been given the psychic tools to grow into our full humanity.

Reason

Within the objective realm of life, reason is the highest value.

In contemporary culture, we tend to underestimate how much effort it would take simply to stay alive from day to day in the natural environment. As our cultures have obtained increasingly advanced technologies of all sorts, food, shelter, clothing and other necessities of life have become more available with less effort. 

Other needs such as community and a deep sense of purpose are not necessarily fulfilled better in more advanced cultures, and we know that capitalist economies are excellent at creating within us powerful new and often frivolous needs. For many people whose subsistence needs have been satisfied, life may still feel as unsatisfactory as it does for people living with far fewer resources.

Who among us lives without a pressing sense each day that we have needs to be addressed? We respond to those needs habitually, impulsively, and to some extent reasonably.

As an instrumental tool, reason is our best way to obtain what we want and to avoid what we do not want. Popular television shows depict urban folks with the experience of trying to survive in the wilderness for some period of time. Contestants on these shows can be faced with enormous and unfamiliar challenges. Those who are successful demonstrate a remarkable capacity for reasoning, allowing them to obtain food, shelter and warmth. 

As global culture now faces a new existential problem like climate change created by structures in our lifestyle, we can only hope that human institutions will reason our way to the changes that will mitigate environmental disaster.

Consider how reason is a process that seems embedded in cultural evolution, even when it is difficult to point to who it is that is reasoning through the problems of a culture. An example of cultural evolution at its best is the way traditional cultures with limited resources often found ways to provide balanced diets to members without access to nutritional science. Clearly, the successful ideas about nutritional variety, preparation and toxicity were learned over generations. Capitalist economies feature processes of food production and distribution with different incentives. Our material abundance has allowed deviation from the finely developed diets for nutrition we find in traditional cultures. It has yielded enormous profits, capital expansion and fulfillment of tastes of food that delight us. The point is simply that the incentives built into a way of life will result in a reasoned response by the actors of the culture.

Of course, reason is the tool we may use when we perceive that our behaviors are not serving us, when we decide to change.

We do not always reason well. How often do we make decisions based upon the feeling that a bad idea “makes sense”? There are important fields of study that show us our errors in logic, our predilection for allowing our interests to influence our reasoning, our vulnerability to rhetorical arguments and other fallacies in thinking. But it is objectively clear that good reasoning is the antidote for bad reasoning. 

And of course, reason is far from the whole story in life. It is clear that computers can solve many problems faster and perhaps better than humans, yet we assume that at this point computers lack sentience and particularly the capacity for joy and love. 

People like a sense of certainty, but life offers little of that. We often find ourselves faced with the need to make a decision without all of the evidence required. 

Probabilistic thinking takes reasoning so far and asks us to make a choice. When the definitive answers to a problem are still far in the future, reasoning is a process that can emerge over time, allowing us to adjust our tentative answers on the basis of new evidence. Some people regard objectivity as cold and bloodless, but good reasoning can be a subtle and lively process.

Some religious traditions suggest that we subordinate human reasoning to the path of faith. This is a way of saying, “Here is the truth. Don’t try to figure it out. Just accept it.” Many good lives have been based upon truth that has been handed down in this manner.

Our liberal traditions reflect a strong emphasis upon the potential of reason. Buddhism shares some of this emphasis. In his teachings, the Buddha seemed to carry with him an attitude of “Don’t take my word for this. Try it out.” For some of us, a reasoned approach to life is foundational. We see one’s emerging experience itself as an ongoing experiment in finding clearer and clearer understandings. 

One of my academic advisors said this to me thirty-five years ago in a conversation about plans for a research project and reason: “Gradually, I’ve come to doubt the idea of truth. In the human world, it seems like there is simply a power struggle for whose version of truth will prevail.” This struck me as an abandonment of the liberal project. We can certainly concede that power does shape human reality; that in many times and places, perhaps most, power does trump reason; that progress carried by reasoning among people and institutions has been uneven and anything but inevitable. But like the value of love, the value of reason is foundational to the good life. The evidence of this is observable in human culture and provides the basis for a durable faith.

Everyone who makes their way to the moment at which they might take a leap of faith has reasoned their way to that moment. She or he has chosen to listen to a message, chosen to enter a door to a temple, chosen to respond to a book; chosen to join a cause. Or if one rejects the idea that we have free will, the process of life delivered them to that moment. Unless we accept that we are merely pawns of metaphysical processes or inevitable human inclinations toward our least generous behaviors, reason in some form and of some quality is behind our movements. 

Knowledge is and always should be somewhat tentative. Great questions without obvious answers demand that we hold our ideas lightly. We experience and we act in response to habits, impulses and reason, and in each moment of our lives we arrive at a unique place. Reason is a key to finding our way forward. 

Values

This essay identifies beauty, love and reason as three cardinal values rather than ideals, reflecting a practical perspective that emphasizes the primacy of our lived experience. The concept of values is more relative in nature than the concept of ideals. “Ideals” as a concept sometimes connotes a quality that is handed down to us. 

We can value many things and often our values conflict with one another. It makes sense then to understand our values hierarchically. Some are simply more important than others.

Abraham Maslow based his developmental psychology on needs, arguing that as lower-level physiological needs are met in life new needs open up in a natural order including safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs and self-actualization needs. Other dimensions of psychic life can be seen as developmental in a similar way including cognition, morality and interpersonal relations. In each of these areas, developmental psychology describes an alignment of higher and more mature stages of being that emerge if conditions are sufficient. Our values may also simply change over time as our life circumstances change. 

My father, who experienced family dysfunction in childhood and suffered from PTSD as a result of combat in the military, once said to me, “The thing that matters in life is survival.” That made little sense to me, as the beneficiary of a far more loving and safe early life. Some of the most famous personalities in our culture are clear and honest in asserting their highest value in saying that “life is about winning”. In some cases, we can take people at their word about their values.

Usually though our professed values do not describe our state of being or our stage of growth the way that our behavior or our operational thinking does. Some people whose behavior reflects that their highest value is “survival’ or “winning” will profess devotion to a more elevated set of values. Our values, as we speak about them, often seem to have an aspirational quality.

Inquiring about our own highest values can be an effective way to ask “What really matters to me?” Our answers may not be a full reflection of how we are living our lives. But the answers may help us to intentionally close the chasm between being who we are and who we aspire to be.

This essay began with the idea of the chronic sense in which life feels unsatisfactory. It can help ease this discomfort when we have a clear sense of purpose. Human cultures try to provide that sense of purpose in many different ways, and perhaps most people most of the time move forward well with their faith, whatever their faith may be. But there can be crises of faith, dark moments of feeling one’s insignificance, and a deep alienation from the world.

• A young person leaves for college and finds that his study of science has undermined his faith in God.
• A teacher, doctor, politician or social worker feels that their work is part of something larger, and then suddenly it all seems to be a matter of spinning one’s wheels.
• An athlete is devoted totally to performance on the field and then at once a career ends with an injury.
• A parent invests single-mindedly in raising a child who in early adulthood simply drifts away.
• A materially successful person works and plays hard for years, then one day discovers that their fully embraced activities and goals now feel empty.

Resilient people are often able to rebuild meaning in their lives after a crisis. Some do so by returning to the faith that guided them previously. Others may look elsewhere. Some jump headlong into a faith community. Others may begin a more solitary path. 

Building a deep sense of meaning at whatever point in life may or may not entail dramatic changes in what one does each day. Yes, one person may engage in wholesale life changes in the context of a crisis. For another, the values upon which the new faith rests may simply be a direction toward which life thereafter moves.

What really matters? Contemplation of this question helps clarify what we value in this life. For me, the most durable and elevating answer is conscious life, because it is by nature beautiful, free and joyous. And not just my conscious life, but every moment of every conscious life, as well as the complex process of reasoning out how to live in response to that recognition. What of the clash between those cardinal values and other tugs on my attention or impulses that take me afield? What of the contradictions, the hypocrisy, the ethical lapses, the mindless stumbling about? Because we are human, these are simply features of our being. We are compromised, but we may move forward with direction and purpose to a more conscious life.

Some Sources

I have meditated with the guidance of a number of teachers. Both as a teacher of meditation (available through the Waking Up app) and in discussions about consciousness (available in books and various podcasts), I strongly recommend the work of Sam Harris. I’ve found to be particularly useful Harris’ description of lived experience as “consciousness and its contents” and particularly his layered analysis of what constitutes the contents of mind.

The work of developmental psychologists is important. Robert Kegan is one of many excellent resources in adult stages of development. The idea that the stage growth available to us extends far beyond adolescence rests on the assumption that there are higher understandings that require our continued growth.

Stephen Pinker has been a very important influence on my thinking, especially with regard to reason.

My appreciation of religion has been deepened by the work of Huston Smith and Karen Armstrong.

The work of Ken Wilber is excellent at synthesizing our wisdom traditions. I’ve been particularly influenced by his work on multi-perspectival thinking.