Searching for the Meaning of Life

South Moat Mountain in Conway NH
CC Jean Stimmell: 10/13/16

Plato believed humans were like captives in a cave only able to see a reflection of the real world flickering on the cavern walls. Carl Jung believed that the accumulated wisdom of human history is stored in our collective unconscious, accessible to us only through dreams and myths.

These two soothsayers came to mind as I attempted to make sense of a strange dream I had, so vivid it felt more real than cold morning dew on bare feet.

In the dream, I am having a blissful lunch on top of a mountain, feeling alive and at one with this sparse landscape wrapped in an ethereal blue mist. At first, I think I am all alone, but then I spot three figures in the distance, sitting at a table made out of old, weathered boards. 

As I move closer, I note they are fixated on a stone with writing on it that I can’t quite read – yet suddenly desire with all my being. There is no talk. It feels like a scene out of an Ingmar Bergman movie, replete with taciturn, inscrutable characters. Moving yet closer, I notice an empty chair at the table. After things are rearranged to make room, they allow me to sit down.

A tall, gaunt, eagle-eyed man with wisps of white hair falling onto his face – like something out of the Old Testament – stares daggers at me like a hawk sizing up its prey. Perched in front of him is the sacred tome containing the inscrutable writing – the words that will reveal the secret of life. As I lean forward, straining to make out the words, he abruptly snatches the totem away. I wake up crushed, robbed of the big answers to life.

What is this dream trying to tell me? Is this a myth like that of Sisyphus, who was sentenced by Zeus to labor for eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain every day but, at the last moment, before reaching the top, slipping, and the builder falls back to where he started. Is this what my dream means: whatever we want is always just out of our grasp?

Luckily, the next day David Whyte, provided the answers I sought. He is, of course, the well-known poet and mystic whose way with words often puts me in a trance. The power of poetry, according to Whyte, is its ability to create an experience, not just talk about one. In his view, great poets give birth to immortal poems that speak to every generation^⁠1; Jung would say they tap into our collective unconscious.

Listening to Whyte talk on an “On Being” podcast, I felt like he spoke directly to me: We humans are “the only part of creation that can actually refuse to be ourselves…The cloud is the cloud. The mountain is the mountain. The tree is the tree. The hawk is the hawk. And the kingfisher doesn’t wake up one day and say, you know, God; I’m absolutely fed up to the back teeth of this whole kingfisher trip. Can I have a day as a crow? No. The kingfisher is just the kingfisher.” That’s one of the healing gifts we can learn from the natural world that it is always just itself.^⁠2 

We don’t have to pursue higher forms of life because we are already whole and sacred, just the way we are. It's clear to me now I began on the right path: feeling alive and vibrantly in the present, enjoying lunch in a beautiful setting; that is until I got distracted by uncompromising true believers, jealously guarding an absolute truth that only amounted to some scribbling on a rock.

John Welwood, a luminary in transpersonal psychology, gives us the proper perspective in this excerpt from his poem “Forget about Enlightenment:”

Sit down wherever you are

Open your heart to who you are, right now,

Not who you would like to be.

All of you is holy.

You’re already more and less

Than whatever you can know.

xxx

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlz3mf7jxkc&t=301s

² https://onbeing.org/programs/david-whyte-seeking-language-large-enough/