Wellness Calendar: Friday 7 November

Searching for meaning and purpose

Is it part of the human condition to look for an understanding that explains the point of our being, and how to strive to be the best that we can be?

Is this how religion once gained a foothold in our societies – by taking away the angst and the uncertainty and giving people solid answers to such matters? Taking this arduous task away from the individual and into the hands of the scholars who wrote the guidebook(s), as a one-shirt-fits-all design for life.

For those of us who prefer to go on our own self-directed journey, there are other places to visit than simply theology. There’s cosmology, psychology, art, craft and literature. And then there’s philosophy, otherwise known as the love of wisdom.

Here we get to burrow down into all sorts of explorations and inquiries into human existence, ethics and morality, reason and logic, the nature of reality, of love, the beauty of the world, not to mention an end to suffering, emotional fulfilment and enlightenment.

Here’s a sprinkling of some philosophers and quotes illustrating how this study might give us an introduction to meaning and purpose:

Immanuel Kant viewed philosophy as asking and answering four questions: “What is it like to be human? What can I know? What can I do? What can I hope for?”

Socrates saw the unexamined world as not worth living and that the only true wisdom was knowing you know nothing.

Heidegger raised a distinction between philosophy and religion when he said, “Philosophy is radical questioning, but to really question – to push one’s questioning to the brink of the abyss – one must be an atheist, for faith gives answers too soon.”

Could it be that there’s a continuousness, endlessness and restlessness to the pursuit of meaning?

These notions come from a western thread of philosophy, which has a different texture to that of the east, as hopefully some of these eastern-leaning quotes will demonstrate:

“To know yourself, you must sacrifice the illusion that you already do.” Vironika Tugaleva.

“In a day when you don’t come across any problems, you can be sure that you are travelling on the wrong path.” Swami Vivekananda

“I have become my own vision of an optimist. If I can’t make it through one door, I’ll go through another door – or I’ll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.” Rabindranath Tagore

Do you consider yourself to be philosophically-minded?
Or does it give you a giant headache?

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