For the wayfarer, everything has meaning and purpose. It is not necessary to understand that purpose or explain the meaning to experience the fact that it exists. The acknowledgment of it however and the awareness of it as a motivating force, is fundamental to the wayfarer's approach to life and a willingness to recognize it in the context of day to day living is at the heart of the wayfarer's expression of practical spirituality. Unthinkable (January 1998) To regret events such as the sinking of the Titanic and the death of Diana may seem to be right and normal. However, to appreciate these occurrences for the positives they bring has wider implications for the wayfarer... The Meaning Man (October 1997) What is the meaning of life? An oft asked question and perhaps one without an absolute answer. Victor Frankyl, whose life recently ended sought to help others find meaning in their lives through the example of his own experience of triumph over despair in the death camps of Nazi Germany. Hidden Treasure (July 1997) What seem to be accidents, tragedies and disasters happen to all of us at some time. The choices we make throughout these seemingly random events can prove to have enormous significance in retrospect. Unthinkable (January 1998) To regret events such as the sinking of the Titanic and the death of Diana may seem to be right and normal. However, to appreciate these occurrences for the positives they bring has wider implications for the wayfarer... Not only was the Titanic proclaimed unsinkable, so it seems is the story of the Titanic itself. It's a story that just won't go away. Titanic, the most expensive movie ever made is undoubtedly an impressive and compelling piece of work. The rendering of this shocking tale is an absolute delight and the expertly crafted sub plots about freedom and love are an inspiration. Eighty five years on, the fate of this incredible vessel is still having impact on millions of people all around the world, much as it might have in April of 1912, although possibly more so, the age of communication having made our world so much smaller. The sinking of the Titanic was always going to happen. It was meant to be. And in the same way as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, its legacy will live forever. Tragedy has a tremendous capacity to move us in a way that happy events do not. Naturally, happy events have their own ways of inspiring us, but there's nothing quite like sadness and disaster to provoke feeling and to motivate people toward re-examining the values in their own lives. Because the effects of such grand scale tragedies are so far-reaching and so enduring, these events have a valid and necessary place in the scheme of world events and are therefore also, beyond regret. This world of ours is a place of learning and of experience. The diversity of opportunity available in a human context today is vast. The positive value in tragic events is unquestionable; those who are involved in such circumstances are presented with rare and challenging choices and wherever there are dilemmas, there is potential for growth, change and the chance to become stronger. The fortunate nature of such opportunity however, tends to be retrospective. Often only when looking back on the turmoil can we feel appreciation for what we gained having come through the process. Perhaps the greatest challenge of all though, is to look back on our past without regret, without the wish that things should have been different, without the hope that we could have done something else. Appreciation and regret do not mix. In order to appreciate we must let go the urge to cling to the regrets. If we cling to those regrets, we cannot appreciate, therefore, we cannot make the most of what has happened to us - we do not grow; the event has been wasted. If we regret the event, we regret the benefits and changes that the event brought. We cannot have it both ways. With this in mind then we are able to view other events and appreciate the place of those events in the progress of the world even when tragedy and death are the dominant factors. For many, the death of Princess Diana was the worst kind of tragedy and yet, her death has brought hope to millions, it has motivated acts of profound altruism, it has influenced governments and done more to bring people together than possibly any other single event in the last century. Would it be right that we could turn back the clock and sacrifice all of this to have her back? Many would no doubt emphatically say 'yes'. But to wish the reverse of the positive effects of this event is to miss the point of it happening in the first place. This life and death held more meaning than perhaps any of us can truly know or understand. However, the life of Diana brought meaning to her death and conversely, her death brought more impetus to her life. It is impossible to separate her life from her death and thus, it is impossible to separate her influence on the world in life from her effect on people as the result of her death. We cannot isolate Diana's purpose or her inspirational effect on the world from the fact that she was always going to die at the age of 36 in a car accident and that this event would move millions in a way that could not have occurred should she have lived. It would be an impossible challenge for many to accept this point of view and yet in a sense, to wish her back is to disrespect the purpose of her life and to misunderstand the value of that life. Tragedies happen, deaths occur and life goes on. We owe it to ourselves to appreciate life's processes and to pay tribute to the miracle of process, not by regretting what has happened, or pining for what could have happened, but by valuing what has happened in choosing to let it make us stronger and to make us more. Wayfarer International, Copyright © John & Melody Anderson, 1997 - 1999. All rights reserved. The Meaning Man (October 1997) What is the meaning of life? An oft asked question and perhaps one without an absolute answer. Victor Frankyl, whose life recently ended sought to help others find meaning in their lives through the example of his own experience of triumph over despair in the death camps of Nazi Germany. The Library of Congress has described his book as one of the ten most influential books of the twentieth century. He himself said that “there is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even in the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is meaning in one’s life.” And indeed no one could have been more qualified to make such a statement having endured and survived four Nazi death camps including Auschwitz from 1942 –1945 while his parents, other family members and his wife all perished at the hands of the Holocaust. Victor Frankyl, one of the most original psychotherapists of this century, died early last month in Vienna, where 92 years ago he began his extraordinary life. Frankyl developed his revolutionary point of view largely as the result of his experiences as an inmate of the concentration camps and as did all those who were imprisoned there, he witnessed much extreme suffering and many deaths. His observations of himself and his fellow prisoners led to the adoption of an attitude toward life that saw him survive the camps and, in his own words, “find hope amid despair, beauty amid desolation and nobility amid depravity.” After the war, during his time as head of the neurological department of the Polyclinic Hospital he dictated his most recognized work Man’s Search for Meaning in nine days. It was to sell more than two million copies in 26 languages (Electronic Telegraph). Essentially the book proposes that humanity’s primary motivational force in life, contrary to what Freud and many other leading 20th century figures had said, was the search for meaning, even in the most dismal of circumstances. Survival, he came to believe, depended not merely on the daily struggle to stay alive but on a sense of purpose, which in immediate terms meant a belief in the future. “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed,” Frankyl said. “With the loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.” His method for teaching, Logotherapy, was devised to assist his patients to find meaning in life. The word ‘logos’ found in Greek philosophy and theology refers to the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning. According to the Platonists, the logos was both immanent in the world and at the same time the transcendent divine mind. The concept defined by the term logos however, is found in Greek, Indian, Egyptian and Persian philosophical and theological systems. Frankyl’s choice of the name was an apt one for a theory with so many parallels in ancient civilization. This is hardly surprising for the search for meaning has long been expressed as an important force in the life of man from the earliest times. What made Frankyl’s ideas so different from those of his contemporaries is that he considered this search to be the primary and sole motivation in the life of man, above all others. His experiences in the war years lent his teachings a depth and a conviction few could argue with. In any discussion about meaning, critics will always cite the most horrific examples of suffering as proof that meaning cannot exist, for what possible meaning can there be in such senseless hardship? Frankyl’s answer: “We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation. As such, I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.” “We needed to stop asking ourselves about the meaning of life and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life daily and hourly…” Upon seeing a newsreel item about the gas chambers and crematoria of the death camps, which during his time of incarceration he had never seen, Frankyl was to remark: “It didn’t depress me. Because when you hear that the individual with the warmest heart and the deepest piety you have known in your life, that she ended in a gas chamber, either you go and hang yourself immediately, or you have the resources within yourself to survive such a moment.” While Frankyl’s understandings of life are undeniably profound and indeed founded on a solid experiential base, the creation of a structure or therapy carries with it implicit dangers that threaten the very integrity of the original inspiration. In later years Frankyl became critical of those who opposed or were uninterested in this theories. He fretted for the direction the Western World had taken and despaired that the focus on sex overshadowed what he felt was the ultimate and most significant goal to which man can aspire, that of love. It can be seen in the case of any individual who truly seeks meaning, that he will ultimately discover what has been discovered before by other true seekers. Strands of the truth weave themselves throughout history and are to be found in many established philosophies. However the very act of defining those truths and seating them within the bounds of a structure, institution, philosophy, religion or therapy immediately confines them in a manner where the evolution of the truth is thwarted. Once we try to cling to the truth, it is in that moment, lost to us. Truth must always be expressed as a personal search and it must always be ongoing and evolving. Even if we acknowledge the existence of absolute or universal truth, truth is sensitive to its context and in this way, can never be captured and proclaimed in an absolute manner. Truth must be allowed to evolve and by way of this evolution the individual’s relationship with the truth is what makes its influence significant. Truth cannot exist alone, it may only exist in relation to something. If our motivation in life truly is the search for meaning, then we must not find it and cling to it, or our reason for living ends. We can indeed find meaning in many things, but it is this dynamic process of finding meaning that remains the true significant point here. Not the finding of meaning itself. The process by which we can overcome is surely what made Frankyl strong, not simply the recognition of truth– but the application of the truth in a dynamic context. Victor Frankyl preferred not to be described as a religious philosopher but he did not resist the description strongly. “If you call ‘religious’ a man who believes in what I call Supermeaning, a meaning so comprehensive that you can no longer grasp it, get hold of it in rational intellectual terminology, then one should feel free to call me religious, really. And actually,” he said, “ I have come to define religion as an expression, a manifestation, of not only man’s will to meaning, but of man’s longing for an ultimate meaning, that is to say a meaning that is so comprehensive that it is no longer comprehensible…” In this statement he alludes to a dynamic process and hints at the nature of the search for meaning that he considered to be so profound. If Victor Frankyl is to be remembered then better that he is remembered not because of Logotherapy or his experiences in the concentration camps, but because he reminds us all that the quest for meaning can provide motivation in any context, no matter how hopeless - and that this search must be the product of our own experiences, not the expression of the proclamation of others. Wayfarer International, Copyright © John & Melody Anderson, 1997 - 1999. All rights reserved. Hidden Treasure (July 1997) What seem to be accidents, tragedies and disasters happen to all of us at some time. The choices we make throughout these seemingly random events can prove to have enormous significance in retrospect. Jacques Cousteau died this week and as is often the case when a public figure or celebrity departs, the tributes and biographies that emerged brought to our attention far more about the life of the man than many of us were ever aware of when he was alive. He is, of course, credited with co-inventing the aqualung, he won Oscars and he wrote books. But something probably very few of us realized was that his involvement in the undersea world was almost an accidental result of misadventure in his early life. In the 1930s Cousteau nearly lost his life in a car accident and badly injured, came close to having one of his arms amputated. Needless to say he kept the arm after a tenacious war with the medical orthodoxy of the time and regained the use of his limbs by swimming and eventually diving. Having taken to wearing a pearl diver’s mask during his rehabilitative swims, for the first time Cousteau began to recognize the hidden beauty that lay beneath the ocean waves and the rest, as they say, is history. It seems remarkable that something seemingly so accidental can lead to something that seems so preordained. It is difficult to imagine that the life of Jacques Cousteau could have ever followed a different course. His life just seems to have been so right – for the times and for the kind of man that he was. When an individual’s life achievements impact so significantly on the world and its people, somehow it just seems that it was always meant to be. If there was ever a purpose to Cousteau’s life one would be inclined to feel that he fulfilled it. Of course it isn’t only public figures in whom we can recognize this strong sense of purpose and the fulfillment of it, although we tend to notice it more because of the fact that they are in the public eye. It isn’t uncommon for one random event to lead to what in retrospect can be seen to be the most significant achievements in the life of an individual, perhaps the achievements for which he or she comes to be remembered. It is often possible to identify a specific moment in time when the entire course of an individual’s life changed to align itself with a new and significant direction. Cousteau’s car accident and his resulting affiliation with the sea is an example of this. Had it not been for the rehabilitation he undertook at that time, what might have been the outcome of this man’s life? Would he still have come to be recognized the world over as a hero of the sea or would he have gone on to lead a completely different life? We can only speculate as to what his choices and the results of them could have been, but it is significant that the kinds of events that can seem to set an individual on the path toward their life’s purpose can be the sorts of events that are easily overlooked or dismissed at the time. This poses an important question then about how an individual might learn to recognize these significant windows in time and how to make the most of them when they appear. The simple answer is that we can’t, or at least that’s how it seems. The unique nature of life’s process is such that these moments in time are only identifiable as having the significance they do in retrospect. In rather the same way as we, with the benefit of hindsight, might look back on Cousteau’s life and perceive the important nature of that car accident, it is unlikely that Cousteau himself would have had the same appreciation for its significance at the time. In fact the event may have even seemed like a tragedy. As much as we like to think that we are the masters of our own destiny we can never quite be certain as to what enormity might arise from the insignificant. It may be tempting to hold the view that when the big chance happens along its significance will be clear and we will grasp at it with both hands. But it is doubtful that events ever truly divulge their impact at the time of the event occurring nor is it logical that they would. In fact many events may never have led to eventual greatness if their importance had been understood at the moment of their occurring. The influence of intuition would seem to have some bearing on this. Knowing too much about the outcome of situations can often seem to hinder the progress of them. Perhaps then, our understanding of an event and the meaning of its place in our lives is less important than what we are motivated to do next, as a result of the event. Given the fact that the events in our lives have an uncanny way of appearing to be deceptively unassuming, a dedicated approach toward all opportunities, no matter how small they seem to be, is the only way to ensure that the broadest range of options will follow. To imagine that we can determine the certain outcome of any event would be to deny the evidence to the contrary as life continually thrusts it before us. Had Cousteau allowed his doctors to amputate his arm, what would have become of the world in the absence of his celebrity? Had he not been involved in the accident in the first place, would he have turned to the sea with the passion that he eventually did? And if his tenacity had not been strong, would we even have heard the news that he had died? The course of our lives can change in the twinkling of an eye. What we do tomorrow could become the event that spawns our greatest achievements. How we approach that event could make all the difference between one version of our lives and another. And the nature of those versions will always be dependent on how seriously we regard the opportunities that come our way. Wayfarer International, Copyright © John & Melody Anderson, 1997 - 2002. All rights reserved.