Man’s Search for Meaning – Understanding How Our Lives Fundamentally Work

The starting part of the title is borrowed from the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” written by Dr. Viktor Frankl. It is a short autobiographical volume of this Austrian psychiatrist’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps during the World War II, where he was imprisoned and tortured because he was a Jew. The book is a wonderful starting point to discover the power of the human mind and in a very heavy emotional way, it explains how we humans perceive things. The experiences he had in the death camp were terrible, and the explanations of the hideous tortures and indignities which were afflicted on the prisoners show to which extent their will to live was demolished. It is during this time, that he realized something which he calls “the last ultimate freedom”, which means the power to chose one’s own response in any given set of circumstances. During that period of time he realized that his Nazi captors could not hurt him, they could hurt his body, they could hurt his self respect, but whatever they do, they could not hurt the person who stayed in that body, i.e. they did not have the power to hurt Viktor Frankl. And little by little the spark of this freedom in him kept growing and he became completely indifferent to the hideous events around him.

It is that feeling which explains the fundamental power of the human mind. Nothing can hurt us, unless we want it to. It is our willing permission, our consent which allows events, people or things to hurt us far more than they originally hurt us. The things can hurt us, physically, but the real pain comes from the emotional hurt, which makes the physical hurt to multiply the pain many times over the circumstantial impact. This is particularly hard to accept and even harder to implement, because all of us, right from our childhood have this tendency of blaming the hurt to the circumstances, or because someone else did something to us. We have this tendency to blame things like, I am upset today because my friend doesn’t have time for me, or I am upset because XYZ did or did not do ABC.

This brings us to another important insight. If it is true that we are miserable because we wanted to be miserable, or we chose our response to be miserable based on a circumstance, it is also true that we can chose otherwise and not be miserable. No circumstance has in it the power to make us sad, unless we truly want it to. It is not the circumstance that influences what happens to us, but it is our response to the situation that decides what actually happens to us. This same thing can understood though in a much simplified way by Steven Covey’s 90-10 principle, which states, 10% of life is made up of what happens to you. 90% of life is decided by how you react.

There above is a simple and yet very beautiful example of this theory. There are numerous incidents and people who portray this very beautifully. Movies like The Shawshank Redemption and the Pursuit of Happyness show the level where we can reach, rising from all odds, if we keep hope and faith and most importantly do not let the “person” in us succumb to the external circumstances.


Implementing this in Our Day to Day Life

The above shows the importance of how the reaction of our mind can make or break a day. There is a beautiful line in the movie the Matrix, which goes “What is Real? How do you define Real? If real is what you can smell, see, touch or feel then real means just the electronic impulses interpreted by your Brain...” If you dig deep, the above statement does seem to suggest the same thing. The whole world, the perceptions, the situations, the experiences and to an extent event the outcomes of events are all dependent on how we react to a situation, and not the situation itself.

Since we are on the brink of yet another summer season, there is surely going to be a particularly interesting situation, where people constantly crib and complain about how hot it is around this time of the year. Do remember to do this exercise and keep repeating something like Shit! The weather is so hot… its killing me to yourself, and you will realize that each time you say the statement, you will actually feel a lot of heat, and you will actually feel the brunt of summer. And then, on a completely separate note, try to react in an opposite way and think something like, if the weather won’t get warmer in summer, when would it get hot? The minute you start giving these positive autosuggestions to your brain, the heat will kind of reduce by a couple degrees for you.


Final Verdict:
While it is not particularly easy to reach the level where Viktor Frankl had reached and become completely liberated from the pains associated with the circumstances that keep changing the course of our life, it is also important to give moving towards this goal a try. Another thing, if you find yourself in self-pity or know someone else who is, I would suggest you pick up this short book Man’s Search For Meaning and gauge the situation that you are in today and be thankful to life for not being hard on you.

All said and done, the parting thought is that we keep in our mind is the fact that the key to a happy and satisfied life is to start choosing our responses and gaining control of our life. And the very reaction that it is not easy to make a change of this magnitude in our thought process, will make the process of this transition tough, and hence this negative thought, should be scrapped.

So in the end, it all boils down to what Mufasa, the Lion tells his cub Simba in the famous movie The Lion King, “Remember who you are”.