This last point is the key to the book—and to its relevance today. In the early years of the twenty-first century, several forces have gathered to create the circumstances for the pursuit of meaning on a scale never before imagined. First, while problems of poverty and other social maladies persist, most people in the advanced world have been relieved from true suffering. As I laid out in Chapter 2, we live in an era of abundance, with standards of living unmatched in the history of the world. Freed from the struggle for survival, we have the luxury of devoting more of our lives to the search for meaning. Surely, if Frankl and his fellow prisoners could pursue meaning from the work camps of Auschwitz, we can do the same from the comfort of our abundant lives.
Other forces are also at work. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, the mammoth baby boom generation is reaching a demographic milestone. The typical boomer now has more of his life behind him than ahead of him, prompting the searching of souls and the reevaluation of priorities. The specter of terrorism hovers, offering reminders of life’s fleetingness and raising questions of its purpose. Meantime, technology continues its unrelenting march, deluging us with data and choking us with choices. All these forces have gathered into a perfect storm of circumstances that is making the search for meaning more possible and the will to find meaning the sixth essential aptitude of the Conceptual Age.
“We are born for meaning, not pleasure, unless it is pleasure that is steeped in meaning.”
—JACOB NEEDLEMAN
Robert William Fogel, the Nobel laureate economist I mentioned briefly in Chapter 2, calls this moment the “Fourth Great Awakening.” He writes, “Spiritual (or immaterial) inequity is now as great a problem as material inequity, perhaps even greater.”3 His words echo Frankl’s a half-century earlier: “[P]eople have enough to live, but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”4 Ronald Inglehart, a respected political scientist at the University of Michigan who has been tracking and comparing public opinion in dozens of countries for the last quarter-century, has detected a similar yearning. Each time he administers his World Values Survey, he finds that respondents express greater concern for spiritual and immaterial matters. For instance, according to one recent survey, 58 percent of Americans say they think often about the meaning and purpose of life. Substantial, though lower, percentages of Germans, British, and Japanese report the same.5 Inglehart believes that the advanced world is in the midst of a slow change in its operating principles, “a gradual shift from ‘Materialist’ values (emphasizing economic and physical security above all) toward ‘Postmaterialist’ priorities (emphasizing self-expression and the quality of life).”6 Gregg Easterbrook, an American journalist who has written insightfully on this topic, puts it more boldly: “A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale—involving hundreds of millions of people—and may eventually be recognized as the principal cultural development of our age.”7
Whatever we call it—the “Fourth Great Awakening,” “Post-materialist” values, “meaning want”—the consequences are the same. Meaning has become a central aspect of our work and our lives. Pursuing meaning obviously is no simple task. You can’t buy a cookbook with the recipe for it—or open a packet of powder and add water and stir. But there are two practical, whole-minded ways for individuals, families, and businesses to begin the search for meaning: start taking spirituality seriously and start taking happiness seriously.
Taking Spirituality Seriously
A little man in a burgundy robe and red sneakers is the last to take the stage. As he emerges from the wings, the audience stands in hushed reverence. He smiles a beatific smile, greets the others, and sits cross-legged on the empty armchair that’s waiting for him. The man I’m squinting at from the back rows of a packed 1,300-seat auditorium on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the man who’s caused all these people, including Richard Gere, hands pressed together Namaste-style, and Goldie Hawn, hands wiggling by her side, to rise and revere—is Tenzin Gayatso, aka the 14th manifestation of the Buddha of Compassion, aka the Dalai Lama—winner of the Nobel Prize, leader in exile of Tibet, and spiritual rock star who the next evening will fill Boston’s Fleet Center with some thirteen thousand adoring fans.
What is the Dalai Lama doing at MIT? He’s here for the “Investigating the Mind” conference—a two-day gabfest about what science can learn from Buddhism and what Buddhism can learn from science. Each morning and afternoon the chairs onstage will fill with scientists wearing professorial earth tones and monks wearing rich shades of red and saffron—a visual display of reason breaking bread with spirit, of the left and right sides of our collective brains meeting in the middle. Fifteen years ago, the Dalai Lama began inviting scientists to his home in Dharamsala, India. He was interested in what they were learning about the brain, and they were curious about what was going on in the brains of people who have developed an almost superhuman capacity for meditation and spiritual transcendence. Over the next decade and a half, scientists such as the University of Wisconsin’s Richard Davidson began sliding monks into MRI machines like the one I entered in Chapter 1, to capture images of their meditating brains and to make new insights into emotion, attention, mental imagery, and other cognitive capacities. Monks such as Mathieu Ricard, who originally trained as a molecular biologist, began reading scientific papers to understand the workings of the mind and perhaps the nature of the soul. The meeting that I attended was their first public gathering—a coming-out party of sorts. “Science and Buddhism are very similar,” the Dalai Lama told some of us at a press conference before the main event, “because they are exploring the nature of reality, and both have the goal to lessen the suffering of mankind.”
“I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear.
Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we are all seeking something better in life. So I think the very motion of our life is towards happiness.”
—THE DALAI LAMA
What happened at the conference—lots of talk, plans for future research—is less significant perhaps than that it happened. Even MIT is taking spirituality seriously. As the well-known molecular biologist Eric Lander told the crowd, science is merely one way to understand the world. Across many different realms, there’s a growing recognition that spirituality—not religion necessarily, but the more broadly defined concern for the meaning and purpose of life—is a fundamental part of the human condition. Indeed, our capacity for faith—again, not religion per se, but the belief in something larger than ourselves—may be wired into our brains. Perhaps not surprisingly, this wiring seems to run through the brain’s right hemisphere. For example, Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Ontario’s Laurentian University, has conducted (somewhat controversial) experiments with a device that’s come to be called a “God helmet.” Persinger fastens the helmet onto subjects’ heads and bathes their brains’ right hemispheres in a weak field of electromagnetic radiation. Most of those who have strapped on the apparatus report feeling either the presence of God or a oneness with the universe, suggesting again that spiritual and mystical thoughts and experiences may be part of our neurophysiology.8 Meantime, at the University of Pennsylvania, Andrew Newberg has scanned the brains of nuns when they have meditated to the point of religious ecstasy and connection with God. His images show that during such moments, the part of the brain that guides a sense of self is less active—thus contributing to the feeling of being unified with something larger. Their work and the work of others have given rise to a new field, neurotheology, which explores the relationship between the brain and spiritual experience. As Caltech neuroscientist Steven Quartz puts it, “Studies of our biological constitution make it increasingly clear that we are social creatures of meaning, who crave a sense of coherence and purpose.”9
At the very least, we ought to take spirituality seriously because of its demonstrated ability to improv
e our lives—something that might be even more valuable when so many of us have satisfied (and oversatisfied) our material needs. For instance, some of the maladies of modern life—stress, heart disease, and so on—can be allayed by attending to the spirit. People who pray regularly have been shown to have lower blood pressure, on average, than those who don’t, according to research at Duke University. Johns Hopkins researchers have found that attending religious services cut people’s risk of death from heart disease, suicide, and some cancers. Other research has found that women to whom life’s meaning and purpose was central had higher levels of the types of cells that attack viruses and some kinds of cancer cells. Still other studies have found that the belief that life has some higher purpose can buffer people from heart disease. According to a study at Dartmouth College, one predictor of survival among open-heart patients was how much patients relied on faith and prayer. People who go to church (or synagogue or a mosque) regularly also seem to live longer than those who don’t—even controlling for a host of biological and behavioral variables.10
This is tricky and controversial territory—in part because so many charlatans have invoked the power of God to heal the infirm. If you depend on spirituality alone to battle cancer or to mend broken bones, you deserve the disastrous results that will follow. But a whole-minded approach—L-Directed reason combined with R-Directed spirit—can be effective. As I noted in Chapter 3, more than half of American medical schools now have courses in spirituality and health. According to Newsweek, “72 percent of Americans say they would welcome a conversation with their physician about faith.”11 That’s one reason some doctors have even begun taking “spiritual histories” of patients—asking them whether they seek solace in religion, whether they’re part of a community of faith, and whether they see a deeper meaning in their lives. It can be a delicate topic, of course. But as Duke University’s Dr. Harold Koenig told Religion News Service, “We’re at the place we were 20 years ago when doctors were asked to take a sexual history.” Koenig estimates that between 5 and 10 percent of U.S. physicians take some form of spiritual history. 12 Like narrative medicine, this merging of spirit and health is part of a more sweeping trend in medicine to treat each patient as a whole person rather than as a receptacle for a particular illness.
One other field that has begun to take spirituality more seriously is business. If the Conceptual Age is flowering with postmaterialist values and deepening our “meaning want,” it makes sense that the phenomenon would take root in the place where many of us spend most of our waking hours.
Five years ago, Ian Mitroff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, and Elizabeth Denton, a consultant, published a report called A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America. After interviewing nearly one hundred executives about spirituality in the workplace, they reached some surprising conclusions. Most of the executives defined spirituality in much the same way—not as religion, but as “the basic desire to find purpose and meaning in one’s life.” Yet, the executives were so understandably concerned that the language of spirit in the workplace would offend their religiously diverse employees that they scrubbed their vocabulary of all such talk. Meanwhile, Mitroff and Denton discovered, the employees were hungering to bring their spiritual values (and thus their whole person rather than one compartment of themselves) to work, but didn’t feel comfortable doing so. Read this report and you can almost picture a river of meaning and purpose being dammed outside of corporate headquarters. But here’s the kicker: if that spiritual tide had been released, the companies might have been better off. Mitroff and Denton also found that companies that acknowledged spiritual values and aligned them with company goals outperformed those that did not. In other words, letting spirituality into the workplace didn’t distract organizations from their goals. It often helped them reach those goals.
As more companies grasp this idea, we are likely to see a rise in spirit in business—a growing demand from individuals for workplaces that offer meaning as well as money. According to one recent U.S. survey, more than three out of five adults believe a greater sense of spirituality would improve their own workplace. Likewise, 70 percent of respondents to British think tank Roffey Park’s annual management survey said they wanted their working lives to be more meaningful. And in the last few years groups such as the Association for Spirit at Work and events such as the annual international Spirit in Business Conference have emerged.
We’ll also see a continued rise in spirit as business—commercial ventures that help a meaning-seeking population slake its craving for transcendence. Recall the candle industry of Chapter 2. Or think about the proliferation of yoga studios, evangelical bookstores, and “green” products from the Toyota Prius to the cosmetics of the Body Shop. Rich Karlgaard, the savvy publisher of Forbes, says this is the next cycle of business. First came the quality revolution of the 1990s. Then came what Karlgaard calls “the cheap revolution,” which dramatically reduced the cost of goods and allowed people around the world to have cell phones and Internet access. “So what’s next?” he asks. “Meaning. Purpose. Deep life experience. Use whatever word or phrase you like, but know that consumer desire for these qualities is on the rise. Remember your Abraham Maslow and your Viktor Frankl. Bet your business on it.”13
Taking Happiness Seriously
“Happiness,” Viktor Frankl wrote, “cannot be pursued; it must ensue.” But from what does it ensue? That question has vexed humankind since a humankind was around to be vexed. But now the field of psychology has begun to provide some answers—thanks largely to the work of Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the “positive psychology” movement.
For most of its history, academic psychology focused on everything except happiness. It studied disease, disorder, and dysfunction, and largely ignored what made people satisfied and fulfilled. But when Seligman took the helm of the American Psychological Association in 1998, he slowly began guiding the ship of psych in a new direction. Seligman’s research, as well as that of many other scientists who have turned their attention to satisfaction and well-being, has begun to unlock the secrets of what makes people happy—and to encourage the wider world to take happiness seriously.
“You’re not going to find the meaning of life hidden under a rock written by someone else. You’ll only find it by giving meaning to life from inside yourself.”
—DR. ROBERT FIRESTONE,
author and
psychotherapist
According to Seligman, happiness derives from a mix of factors. Part of it depends on biology. We’re all born with a relatively fixed natural range of well-being imprinted on our genes. Some of us tilt toward the gloomy end of the spectrum, others toward the cheery end. But all of us can learn how to reach the upper portions of our individual range—where happiness can ensue. Among the things that contribute to happiness, according to Seligman, are engaging in satisfying work, avoiding negative events and emotions, being married, and having a rich social network. Also important are gratitude, forgiveness, and optimism. (What doesn’t seem to matter much at all, according to the research, are making more money, getting lots of education, or living in a pleasant climate.)
Marshalling these elements can help create what Seligman calls the “Pleasant Life”—a life full of positive emotions about the past, present, and future. But the Pleasant Life is only one rung on the hedonic ladder. At a higher level is what Seligman calls the “Good Life”—in which you use your “signature strengths” (what you’re great at) to achieve gratification in the main areas of your life. This can turn work from what Studs Terkel called “a Monday to Friday sort of dying” into a calling. “A calling is the most satisfying form of work because, as gratification, it is done for its own sake rather than for the material benefits it brings,” says Seligman. “Enjoying the resulting state of flow on the job will soon, I predict, overtake material reward as the principal reason for working.” The Good
Life is good for business, too. “More happiness causes more productivity and higher income,” Seligman writes. There’s even an emerging school of management thought built around the tenets of positive psychology.
But the Good Life is not the ultimate. “There’s a third form of happiness that is ineluctably pursued by humans, and that’s the pursuit of meaning . . . knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying them in the service of something larger than you are,” Seligman says.14 Going beyond the self in this fashion is not much different from what those meditating nuns and monks were doing. And as rising prosperity and abundance allow more people to engage in this pursuit, and as more of us summon the will to do so, Meaning will move to the center of our lives and our consciousness.
THE BESTSELLING business book of the last decade has been a thin little volume with a strange title. Who Moved My Cheese? is a business fable that has sold millions of copies around the world. The book tells the tale of Hem and Haw, two mouselike critters who live in a maze and love cheese. One day, after years of finding their cheese in the same place, Hem and Haw awaken to find their precious cheddar gone. Somebody, yes, has moved their cheese. Hem and Haw react differently to this discovery. Hem, the whiny mouseling, wants to wait until somebody puts the cheese back. Haw, the anxious but realistic mouseling, wants to venture into the maze to discover new cheese. In the end, Haw convinces Hem that they should take action to solve their problem rather than wait for the solution magically to appear. And the micelings live happily ever after (or at least until their cheese moves again). The moral of the story is that change is inevitable, and when it happens, the wisest response is not to wail or whine but to suck it up and deal with it.