Meditation on Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning Part 1 A Hint from Heaven Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation,
Facing a fate he cannot change,
May rise above himself.
He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.
This in short is the message of Viktor Frankl's life and book,
Man's Search for Meaning.
Frankl's hopeless situation is unique in its terror.
As a young succeeding psychologist living in Vienna during Hitler's takeover of Austria,
Frankl,
His parents,
Sibling,
And his wife were all arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps.
We hear about Frankl's survival,
Or triumph I'll call it,
And upon his being freed learning that none of his loved ones survived.
These experiences,
As well as his genius,
Helped form this powerful idea that who we are is not tied to fate,
But to the purpose we choose to embody and express even in spite of fate.
Even if we have not survived a terrible event as unique as Frankl's,
His message is still for all of us.
It is also important to remark that Frankl doesn't think we have to suffer to find meaning.
Each of us is faced with circumstances from time to time,
From pain to conflicts to aging to loving to coming to terms with our own mortality.
The question should never be how do these things define ourselves,
But who will we become?
Part of Frankl's message to us is that the choice to be in our highest integrity,
To be our most true,
Is greater than our instinct to just survive.
Note this choice of Frankl's that in a sense foreshadows his most awful and triumphant journey.
Frankl was a promising psychologist,
And unlike many other Jews who knew that arrests were certainly coming that they could not escape,
Frankl actually did have a choice.
He shares,
Shortly before the United States entered World War II,
I received an invitation to come to the American Consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration visa.
My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria.
I suddenly hesitated,
However.
The question beset me.
Could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate,
To be sent,
Sooner or later,
To a concentration camp or even to a so-called extermination camp?
Where did my responsibility lie?
Should I foster my brainchild,
Logotherapy,
By emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books?
Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child,
The child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them?
I pondered the problem this way and that,
But could not arrive at a solution.
This was the type of dilemma that made one wish for a hint from heaven,
As the phrase goes.
It was then that I noticed a piece of marble on a table at home.
When I asked my father about it,
He explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue.
He had taken the piece home because it was a part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed.
One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece.
My father explained that this letter stood for one of the commandments.
Eagerly,
I asked,
Which one is it?
He answered,
Honor thy father and thy mother,
That thy days may be long upon the land.
At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land,
And to let the American visa lapse.
There was his hint from heaven.
Have you ever found yourself faced with a difficult situation only to experience a hint from heaven that tells you that there is a reason in that for you?
Not to suffer whatever fate may befall you,
But to triumph in being your highest and most true self.
The stories of success and joy in our communities are amazing,
But in particular are the stories of triumph that make us who we are,
The survivors of abuse,
Of poverty,
Of sickness.
Again,
There is no rationalizing to make any of the awful things that happen in any way okay to any of us,
But Frankl's message to us is that in how we respond to what happens to us,
There is our reason.
By not turning off,
Giving in,
Or denying our values,
We can respond with our highest self.
That reason,
Frankl tells us,
Is who we become.
To turn hurt into healing,
Fear into love,
Failure to success.
This to me is the greatest of human magic.
It is how man and women demonstrate God.
In a concentration camp,
Frankl tells the following story of the insult of his circumstance.
This instance happens when in 2 degree temperatures he is forced to lay water pipes,
Already at a point of starvation and weakness.
A guard approaches him.
You pig!
I have been watching you the whole time.
I'll teach you to work.
Wait till you dig dirt with your teeth.
You'll die like an animal.
In two days I'll finish you off.
You've never done a stroke of work in your life.
What were you,
Swine?
A businessman?
I was past caring,
But I had to take this threat of killing me seriously,
So I straightened up and looked him directly in the eye.
I was a doctor.
A specialist.
What?
A doctor?
I bet you got a lot of money out of people.
As it happens,
I did most of my work for no money at all,
In clinics for the poor.
But now I had said too much.
He threw himself on me and knocked me down,
Shouting like a madman.
I could no longer remember what he shouted.
Frankel goes on,
Indignation can rouse even a seemingly hardened prisoner.
Indignation not about cruelty or pain,
But about the insult connected with it.
That time blood rushed to my head because I had to listen to a man judge my life who had so little idea of it.
In our own lives,
It might be a man,
But more often it is a circumstance that disrespects who we are.
Let us not allow them to define us.
We must claim our truth and how we hold ourselves in the power of our response.
Central to this idea of a hint from heaven is that the central recognition that however suffocating a circumstance may seem,
That circumstance is not all there is.
If we listen,
If we stay open,
It reveals itself to us,
That hint from heaven.
Frankel has a powerful experience of this one early morning trekking to a work site.
We stumbled on in the darkness,
Over big stones and through large puddles,
Along the one road leading from the camp.
The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles.
Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm.
Hardly a word was spoke.
The icy wind did not encourage talk.
Hiding his mouth behind his upward collar,
The man marching next to me whispered suddenly,
If our wives could see us now,
I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us.
That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind.
As we stumbled on for miles,
Slipping on icy spots,
Supporting each other time and again,
Dragging one another up and onward,
Nothing was said,
But we both knew.
Each of us was thinking of his wife.
Occasionally I looked at the sky where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds.
But my mind clung to my wife's image,
Imagining it with an uncanny acuteness.
I heard her answering me,
Saw her smile,
Her frank and encouraging look.
Still or not,
Her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
One way to interpret that story is to say that it was a sad delusion,
Especially considering what we the reader know,
That his wife had not survived.
Yet through the vision of our loved ones,
Through hope,
Is this not how God speaks to us?
Not with booming words,
But with the treasures of the heart.
Our uncle does not promise us that tuning into heaven's hints will change the fates bestowed us,
Just that it reminds us that there is more to us than the apparent fate.
If you experience poverty,
That is not who you are.
If you experience dying,
That is not who you are.
You are,
We all are,
Children of God and these hints from heaven remind us of that fact.
They don't fix our problems,
But like a supportive presence,
A little wink of faith in us from the divine helps us to walk forward through whatever the challenge may be.
To complete Frankl's experience of his wife,
A thought transfixed me.
For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets,
Proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers,
The truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.
Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart,
The salvation of man is through love and in love.
I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss,
Be it only for a brief moment in the contemplation of his beloved.
In a position of utter desolation,
When man cannot express himself in positive action,
Then his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way,
An honorable way.
In such a position,
Man can,
Through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved,
Achieve fulfillment.
For the first time in my life,
I was able to understand the meaning of the words,
The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.
Fr.
Fr.
We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle.
The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action.
There were enough examples,
Often of a heroic nature,
Which proved that apathy could be overcome,
Irritability suppressed.
Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom,
Of independence of mind,
Even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others,
Giving away their last piece of bread.
They may have been few in number,
But they offer sufficient proof that,
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,
The last of human freedoms,
To choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
To choose one's own way.
To me,
This is the most liberating statement.
I am always at choice.
I am always at choice.
Not always about what happens to me,
But what I do about it.
It is a statement as well of our spiritual nature,
That at the deepest level our freedom,
Our liberty,
The truth of who we are cannot be touched,
Although it must be chosen.
Fr.
Fr.
We should not try to make him someone special for what he went through.
Fr.
Fr.
Fr.
Fr.
Fr.
Fr.
Fr.
To have volition,
To have freedom.
No more than an animal.
Here lies the chance for a man,
Either to make use of or to forego the opportunities of attaining moral values that a difficult situation may afford him.
And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
And yes,
This goes for the most tragic of moments,
But also when you can't find the can opener,
When you are having trouble falling asleep,
Or you are unhappy with election results.
One of the most difficult lessons I have learned in my life is that I am not in control,
And yet there is a slight paradox because I am at choice.
I am not in control,
But I am at choice.
It is as if the world of events and circumstances only hold so much stake in reality.
There is this interiority of my being,
Where if I release control I have this choice,
To deepen,
To find meaning,
To experience grace.
The deeper meaning for me,
And maybe for you too,
Is that I don't need to be in control of life.
I want to be free,
To express that freedom,
And I want life to do the same.
I want that freedom,
That love and creativity to be the creative power in my life,
Not living to survive,
To do just damage control,
Or to live out of fear.
We are at choice in how we respond to our circumstances,
But God knows it isn't easy.
Frankel shares,
The most ghastly moment of the twenty-four hours of camp life was the awakening when,
At a still nocturnal hour,
The three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams.
We then began the tussle with our wet shoes into which we could scarcely force our feet,
Which were sore and swollen with edema.
And there were the usual moans and groans about petty troubles,
Such as the snapping of wires which replaced shoelaces.
One morning I heard someone,
Whom I knew to be brave and dignified,
Cry like a child because he finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear.
In those ghastly moments I found a little bit of comfort,
A small piece of bread,
Which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed delight.
Of course,
We have nothing but compassion for that man and indeed even for Frankel,
Whose strategy is in that tiniest piece of bread he saved for himself,
Which in that moment is not bread,
But like a sacrament in which to receive God,
To remind himself that there is something more.
But here for Frankel,
We have the terror of this circumstance,
And you have the man who God bless him has been taken over,
And Frankel,
Who in his simplest of ways is hanging on to his last freedom.
Frankel also tells the story of a man in camp who has a dream that he will be freed on a certain date,
That the war will be over.
As that date nears and the man realizes it's not going to happen,
He grows incredibly ill and on the date in his dream,
Passes away.
Frankel tells us,
His will to live had been paralyzed.
It is a message not to dismiss hope,
But to not travel so far in the attachments of our mind that we give up our ability to choose.
Part of how Frankel survived in the camp was getting to help with the sick patients.
He tells the following story of a young woman's death.
It is a simple story,
There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it,
But to me it seems like a poem.
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days,
But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge.
I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,
She told me.
In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.
Pointing through the window of the hut,
She said,
Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree and on the branch were two blossoms.
I often talked to this tree,
She said to me.
I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words.
Was she delirious?
Did she have occasional hallucinations?
Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied.
Yes.
What did it say to her?
She answered,
It said to me,
I am here.
I am here.
I am life.
Eternal life.
Reading this reminded me of what Martin Buber said about how we might view a tree.
We can see a tree as an object,
As a species to study,
Or as a living thing with an active consciousness that is even a part of who we are.
Perhaps this is what the young woman was seeing.
Our calling is not to endure the pains of the world.
It is not to get in line with the common sense.
What if our calling is simply to make the highest choices,
The highest choices for ourselves,
In accordance with our heart of hearts and what is at the heart of all hearts.
For if the right to choose is the last human freedom,
It follows that it is the greatest choice.
Use it.
And through this choice we reveal meaning,
Our meaning,
Life's meaning,
Or as Frankl put it,
Ultimately man should not ask what the meaning of his life is,
But rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
In a word,
Each man is questioned by life,
And he can only answer to life by answering for his own life.
To life he can only respond by being responsible.
And he also says,
For the meaning of life differs from man to man,
From day to day,
And from hour to hour.
What matters,
Therefore,
Is not the meaning of life in general,
But rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
That's our choice.
What will my life mean right now?
Not tomorrow,
Not yesterday,
But now.
Choose to be your most true,
And what is most true will reveal itself not only to you,
But as you.
Meditations on Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning Part 3 The Essence of Existence Imagine that you've got two journals.
In one you record things as they actually happen.
The successes,
The failures,
Misgivings,
And so on.
In the other,
You record things as you would have liked them to have happened.
The girl or guy who says yes instead of no,
The errors you didn't make at baseball,
And so on.
The point of the exercise,
I think,
Is this.
Which journal do you wind up wanting to change first?
The way things really happened once so it could look more like what you wanted,
Or the one with what you wanted so that it could be closer to what really is.
In life,
We give thanks for the good things,
Yet I know we all know this as well.
True gratitude,
True blessings,
Are rejoicing for the whole of the thing.
Yes,
We can nitpick things that stink,
But the whole of life held in our hearts,
That's how gratitude sings.
This is the essence of existence.
In his internment,
Viktor Frankl loses his entire family and nearly his own life.
Something else he also loses is what he refers to as his mental child.
Frankl,
A young psychologist,
Has a manuscript for a kind of psychotherapy he calls logotherapy.
This is his life work and when he is arrested,
This manuscript is in his pocket and taken away with his clothes.
He is forced to trade them on for ragged clothes just taken from a man killed in a gas chamber.
Frankl is crushed,
Faced with the reality that he will not only lose his family and his own life,
But also his mental work.
He's destitute.
But because of this loss of mental work as well,
His question is a little different than most of those in camp.
Frankl tells us their question was,
How do I survive?
For Frankl,
The question was,
Has all this suffering,
This dying around us,
A meaning?
And he goes on,
For if not then,
Ultimately there is no meaning to survival,
For a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance as whether one escapes or not,
Ultimately would not be worth living at all.
Like the hint from heaven Frankl received to stay with his parents,
Another arrival of such a message comes in through his ragged clothes.
Instead of the many pages of my manuscript,
I found in a pocket of the newly acquired coat one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book,
Containing the most important Jewish prayer,
Shema Yisrael.
How should I have interpreted such a coincidence other than as a challenge to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper?
Have you ever lost something only to realize what you are really looking for?
It can sound contrite,
But I have found it true that my breakups in relationships have taught me to love,
That my failure,
Success,
And my shortcomings my strengths to work on.
All of this in the realization that I have too often in my life been more attached to having what I thought things should look like instead of living my beliefs and trusting the result.
Love looked like this.
Success,
Hey,
Looked like this.
And it takes wisdom to listen when love and success look back at you and say,
No,
Think again.
The message?
Don't have love,
Live love.
Don't have success,
Live success.
Speaking to the idea of a whole meaning to our lives,
Frankel shares,
Consider a movie.
It consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures,
And each of them makes sense and carries a meaning.
Yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown.
However,
We cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components,
Each of the individual pictures.
Isn't it the same with life?
Doesn't the final meaning of life too reveal itself at all only at this end on the verge of death?
And doesn't this final meaning too depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual's knowledge and belief?
All that being said,
It really comes down to what the meaning of your life is here and now.
For as we have spoken about before,
What we choose has something to do with how we experience that.
This is where the essence of existence comes in.
When you can give thanks for the whole of your life here and now,
You can carry the meaning of your life with you.
We won't get distracted by the pieces,
But be centered in the whole.
Frankel tells us the odds of surviving a concentration camp during the war was 1 in 28.
He survives many close calls and recalls many stories wherein following his own intuition he makes choices that others tell him will lead to his death,
Yet leads to theirs.
And indeed there are times of pure grace where he feels spared as if that is his fate.
Frankel never comes out and says it,
He never says he was smarter or more blessed.
What he does is often recount the following fable.
Does this not bring to mind the story of death in Tehran?
A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants.
The servant cried that he had just encountered death who had threatened him.
He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Tehran,
Which he could reach that same evening.
The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse.
On returning to his house the master himself met death and questioned him.
Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?
I did not threaten him.
I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Tehran said death.
Our fate will be our fate is the point.
But the message again is that your fate is not the point.
How you live,
That's the point.
How you choose to live this moment,
In blindness and nitpicking or in gratitude for the whole of it,
That is the essence of existence.
Meditations on Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning Part 4 The Will to Meaning In Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning,
We almost have two authors.
One is anonymous and endures the suffering of concentration camps in a way that represents all who endured it.
He is the everyman.
The other author is a psychologist who through his experiences of suffering is teaching us his theories about man and women.
A psychological theory at the heart of which is that central to every human being is the will to meaning and that all man does or doesn't do can be traced back to this.
This is very different than Sigmund Freud's pleasure principle which traces back all the actions of our minds and hearts back to sexual desire and trying to turn everyone into our parents.
This thinking by the way continues to be the dominant viewpoint of psychologists today.
Frankl adamantly disagrees with this approach.
He says,
Sigmund Freud once asserted,
Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger.
With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individuals' differences will blur,
And in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.
Thank heaven Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside.
His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture,
But not in the filth of Auschwitz.
There the individual differences did not blur,
But on the contrary,
People became more different,
People unmasked themselves,
Both the swine and the saints.
There seems to be an anyone with sense,
Anyone who has made it through any sort of hardship,
A certain sort of responsiveness,
A morality,
An understanding of what's most important.
There is a desire to do good,
Not for fear of God or displeasing mommy,
But for good itself.
Even Darwin,
The evolutionist who promoted the idea of survival of the fittest,
He struggled with the idea of altruism,
What causes another being to do good for another with no clear benefit to that being,
Human,
Snail,
Or even some combination of both.
Joseph Campbell often relayed the story of a police officer who saves a man attempting to commit suicide over a well-known cliff known for just that reason.
The officer in doing so almost loses his own life.
A reporter asked the officer why he didn't let go,
And the officer replied that if he had let that young man go,
He would not have been able to live another day.
There was something that acted in that man that was instinctual,
That couldn't help it.
Have we not felt this energy in our own lives,
Sometimes behind our greatest choices?
Is this not the key to meaning in our lives?
For a society we say is all about materialism and money,
Is not a meaningful and purposeful life deep down still our greatest concern?
Frankel says,
Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life,
And not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives.
This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone.
Only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.
There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are nothing but defense mechanisms,
Nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my reaction formations.
Man,
However,
Is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideas and values.
Anyone who knows me would probably not describe me as one who lacks ego.
I'd certainly say that my ego is no bigger than anyone else's.
I certainly think about myself a lot.
How will this affect me?
What will happen to me?
What would I rather be doing right now?
What is she thinking about me?
It's kind of like that cat food song,
Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow,
But it's me me me me me me me.
Yet when I measure life in terms of what I value,
I don't look at how I'm affected,
But what in whom I have affected.
The people I've supported in some way and have grown to love.
How present I've been able to be to the world around me,
And not the one of my interior chatter.
Me from one point of view is what I do to pass time.
It is the meaning that I'm really up to,
And thus it is the meaning that I really am.
Frankel tells us about an American diplomat who sees him.
He is unhappy with his job and at the time American foreign policy.
His previous psychologist considered this a sickness.
He asked questions about his father and explained how the military had taken on his father image.
Frankel encouraged the man to get a new job.
The man did and became happy.
For those of us currently struggling with a seeming psychosis,
A fear,
A hurt,
A delusion,
Is there something wrong with us?
Are we crazy?
Or are we called to live in a greater way we have yet to say yes to?
Meaning is the best medicine.
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances,
Frankel shares,
But only by lack of meaning and purpose.
Frankel tells us we experience meaning in three essential ways.
One,
By creating a work or doing a deed.
This is about having something to do of value to us.
It's about achievement.
The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone.
Truth,
Beauty,
Goodness,
And especially in our relationships,
Love.
Those immense feelings of life that come only with someone else.
I love this story that Frankel tells in the afterword of his book.
Frankel was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life.
He wrote the response on paper and asked his students to guess what he had written.
After some moments of quiet reflection,
A student surprised Frankel by saying,
The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.
That was it exactly,
Frankel said.
Those are the very words I had written.
Frankel's philosophy of a will to meaning is quite understandable in these two ways.
Find meaning through achievement and love.
The third,
However,
Is the most challenging and came through Frankel's experience during the Second World War.
Frankel calls it the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.
This is not required for meaning,
Mind you,
But many of us face it.
He says,
We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation,
When facing a fate that cannot be changed.
For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best,
Which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph,
To turn one's predicament into a human achievement.
When we are no longer able to change a situation,
Just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer.
We are challenged to change ourselves.
And he also says,
In some way,
Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
Central to Frankel's philosophy of the individual is that she is self-determining.
This is what makes him a unique.
Freud's pleasure principle,
Adler's will to power,
Even Maslow's hierarchy of needs,
All are based somewhat on the idea that man and women are determinable.
Not for Frankel.
We are always at choice,
And as long as we are,
There is an opportunity for meaning.
He shares,
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness,
That his wall calendar from which he daily tears a sheet grows thinner with each passing day.
On the other hand,
The person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors,
After first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back.
He can reflect with pride amid joy on all the richness set down on these notes,
On all the life he has already lived to the fullest.
What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old?
Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees or wax nostalgic over his lost youth?
What reasons has he to envy a young person for the possibility that a young person has,
The future which is in store for him?
No thank you,
He will think.
Instead of possibilities,
I have realities in my past.
Not only the reality of work done and of love loved,
But of sufferings bravely suffered.
These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud,
Though these are the things which cannot inspire envy.
Do not grieve for that which you have never had,
But live fully in the reality that you have been given.
