Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘It feels strange to be writing to you about the meaning of life while my mother is struggling to hold on to hers. At the age of 89 she’s had a long life by the standards of human history, but any human life is the briefest glimmer in the vastness of time. The inconceivable brevity of human existence brings questions about meaning, purpose and fulfilment into sharp relief.

My mother was born in York in 1934, on Christmas Day, and grew up playing in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. She was a teacher, and later an artist and a landscape photographer. Lately, before her recent illness, she would wonder to me at the prospect of nonexistence. She knows she will die, as most of us do at some level, but she cannot imagine not existing. As the horizons of her life have contracted, she has been able to find contentment in simpler and simpler things: the rhythms of the garden, the play of light on the leaves of a tree. This flexibility suggests to me that meaning, purpose and fulfilment are not only different things, but moving targets, if they are targets at all.

I’ve spent my career trying to understand more about the mystery of consciousness. About how the mess of neural wetware inside our heads can give rise to the everyday miracle of experience. Consciousness is intimately familiar to each of us. We all know what it’s like to be conscious, and what it’s like to lose consciousness when we fall into a dreamless sleep. The nature of consciousness is also endlessly perplexing, confounding scientists and thinkers for thousands of years.

Some people worry that pursuing a scientific perspective on conscious experience might drain life of meaning by reducing us to mere biological machinery. I have found the opposite to be the case. There is no reduction. There is rather a continuity with the natural world, and with this continuity comes an expansion, a wider and deeper perspective. As we gradually pull back the curtains on the biological basis of conscious experience in all its richness, there are new opportunities to take ourselves and our conscious lives less for granted. We can see ourselves more as part of, and less apart from, the rest of nature. Our brief moments in the light of existence become more remarkable for having happened at all.

A recognition of the precarity of consciousness can help defuse some of our existential fears. We do not usually worry much about the oblivion that preceded our birth, so why should we worry about the equivalent oblivion that will follow our death? Oblivion isn’t the experience of absence, it is the absence of experience. As the novelist Julian Barnes put it, in his meditation on mortality, there is “nothing to be frightened of”.

I’ve come to think of consciousness as the precondition for meaning. An argument can be made that without consciousness, nothing would matter at all. Meaning, purpose and fulfilment can take many forms against this backdrop. The Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia best captures what I have in mind here. Eudaimonia means living well, flourishing, doing that which is worth doing. It is not about pleasure or hedonic satisfaction, nor is it about selfless sacrifice for some greater good. It involves realising one’s potential through cultivating virtues such as reason, courage and wisdom. Fundamentally, it comes down to doing a bit of good and feeling good about doing so.

For me, participating in some small way in the scientific and philosophical journey to understand ourselves and our place in nature, and communicating some of this journey to others, offers the promise of a slice of eudaimonia. In practice, frustration lurks at every turn. There is the risk of hubris when dealing with such apparently grand matters. And the dramas of everyday life get in the way.

Which brings me back to my mother. Today she has rallied, unexpectedly confounding the prognosis of the doctors. I asked her what she thought the meaning of life was, from her now frail vantage point. She told me it was about relationships with other people, and who can argue with that.’
(from the Guardian)